Fighting Fantasy VIi

[davidn]

Did anyone else have the Fighting Fantasy books? They were like a version of Choose Your Own Adventure for people who would later grow up to be able to name at least fifty power metal artists and know all of their direct lineages back to Helloween. Written primarily by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop, they were set in the sort of science fiction and fantasy environments that you would reasonably expect, with dice-based RPG elements and inventory playing a part along with the player's decision-making. I found out by chance that a few of them had been released as iOS games, and bought the one for Deathtrap Dungeon to see how it played.

This was one of the more famous Fighting Fantasy books, having been turned into a moderately rubbish PC game some years ago. It's set in a town that houses a twisted labyrinth underneath its foundations - not a natural phenomenon explored for curiosity and fortune like in Etrian Odyssey, but a custom-built monster-filled dungeon constructed by a sadistic Dungeons and Dragons-playing baron that really let his obsession get out of hand. Each year, champions come forward to brave its depths despite the count of survivors remaining at zero since its inception, and here you are cast as one of the people stupid enough to attempt it yourself.

As soon as I started reading the first paragraphs on the iPhone, I was surprised by how straight the conversion was from book to game - it's actually almost like something you'd expect from a Kindle in that while you get full-colour illustrations, the text and mechanics are basically unchanged from the paper version. The numbering and text of entries remains the same - choices are presented as hyperlinks that are disabled and highlighted according to whether they're valid or not, rather than the game making any effort to force the narrative even when a choice depends on something that it already knows (like whether you have an item in your inventory). For example, rather than splitting entries when a dice roll needs to be made, the classic challenges of "Test your luck. If you are lucky, turn to 94. If not, turn to 172." are still present - you first have to click the link after "Test your luck" which brings you to the dice-rolling screen, and then one or the other of those links will become enabled depending on the result of the roll.

Fights play out in exactly the same way as they used to, as well - you're taken to the screen where shaking the device causes a couple of dice to tumble around, and you can tilt it around to try to influence their landing even though this naturally doesn't help at all. The most you get in terms of extras is a decidedly Statbuilder-like little fanfare and "YOU WON" when fights end. They could have done a lot in transplanting this to a handheld game, taking you to an RPG-type battle screen to fight enemies or at least give visual representations of the monsters, but instead it's obvious that they made a conscious decision to keep it very firmly in its tangible roots.

Converting a gamebook to computer format also makes it extremely difficult because of removing one major option from the player - you can't cheat. With any gamebook of this type, I believe the usual protocol is to mark places where you think you've made a bad decision by sticking all your fingers gradually into the pages as bookmarks, followed by rulers, bits of Lego and whatever else you had lying around. There's no such luck here, as once you make a decision there's no going back - a "Continue" option is provided on the main menu, but in a Pythonesque twist, using it after you die will continue from literally the same place you left off, and you get to read about your demise once again. Mercifully, though, if you die during a fight you can freely retry it.

The game - and the general Fighting Fantasy philosophy - says that no matter how poor your initial dice rolls are in setting up your character, the true route through the game should allow you to pass fairly easily. This is blatantly untrue - in fact, there's no reason not to just keep trying the character creation until you end up with the maximum possible skill score of 12 (a crucial statistic in fights). And even with that advantage, the setup of this particular book is such that you really need to do everything perfectly to have a chance of completing it - if you don't have three specific gems near the end, then instead of getting the promised reward, you get roped into a lifetime of maintaining and setting up traps for the dungeon, then presumably hiding away and hoping to see some passing gamebook designers fall into them.

Comments

[terrana.livejournal.com]

I remember the Fighting Fantasy books well. I seem to recall that the spiel about how "the true route through the game should allow you to pass fairly easily" was repeated verbatim in every book, with varying degrees of truthfulness. I also remember Deathtrap Dungeon being particularly brutal in terms of difficulty, although that may just be the book's theme introducing a bias.

Funnily enough, when I first started reading this post, my initial concern was the same one you voiced later on: cheating. I maintain, as with all games one plays solo, that this should always be an option if one chooses to use it. Even a choice at the start which asks, "should valid choices be enforced?" that stops you cheating if you tell it to or lets you get on with it otherwise would have been sufficient on that front.

[davidn]

The 'cheating' option would be nice, actually, if the game is keeping deliberately so close to the book anyway - just activate all the links no matter whether you have the required piece of inventory or not. I know I just said "Yes", "Yes", "Yes" during the sequence of being asked whether I had the three required gemstones at the end, in the book... in the game, I've got there a couple of times with various combinations of wrong gems (and it's odd that the path is so short, because I had remembered them as being immense.)

This book really is sadistic, as you'd expect from an unsurvivable dungeon - though it would be nice in the context of the game if the choices presented could be reasoned through with more than arbitrary guesswork! That, and it likes putting you in corners and not telling you until you've gone much further down a doomed path. To give another example in addition to the statue, above - there's a point where you're being pursued by an army of evil little elves. You have a choice - you can run over a bridge or dive into the water next to it. If you run over the bridge, you come to an unopenable door (you need a key much earlier in the game) and are shot by a thousand arrows. If you dive into the water and have a hollow pipe, you can hide and breathe through it while they look for you, then re-emerge when they're gone. Then you walk over the bridge, find the door, have to try to barge it down and are shot by a thousand arrows.