Reviews by End Master
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Better than Firetop Mountain, February 11, 2021I found that Tinman Games does have some more of the Fighting Fantasy books available, but they're not immediately accessible unless you get their Fighting Fantasy Classics app. Not sure why you can't just download them singularly like you can with others, but there you go.
Like most Tinman game updates of the FF series, they don't add too much other than colorized pictures and options to limit your "bookmarks." (Saves) The app itself also provides a bit of history on the FF series.
On with the actual book review.
This one gives you a little more purpose than just a simple dungeon crawl. Instead of being some wandering adventurer going into the evil overlord’s lair to kill and take his stuff, you’re now employed by the government to go into the evil overlord’s lair and kill him. (And take his stuff anyway)
Okay it’s a little more complicated than that. You’re trying to defend your homeland from getting conquered by this wizard Balthus Dire who in later lore you find out he was evil school buddies with Zagor and another evil wizard dude whose name escapes me at the moment.
Basically they all learned under this mentor type, and surprisingly none of them ever backstabbed each other and when they all “graduated” by killing their mentor (who realized too late that he was schooling three hellspawn) they all just went their separate ways to perform dark deeds in their own corner of the world.
I think Balthus and the other guy clashed at some point due to both trying to conquer the same territory, but Zagor seemed content just chilling in his mountain though. (Until some wandering adventurer kicked the crap out of him)
Anyway so this adventure also gives you access to spells! You’re an apprentice so you only get a limited amount and you roll to see how many you get during the stat roll. Choose your spells wisely since you don’t ever get the option to replenish them. Or at least I don’t remember any part in the book where you get that option.
So despite being a wet behind the ears apprentice they send you of all people to go assassinate Balthus Dire. Pretty sure someone in the magic school didn’t like you if they sent you on some suicidal mission like that.
Since you’re supposed to be infiltrating Balthus’ place, you’re trying to be low profile by masquerading as someone that’s just another minor of Dire’s. Since Dire is an equal opportunity evil overlord, you can sort of get away with this because he’s got a diverse bunch of troops of all races working for him.
Though since everyone is working for a darklord anyway, they’re all inclined to kill you just for ticking them off or being suspicious. Not to mention he’s just got weird monsters running about that are probably going to attack anyone they come across.
The encounters in the citadel are pretty varied. Some of the more memorable ones include and ghostly washer woman, a campfire party with an orc, a dwarf and goblin and his girlfriend sitting on his lap, (who is giggling and slapping him occasionally from the description and accompanying picture) a leprechaun that just messes with you for the lulz, witch cooks and their oven heated by a fire elemental, Dire’s wife and more!
Honestly there are more weirder encounters in this one than Firetop and a few creepier bits which makes it stand out a bit more.
There's even a particular encounter where you sort of get to do something a little "morally questionable" but this isn't really dwelled upon too much if you do it. You're there to serve the greater good and all!
There are two major encounters that will stop you from reaching Balthus Dire. They both sort of come one right after another. Since this is a Steve Jackson game rather than Ian Livingston, they won't be combat oriented. One is object based, though there's actually two objects that will work, unfortunately though one of them is on a path that prevents you from resolving the OTHER major encounter which requires having a correct piece of information to get past a certain area. So there is really only one "true path."
If you manage to get through all that, you'll finally meet Balthus Dire and it even shows a picture of him and he looks almost like a fantasy version of Wez from Road Warrior. It even goes on about how he looks more like a soldier rather than a sorcerer.
The final battle with Dire is sort of cool since there are quite a few ways you can do the final combat with him, similar to how you handle Zagor in Firetop Mountain. You can go straight for the kill with combat, but he's pretty strong. The magic duel is a little more fun. Finally, much like with Zagor, there is a way to beat him without combat at all if you know his weakness. Though given what his weakness is, he's a damn fool for having things set up the way he does. Even Zagor had his weakness well protected.
So that’s basically the book. Always thought this one was better than Firetop. It certainly feels a bit more polished.
As a side note I always thought artwork cover for the original UK version was awful. Seriously it’s really boring even when compared to the other UK covers, which are at least serviceable.
Anyway, I liked this one quite a bit and found the setting more interesting than the average dungeon crawler. Dire was also a cool villain compared to a lot of other FF villains. Would have liked to have seen him pop up again somehow.
Offensively dull, February 5, 2021So an IF member suggested that I review this story since apparently nobody else wanted to do it, which is odd since it has as of this review, over 15 ratings and there is an outside review of it linked.
Now I’m going to keep it “clean”, but given the subject matter, this review might still get a little “adult” in parts. Be prepared.
Okay, well immediately the game tells me to read the first one since there will be references I won’t get unless I do, which I’m loathed to do since that’s more work than I wanted to do. Happily it turned out, the first one wants me to download something weird to my computer in order to play it which solves that problem because I’m not about to download anything just to play it.
So I press on without the advantage of past references or whatever else the author wanted me to know. However, Star Wars and Star Trek are pretty well known, so those references are easy. Space Moose would be fairly obscure, but I actually knew about that one from knowing something of underground comics.
The references I didn’t know at all were the IF community members because quite frankly I don’t keep up on who’s supposed to be popular within those ranks. Couldn’t quite tell if these were meant to be playful jabs or outright insulting mockery by the author. First I’d heard of any of them, then again I hadn’t heard of the author of this story either until it was suggested to me.
I guess this game had music and graphics too, but I was just playing via the online link provided. Just as well since I could just judge it based on writing content alone.
Since I know this is primarily something known to be horribly offensive, I naturally attempt to engage in doing such things and soon learn that some of this isn’t the case. So it isn’t like I get to automatically force myself on anyone. Of course that might very well make it too easy, but the game could have gave a death scene or something for attempting it. Not sure why so many IFs shy away from death.
It was also my understanding that the protagonist, Stiffy was some sort of sexual degenerate to the Nth degree, so I was sort of surprised when I couldn’t try to sex up the old lady or the corpses. Already I’m disappointed with how this was handled.
I mean even if the author for some strange reason didn’t want to really push those “boundaries” like he was attempting to do, there were better ways than just “You don’t want to do that.”
For example, the old lady had a pistol, she could have shot you in the groin or something which could have made for a funny scene about feeling pain despite it being a hologram and how you decide not to try that again.
Hell, I could have written a whole amusing fail scene alone for the corpse one.
"You've never really tried cold packing before, but a hole's a hole right? You go over the corpses and try to pick out the most intact one. You eventually find one that looks like Kristen Bell, if Kristen Bell was horribly burned all over, missing a leg and had maggots crawling in her orifices. Closing your eyes and remembering episodes of "The Good Place" you get started... Five minutes later you're retching and busily trying to brush the maggots off your penis. One thing you've learn from all this, is you're definitely not cut out for necrophilia."
Well that’s what I would have written anyway.
So the first two sex encounters with the hologirl and the engineer are pretty dull. Barely pornographic compared to say that Sexual Service Act game.
The next two encounters get super graphic with the gay furry alien sex. Technically the Space Moose rapes you, but it’s one of those things where gay furry alien rape is apparently full of lols. The arena gay sex battle with the Klingon was just an exercise in attempting to make the porn amusing. Just seemed like it was trying too hard though.
Eventually I wind up on the bridge again and I was trying to figure out where to go next. I tried to go to the planet where my engineer apparently went, but the computer didn’t recognize that command. Actually, all throughout the game the parser was a bit on the annoying side with being precise.
Not really feeling very motivated to play anymore or figure out how to proceed, I just left Stiffy to wander his ship forever alone. It’s completely possible I missed out on the greatest stuff yet to come in the game, but it seemed like that was as good of an end as any.
Now based on one of the outside reviews, there was some mention of this being satire which is definitely was as far as the whole Star Trek/Wars thing, the problem is that’s been parodied so much (Even in a sexual way) that it’s dull.
The review also mentions how it was doing some sort of ground breaking in “feminism.”
Lol, no. Just no.
First of all let’s not mistake what this game is and giving it “status” where it doesn’t really exist. The game basically has you getting raped by a giant space moose. Fairly certain rape of any kind played for laughs is the very antithesis of any sort of feminist theory. (Not to mention this rape has the protagonist have some sort of “gay awakening.” I can see THAT one being pretty problematic with a certain crowd.)
I guarantee this game wasn’t written to make some sort of statement of how the objectification of the ladies is wrong and all that. It was just porn that focused more on the gay furry alien sex rather than the hetero kind and was written for the lols. That’s it.
Didn’t really do it for me though of course. I could probably just turn on the TV if I wanted to see bad Star Wars/Star Trek parodies with gay furry alien sex except now they’re actually canon.
In any case, that’s the review. Hope it was worth it.
Random but still amusing, February 3, 2021This was another one I stumbled on while looking up “Choose Your Own Adventure” stuff in the early 2000s. I didn’t know until just recently that it was VERY loosely based on the author’s own family members, though even back when I first played it I figured it involved real people based on the pictures linked to the cast descriptions.
And there’s A LARGE cast of characters. While it’s not necessary to read through the cast description before playing, you might want to, just so you aren’t completely lost because the game is as they say “lol random” enough as it is.
There is no real plot involved, you play as Brad who is very much a basement dwelling loser. You basically wake up like you always do and from there you can get into some adventures ranging from mundane to very weird. And when I say weird, I mean it. There is no real logic about anything that happens.
The endings you can get are arbitrarily scored. You can sort of guess if you got a better one or not depending on how high the number is, but that’s about it. Since there’s always references about how you can’t find your pants and how much you like this one girl, you can kind of consider those your main “general goals” though you’re only going to be able to achieve ONE of those and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one is possible.
Technically there is a “winning” ending which unlocks a “hardcore” mode which starts things off differently. Hardcore mode is impossible to “win” though, but given the brand of humor going on in the story, that’s to be expected.
So getting to the humor, well it’s hit or miss and I imagine it won’t be for everyone. I found it pretty entertaining though. There are some obscure references that probably only a select few might get. For example there’s a reference to an old computer RPG called Telegard. I smiled when I recognized that one. There’s even a grue reference at one point.
As one might expect with a game so large and absurd about a basement dwelling loser, the content is firmly on the “R” rated side in places. There’s no actual sex scenes, but Brad is definitely a creeper.
While I can see the author moved on with other things in life, I am happy to see that they didn’t do what the author of “Jerk Your Own Adventure” did and censor their work. They didn’t disown it either. I can definitely respect that.
Funnier before they censored it, February 3, 2021So I stumbled on this one years ago when I was looking up “Choose Your Own Adventure” stuff in the early 2000s. A little hesitant to click on the link at first, but thankfully it wasn’t some massive porn site and was a simple CYOA.
The whole premise is coming home from work and finding the perfect way to…well let’s call it relieving “stress.”
While the game obviously is all about self-love, there actually isn’t any porn involved. Even the pictures are mostly just normal pictures of every day items or rooms. There’s maybe a couple pictures that have a really blurry image of some girl on a screen or magazine, but since it’s intentionally blurry, it isn’t like you can see much.
I remember playing through it and laughing quite a bit. It’s purpose to be humorous was clear what with the narrator insulting the protagonist constantly and the amusing “bad endings” though the “good endings” were funny too. I’d sometimes come back to it when I was linking it to other people who were looking for funny CYOAs.
I’m not exactly sure what and when it happened, but when I came back to it recently to add to this very database, I played through it and found that it was now censored.
Now it’s not completely censored of course and I’m not sure if this was due to a bunch of whiners complaining to the author or what exactly. Authors “disowning” their past work is always an eye roll inducing thing, but watering stuff down and keeping it around in some “safe” form is bad in a whole other way.
In any case it’s censored enough that it severely lowered my opinion of it enough that this won’t be getting the five stars I originally was going to give it. I can’t really respect work much if the author doesn’t have the courage to stand by it.
More of a rant than a game, January 28, 2021Moving on to the third game, this one seems more like a rant about the medical system rather than a game.
Someone also mentioned that it seemed autobiographical which I’d agree with too given how it comes across. This is also probably why out of the four games recently uploaded from this author, this one was the most annoying despite it having the most plotted out storyline. The last thing I want to do is play as the author insert complaining about whatever isn’t going right in their lives. Just not a fan of IFs being used a personal soapbox.
Even ignoring that potentially being the case, there is no real game here even from a CYOA perspective. It’s mostly linear with a few fake choices here and there that just change the text rather than leading to any different endings. This would have worked better as an angry blog entry than a game considering the lack of branching.
Definitely the worst of the four.
Never expected a zombie FF, January 27, 2021This one was the major return of the FF series as far as their digital books by Tin Man games go. Like House of Hell, it was set in the “modern world” rather than fantasy or (thankfully) scifi. Since this was the first one Tin Man did, they didn't add too many bells and whistles other than colorized pictures and a few other extras they usually do.
For some reason they severely streamlined the combat in this one. Not sure if that’s because they were trying something new or they figured people don’t have attention spans nowadays. You don’t even have many stats. You just use the STAMINA one and you just sort of need to roll over a certain number during combat.
Basic premise is you’re captured and sold to some mad scientist who is trying to make an army of zombies. You have to not only escape his castle, but you have to kill him AND EVERY ZOMBIE (The description of the book even makes a big deal of this).
Despite it being streamlined, it’s still an Ian book, so be prepared for a lot of hard battles in places. In fact, it might even be worse since now you don’t even have a SKILL stat to give you an edge. Hope you roll a lot of 12s.
The mad scientist Gingrich, himself is a mixture of creepy and goofy looking when they show pics of him. He’s fond of white rabbits so you see him holding a fluffy bunny in the picture. Everything in this book is really over the top, so the main villain being a little goofy looking doesn't really detract from him. I think it works in his favor in this case.
Along with zombies, you’ll also encounter some battles with dogs and few human henchmen. The zombies sometime vary from the “normal” ones to weird ones. More than a few opportunities for instant death as well.
It wouldn’t be a bad B-movie rip off, if there wasn’t a girl to save. So you’ll run into one of those who will help you in the book.
Final showdown is with Ging and of course he’s transformed himself into some super zombie and you have to take him out with some Rambo style machine gun.
Now when it says you must kill ALL the zombies, that wasn’t just some passing line, it REALLY means it. Because if you haven’t killed a certain number of zombies to determine if you got them all, then you get a “bad ending” where you and the girl you saved see on TV months later about a zombie outbreak overrunning various parts of the world.
This is probably the more difficult part of the game since this is a CYOA and if you didn’t choose a certain route then yeah you’re probably going to miss a few. Ian as usual, making things harder than they need to be.
Of course if you killed them all, you get the good ending.
Anyway despite the streamlined system, I didn’t mind the book. They did a good job on this horror outing, though again it definitely was more B-movie style than the House of Hell one. Sort of fitting that Ian has the blood and guts style, while Steve's was going for a genuine creepy horror.
It’s worth playing and it was definitely one I played through a couple times
Better late than never, January 27, 2021This one has a bit of an interesting history. One I didn’t even know about until like a decade later since as an American I had always believed the FF series ended with book 21. Little did I know it continued on to book 59, they just stopped publishing them here in the states. All those adventures I missed!
In any case Bloodbones never officially saw publication during the original book run. There were always rumors that it existed in a limited run, or a few special copies were floating about but the truth is, it never left the drawing board since the series got cancelled.
Eventually though during one of FF many reboots, Bloodbones finally rose from its watery grave. The Tin Man Games version didn’t do too much with the updates in this one other than the usual stuff like colorized pictures, it’s bookmark system difficulty, etc.
While this FF book didn’t really see life until much later, it still feels very much like a 80s game book probably because it was written when that style was still popular. It’s definitely one of the more difficult books.
This one was written by Jonathan Green and apparently he tends to focus on horror elements in the FF books he wrote. I only ever read this one by by him (so far) but I can definitely see the horror elements in this one. He seems to lean more towards the Steve Jackson style of things since he has passwords and codes to trip people up rather than relying on tough combat (Though that’s still there too, along with a lot of item collecting)
This whole story is a little more on the personal side as far as FF plots go since you’re trying to kill the ghost pirate that killed your parents at one point. You’ll need gather what you need to defeat him along with finding him in the first place and you’re on a bit of a timer to do all this.
Probably due to a ghost pirate being involved AND voodoo, all I could think of was this being a more grimdark version of Le Chuck from Secret of Monkey Island. Given that this book would have originally been written shortly after that game came out, I can’t help but wonder if there was a little inspiration there.
Still, this one didn’t quite grab me as some of the other FF books. Can’t really put my finger on why exactly. I’d say it’s one of the average entries in the series. Still worth a play through, but not really an excessively memorable adventure.
Saving the world from FEAR itself, January 27, 2021What are the usual settings that most nerds are into?
Fantasy? Obviously. Scifi? Of course. Horror? For sure. Post Apocalyptic? Definitely.
Well what’s the obvious one we missed?
If you said super heroes, then congrats, you are a true nerd.
Once again the FF series tries to step out of its comfort zone and do something other than fantasy. Heavy hitter Steve Jackson (UK) wrote this one, which isn’t too surprising since he always did the more experimental stuff. Since Tin Man reissued this one, I'll also be going into how they updated the originals as usual.
Anyway, you get to be a super hero in a “modern earth” setting. You sort of get a name in this one too since you’re known as the Silver Crusader. However the Tin Man version already updates this by allowing you to customize your own super hero name, your gender and even what your costume looks like.
Other updates include "trading cards" you can collect, new artwork, and the whole book is done in a more "comic book" style in appearance. The main plot hasn't really been changed though.
Basic premise is you’re the defender of Titan City (Oh ho ho ho, a reference to the fantasy world) and you find out that F.E.A.R. (Federation of Euro-American Rebels) lead by Vladimir Utoshski AKA the Titanium Cyborg are having some secret meeting and you have to discover where and when its taking place.
Okay the set up for this one is a little different already. You do the usual stat rolls, but you also pick what powers you have from a list of four. Super strength, Enhanced Technological Skill (ETS), Energy Blast and Psi Powers.
Okay first off Super strength and ETS are basically playing as Superman or Batman respectively. These are really “easy mode” With super strength you even get an automatic skill of 13 and can fly. And with ETS there just about isn’t a single encounter that you won’t have a device on you that can give an alternate solution to resolving it. Hell there is at least one villain you can encounter in the book that will kill EVERY other super hero instantly except the ETS one. (Just like the real Batman!)
Energy blast and psi powers are more difficult mainly because anytime you use those powers you subtract some of your stamina! The psi powers are the worst one since I know there are a few places they won’t even work and/or can result in instant death. It's definitely hard mode.
No matter what power you pick, you’ll get a crime watch which will be informing you of the nearest crime taking place.
Another different thing is, combat stops when you reduce the villains to 1 or 2 stamina. You’re a real hero in this one, as opposed to some dirty opportunistic adventurer so you aren’t supposed to be killing people no matter how evil they are (And them trying to kill you). In fact if you accidentally kill a villain, you lose a hero point, which is another stat you keep track of in this book. Hero points don’t really mean much though; they’re just sort of a way to keep “score” of how well you’re doing.
Depending on which power you picked, you’ll get different clues from the start about various agents of F.E.A.R. The location and times of the meeting also change depending on the powers you picked, so there’s already some replayability here.
With all that out of the way, we’ll get to the meat of the book.
Well the book is essentially one long string of comic book references. Almost every villain is a FF knock off of a Marvel or DC villain. Names are dropped constantly like some multi-millionaire called “Wayne Bruce”, or Banner Street and Parker Airport.
It actually isn’t just comic books either, they also got knock off references to other real world things like the “Wisneyland theme park” or instead of a musical called Cats it’s called Rats. Things like that.
Most of the time, the encounters don’t really stand out unless you fail them. One major one is failing to save the president visiting Titan city and he gets shot Kennedy style.
Even kids aren’t safe in this one. (And from earlier FF books we should know Steve Jackson won’t shy away from some child death) At one point a kid can die at Wisneyland and even YOU can zap a kid with an electric blast accidentally! (He doesn’t die though)
One cool one though is one of the villains is threatening to poison the water supply and you can’t stop him in time. Just when you think you’re going to get an instant fail game state, a gunshot rings out and the villain dies from some security guard that pops a cap in his head while he was distracted with you.
Speaking instant fails, a bad one is your true identity getting discovered. You essentially have to retire and hide somewhere. And nope, you don’t get the option to just kill the folks who learn your identity to shut them up.
In any case, the day will arrive that F.E.A.R. has its meeting and at that point you need the location and time and add up some numbers or something and turn to that page. Obviously if you get it wrong or didn’t get the info, you’ll get a failed ending where Vlad makes an announcement over the radio to all over the world saying F.E.A.R. has taken over the Star Wars program satellites and as a demonstration of their power, they’re going to use their super weapon to blow up Titan City.
Even if you get the location correct, you still have to face Vlad and he has a fearsome skill score of 17 making it virtually impossible to fight him even if you have super strength. In fact, combat will end after the third round at which point you turn to another page which results in an instant death description.
So how do you beat him? Well you had to pick up one of the few items you can collect in this game to weaken him and it's possible to miss it.
Might as well admit this now. Much like Starship Traveler, I never did finish this book proper because I never could find the get the time and location numbers right. I get that Steve Jackson loves his puzzles, passwords, codes and add up these numbers and go here stuff, and I get that makes the game aspect more enjoyable for some, but I've never been a huge fan of it.
I’ve also probably mentioned before that I’ve never really been into super hero stuff, so I was never really wowed by the fact that you play as one.
Still despite everything I just said, I did replay this one a few times. Not sure why given how it has things I’m just not that into in it, but that might be due to a testament to Jackson’s writing and the flow of the book which kept me more interested than I would normally have been.
So while this FF book isn’t on my list of favorites, if you’re into the whole super hero genre then yeah this book would be a pretty good one to play.
Didn't know this one had a computer version either, January 27, 2021And once again, I'll be reviewing the book version since I never had the computer version and I doubt it was much different than the original since it came out around the same time. Though I certainly would love to see a updated version of this one by Tin Man Games.
Generally speaking, you’re always playing as a hero in FF books.
Even in a few titles where you might be working for someone evil, you'll still be a "good person" at your core. Or you might do something questionable, but you're pursuing a greater good. Hell, even the ones where you have very morally gray job like assassin or thief, it's still usually against someone even worse.
Well drown the kids and shoot the neighbors, because if you wanted to play as a complete unrepentant villain protagonist in one of these books, this is the one for you because you play as a blood thirsty, pillaging PIRATE!
Though I’m sadly exaggerating just a bit, because it was written by Andrew Chapman who wrote two earlier FF books (Both scifi) which were slim on the description. So you’re not going to get long bloody passages of you pillaging in graphic detail, let alone anything worse. You do get to take slaves, so it's not all bad. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This book takes place on the world of Titan, but it’s in one of the lesser-used areas. In fact, unless you sort of go and look up the lore in other sources, I don’t think this book even mentions any of the usual known call backs to the world of Titan.
The premise of this book is you and a rival pirate by the name Abdul the Butcher are having a gentlemanly debate over who is the king of the pirates. The pair of you come up with a wager of sailing from the city of Tak to the island of Nippur and whoever manages to have the greatest amount of treasure within the 50 day time limit will get the title of King of the Pirates.
But this isn’t some anime show and your name isn’t Monkey D. so you’re going to have to put in a lot of work actually sacking cities, pillaging merchant ships and taking slaves.
Seeing as you’re in charge of a group pirates you have to roll up stats for them. (CREW STRIKE and CREW STRENGTH) This is for all the large scale battles you’re going to fight. Lose all your Crew Strength and it can safely be assumed you were also cut down in the battle and you’ve failed.
You also roll up your stats as normal and have to keep track of a log book with how many days have passed as well as how much booty you’re racking up. You also get a pretty useful map of the area you’ll be traveling and all the important cities and locations. Probably one of the few FF books where you get a useful map.
Okay so right from the start you get a lot of options of where to set sail. You can go try to find some fat merchant ships, head towards a city to sack or go find some caravans to harass.
The encounters in this book are pretty varied. You go up against ship crews, town militias, cultists and even a few sea monsters. There will also be times where you’ll be fighting some tough personal battles as well.
There are more than a few encounters that are instant death. One of which is a direct mimic to Circe and Odysseus. (Beware of isolated women living on islands surrounded by lots of animals.) Another way is being an idiot and actually wrestling a giant. (It says he smacks you so hard you go flying into the next world. Years before Skyrim!)
A few other encounters that stick out include taking a break from traditional “pirating” and visiting some gambling dens to make some coin, possibly running into someone you know. Speaking of which there is another aspect I enjoyed with this book.
There are at least three places you can bump into old rivals or someone you owe money to. This addition of running into such folks made the adventure feel a little more immersive since it’s giving a bit of background of other events that have occurred in your past.
One of them you owe a boatload of coin to and you have to do a winner takes all dice gamble. The other encounter is bumping into some friendly rival who is involved in a war between two city-states. The last one is really random. You’re just sort of exploring one of the pirate friendly ports and suddenly this beggar attacks you exclaiming he lost everything because of you. Turns out he’s another rival from your past that obviously fell on hard times.
In any case it was little thing like that, that made me like the book even more.
While you can take slaves in the book and they technically count as booty, they’re sort of useless unless you sell them and you only get a chance to do that towards the end of your journey at one particular city. If you don’t stop at that city, you’ll be stuck with a bunch of worthless slaves at the end of your journey and the whole point is to have REAL coin on hand, not some crappy commodities.
Really the only weak point of the book is the final combat just before you reach Abdul. You have to have a mini-game fight with a big cyclops. Andrew always had these pointless mini-games in FF books he wrote.
It’s not a traditional roll the dice fight either. You’ll get a selection of moves to choose from and then turn to that page, then you see who got hurt and get another selection of moves. You keep doing this until one of you runs out of stamina points.
While the mini-game fight isn’t bad (better than Andrew’s other past mini-games) but it just sort takes up space for what could have been used for more story related passages.
Anyway after your fight with the cyclops you’ll meet with Abdul and you’ll compare how much treasure you have.
Failing to have more treasure results in Abdul mocking you and you having to admit defeat. Winning of course means you mock Abdul and you’ll get a pic of Abdul bowing his head in defeat and accepting that you are KING OF THE PIRATES.
And that’s the book.
As if it needs to be said, I really enjoyed this one and while I’ve never written too much pirate related stuff, the whole villain protagonist theme of this book probably influenced me greatly.
For whatever reason, this book doesn’t get a lot of praise and I don’t think it’s ever been reissued in any of the several FF reboot attempts.
This one was also Andrew’s last FF book and as far as I’m concerned he redeemed himself with this one and went out on a high note. He probably should have been writing fantasy rather than scifi since he did a better job at it.
I REALLY liked this one a lot.
Didn't even know there was a C64 version, January 27, 2021Well like I said in the title, never saw this one in stores in the 80s, though I certainly had the original book. I imagine there isn't much difference since this isn't a Tin Man games update (Which they don't change much anyway) so my review is going to be based on the that.
As an unimportant bit of trivia, this is the first book in the series where the US started using the same covers as their UK versions, though the lay out was still a bit different.
This is another one set in the fantasy world of Titan and this one could be considered a semi-sequel to Forest of Doom from a certain perspective.
Starts out with you hanging out in Stonebridge with those pathetic dwarves when Yaztromo has deemed to grace everyone with his presence by actually leaving his tower for a change.
In any case, he explains that some guy called Malbordus is planning to TAKE OVER THE WORLD with his evil magic because his momma abandoned him in Darkwood forest a long time ago and he was raised by dark elves that found him and he didn’t get breast fed as a child.
Well actually we don’t know last bit, for all we know some maternal dark elf might have taken care of that bit. (Hell maybe dark elf milk made him even MORE evil!) Speaking of which, awfully nice of the dark elves in general to take care of an abandoned human child rather than sacrificing it to some spider goddess or throwing it up against the wall.
In any case, Mal’s planning this scheme by gathering up some dragon artifacts in some lost city called Vatos and Yaz says there needs to be an adventurer to reach the lost city before Mal does.
Unsurprisingly all of the dwarves are cowards and you volunteer because you’re all into this sort of stuff due to being addicted to danger. Yaz thinks you look familiar and so takes you back to his tower where he teaches you some spells. Yep, you get some spells to mess around with. You only get four out of a long list, so choose wisely.
One spell that I soon learned I should have taken during my original play through was the “Create water” spell. It seems sort of useless when compared to the other spells, but considering I ended up wandering about in the desert for several passages I would have saved on stamina points with easy water access and not dragging my carcass through the sand like a dead man.
So given that Ian wrote this one, it doesn’t need to be said that you’ve got an item hunt. Now granted you at least know about the dragon artifacts that you need to get before Mal does, but you’ll soon learn that there are some other items that you’re going to need to get through this adventure as well. One of which requires you to disregard common sense to get it.
So immediately you get a couple options on how to travel to the lost city of Vatos located in the Desert of Skulls) You can go to Port Blacksand and book passage on a ship or you can just journey over land.
Regardless of your initial path, you’ll soon get to the Desert of Skulls where I hope you got that create water spell because you’ll be losing a lot of stamina otherwise. The desert is pretty brutal with encounters, ranging from shell demons to basilisks that can both instant kill you, along with just regular tough battles like giant sand worms. Eventually you’ll stop wandering the desert and reach Vatos. For a “lost city” it’s got a lot of activity going on. Granted it’s not that surprising it’s going to have beasties and such taking up residence long after its been abandoned.
While it’s mostly lawless, technically it has a “ruler” a priestess called Leesha as you later find out and her guards of all kinds patrolling the place. A lot of these are of the undead variety, but there are some run of the mill cultists and similar evil types. She’s pretty much the one that organizes the motley lot to raid desert caravans for supplies and slaves.
Leesha even invites skilled artist from all over the world to impress her with their creations in yearly contests. The winner gets a boatload of riches, the losers get sacrificed. You’ll even bump into a few of these artists.
The topside of the city is pretty much abandoned and you end up descending under the city where all the action is and your search for dragon statues. However you soon get targeted by one of Mal’s assassins known as the Messenger of Death. He’s fairly nasty looking from the pic and whispers “death” in your ear before disappearing.
Basically he’s a big trolling jerk. While you’re doing your usual item hunt of exploring every nook and cranny, you run the risk of seeing one of the letters in the word “death” at which point you’ll lose a few stamina points. If during your adventure you see EVERY letter, he pops up and kills you instantly because a regular annoying item hunt just isn’t hard enough.
So the search is basically a dungeon crawl at this point. Along the way you’ll mostly encounter a lot of Leesha’s minions. Not too many friendly folks, but not like you'd find many in a Temple of Terror. There's another unavoidable encounter at one point which makes the game a lot harder but it was probably a cheap way to make the last encounters difficult.
If manage to survive long enough, you eventually reach Leesha herself and I hope you have a certain item on you, otherwise it'll be the end for you. In fact there's another encounter after her which REALLY doesn't make much sense. Ian apparently took this opportunity to shove in stuff he forgot at the last minute since there are two vital things you have to stop and mess around with. One of those I can accept since it's just the usual Ian item hunt.
The second one is a lot harder to believe even in the terms of a fantasy setting and just opens up a slew of questions in terms of the story. Grant FF books are always a bit on the simpler side with their stories, but I expect them to at least follow some semblance of logic.
The encounter is just so maddening that if the option for your character to just turn around and go home, I probably would have picked that choice!
However, storyline issues don't really stop there and they exist all the way up to the end with the final showdown with Mal, along with destroying the dragon statues which you also need the right item to destroy them, or else you'll get a bad ending.
If you don’t have all the statues you'll get a non-standard ending, where it says you look out a nearby window and see Mal riding a big black dragon in the distance and that he’s going to take over the world.
How?
I mean granted he can do a lot of damage, but unless you totally messed up and didn’t get ANY of the statues, presumably he didn’t get the ultimate power source. I mean there could have at least been a passage that made more sense like him popping up, instant killing you and taking your remaining dragons.
And that’s just it, he WILL pop up if you have all the artifacts. Malbordus is a tough battle, but nothing special. Boring really.
So that’s the book.
I found this one to be rather meh. I mean there were a few things of interest going on, but ultimately it’s just sort of bland and has some severe plot holes in terms of the time frame.
At one point it implies that Mal is ahead of you, but somehow you wind up ahead of him. I suppose maybe he got held up doing some other stuff, but that combined with some of the other stuff going on in the book that I already mentioned and it felt like a mess as far as the story and gameplay was concerned.
Not to mention Mal just doesn’t seem all that threatening, especially based on the pic you eventually see of him. He's certainly no Zagor.
Probably would have been better to not even have Mal in there at all and instead focused on traveling to Vatos to stop Leesha from summoning a world destroying demon or something. She seemed a lot more interesting.
While I didn’t dislike it enough to not play enough to beat it, out of all the books I own set in the world of Titan, this is probably one my least favorite.
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