5 ms·
Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series (
by harryf 9y ago
Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery! - now made into a series of mobile apps http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ ). Jackson & Livingstone really pushed this format far more than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.
Most of all I remember "Creature of Havoc" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc ) as being amazing and extremely hard. Instead of being an adventurer you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence. It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". One of those puzzles still has people discussing it http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html ( contains spoilers ). At 13 years old it took me and a friend 2-3 months to finally crack it.
- endgame 9y agoThe biggest one I ever was was the (planned) 12-book Fabled Lands series (of which 5 were published), where you'd be directed to pages in other volumes as you roamed the land, and you had to keep track of code words (i.e., boolean flags) as you did things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands
- mysterydip 9y agoRelated, here's the flowchart for the first fabled lands book, contrast it with the CYOA ones in the article: http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.html?m=1 http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.ht...
- Quarrelsome 9y agooh my god, Creature of Havoc was insane. Never felt like I got close to completing it.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoOr the adventures of Lone Wolf
- euyyn 9y agoThose were awesome.
- smueller1234 9y agoThe other day, I found out that those are freely available nowadays. Somebody even made them into an android app (also free).
- voyou 9y agoProject Aon has all the Lone Wolf books in a variety of formats, including a machine readable format, which they have used to produce similar diagrams of the books' structures. Joe Dever have them permission to distribute the books for free some years ago (you can also now buy them as ebooks, I think). They're all at https://www.projectaon.org/ https://www.projectaon.org/
- pebers 9y agoFYI Project Aon have mapped their structures, for example: https://www.projectaon.org/en/svg/lw/01fftd.svgz https://www.projectaon.org/en/svg/lw/01fftd.svgz The differences are interesting, like which are more linear and which are more branching; some have relatively early choices that fork into two long separate branches.
- dmn001 9y agoSVG flowcharts of many gamebooks including FF and Lone Wolf: http://outspaced.fightingfantasy.net/SVG_Flowcharts/main.html http://outspaced.fightingfantasy.net/SVG_Flowcharts/main.htm...
- userbinator 9y agoIt employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". In computer science terms, that would be an "indirect jump" or "computed goto"; and somewhat relatedly, indirect jumps/calls are for the same reason a little trickier to deal with when reverse-engineering --- without keeping track of other state, it's hard to determine where one will go.
- hunglee2 9y agoI am convinced there was an erroneous dead end in Creature of Havoc - even with cheating it was impossible to win!
- mmastrac 9y agoSPOILER WARNING There was (potentially) a typo in the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc#Reference_213 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc#Reference_21...
- dmn001 9y agoI made .svg diagrams for the Fighting Fantasy books Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap dungeon a while back on my old blog: https://daveman.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-create-svg-link-maps-for-fighting-fantasy-books/ https://daveman.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-create-svg-l...
- rrauenza 9y ago> It employed various techniques that prevented cheating ... Now I wonder if Third Planet from Altair did that. As a kid, I was frustrated to never get to the best ending, so tried to backtrack the references. I was stumped to find that no page seemed to take you there.
- failrate 9y agoOne of my GrailQuest books had an error that prevented you from continuing. I carefully determined the correct page number and edited the book to fix the issue. I can only assume that dead-ends like these arise regularly during development, but most are eliminated by editing and playtesting.
- twic 9y ago> you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence But surely the whole point of Fighting Fantasy books is for me to experience something different to my everyday life?