Phasers to Stun! Warp Factor 9! Highly illogical Captain! We're playing Starship Traveller, Fighting Fantasy's attempt to do Star Trek. This was a bit of an unusual Fighting Fantasy, with rules not found in any other book. Specifically rules for ship to ship combat, remarkably lethal phaser rules and most notably it got you to generate all of the main officers on your ship; seven in all.
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We're back once again like a renegade time lord with The Castle of Lost Souls by Dave Morris. There's actually two versions of this, a Golden Dragon version and one from White Dwarf. We're going to be doing the latter because it's mechanically stronger and supports evil play better. (Rhi wants to play a moustache twirling villain. Which is what she is in real life, minus the moustache). Those wanting to check out the magazine version of The Castle of Lost Souls for themselves can do so on Dave's blog, where he's kindly made it available for all to enjoy. (Despite not liking the gamebook that much himself. Death of the Author. And possibly the adventurer. We will see). The gamebook revival is great. But it does sometimes feel that there's an over-concentration on the dungeon crawl. Not that there's anything wrong with dungeon crawls. They can be a lot of fun and many of us have fond memories of the format. But it shouldn't come at the exclusion of everything else. Especially in the latter period of the gamebook we saw more and more authors experimenting with the format, trying out different settings and ideas. The time travelling detective mystery Falcon series by Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, is one of the more unusual settings. For our next gamebook, we move onto Robot Commando, a classic Fighting Fantasy. Giant Robots! Dinosaurs! Giant Robots fighting Dinosaurs. If Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes made a gamebook this is what it would be like.
It's by Steve Jackson, but not the normal Steve Jackson beloved by Fighting Fantasy fans. This is the American Steve Jackson, known for Munchkin and Illuminati. We start off our gamebook adventures with a TRULY OUTRAGEOUS gamebook. It's Jewels in the Dark, starting Jem of The Holograms fame. It's very much in the choose your own adventure format; there's no system to speak of. More shockingly, there's no interior illustrations, which seems a bit odd for a book based on a cartoon. It's part of the Find Your Fate – Jem series, which somehow managed to run for six books. The eighties was a strange and terrifying time. Anyway, you are Jem when you aren't being Jerrica Benton, President of Starlight Music. Several issues spring to mind here. What kind of name is Jerrica? Isn't being the President of your own record company likely to lead to a conflict of interest when you promote your own records at the expense of other artists or the roster? And how did anybody not guess Jem was Jerrica? Let's have a look at Jem both in and out of her super secret identity. Goddammit Jem, you could have least have changed your top. It should be noted that according to Jem canon this disguise is good enough to completely fool her boyfriend Rio, who feels guilty for having a fling with Jem while going out with Jerrica despite the fact they're OBVIOUSLY THE SAME FUCKING PERSON. Anyway, Jem is in New York promoting a jewellery company and that's where our story begins. We have a rather creepy photographer called Richard constantly telling us to smile. We'll decide if we smile, thank you Richard. But we've been promoting this new advertising campaign for several days with everything going well. But then we hear a crash as the lights topple to the ground! It's our arch rivals, the Misfits. Pizzazz, Stormer and Roxy. (Roxy feels like she draw the short straw in the bad rock star naming lottery). They insult us a bit, but we refuse to rise to the occasion because we are professionals and we have a job to do. And punching Pizzazz in front of our new employer strikes us as a bad idea. And the rest of the week goes smoothly, as it describes more fashion shoots with Richard the overly familiar photographer. Then it's the night of the Saturday publicty party. Which naturally Pizzazz decides to turn up to and be mean again. Maybe we should have punched her? But then famous pop star David Michael Springer turns up and invites us to a joint tour. Naturally, because we are in fact a pop star and not a model we say yes. At which point the book ends because “since you left town the mystery never happens”. TRULY OUTRAGEOUS Cause of Death: Well, technically we didn't die. We made a sensible career decision and apparently that is not the way of the Hologram. RHI SAYS:
If modelling had been my main job and music been my side hustle I'd have stayed behind for jewels because that would have been my main job. But instead I was a pop star doing modelling as my side hustle. Why wouldn't I do my main job? It gave me no motivation to follow the main plot. I want to play CYOA's with women protagonists and there aren't enough around but this felt like a lazy cash in. |
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