Recent material additions to our household:
The first two are, of course, new Doctor Who DVDs. I only bought these yesterday, but am particularly looking forward to Inferno. Not just because I am a Pertwee fan, but because it’s a 2 disc set with scads of extras, and I’m still giddy from how good the interviews and documentaries were on the second disc of Genesis Of The Daleks. (Incidentally to those in the US, season 2 of the new Doctor Who starts on sci-fi on September 29. No word on whether the first episode will be the Christmas Invasion…)
The third DVD shown above is the full first season of Ultraman from 1966. In full colour, with Japanese dialogue and subtitles. We started watching it last night and it’s awesome! I’ll give a detailed review when all 20 episodes are done, but since the collection is a mere US$29.99 you may not want to wait until then!
Starfox Command is the new DS Starfox game. I’ve only played about a half dozen missions but I am liking it so far. I especially like that the developers went with something new (including an unusual tactical map phase between battles). The graphics are ok (not Metroid Hunters quality) but the full stylus control is good.
This time of the year stores traditionally mark down poor selling games and the other three on the above list I bought at deep discount. Jade Empire was a much hyped XBox game of about a year ago which I just got for $9 new. It’s an RPG that suffers from many problems domestically developed RPGs suffer from, but given that it is short and the story is ok I will probably beat it (in under 8 hours). Frantix is a PSP puzzle game that reminds me of a 3D version of a game mechanic that may have been designed for the NES. But at a mere $5 new, who can complain? Battles of Prince Of Persia ($10) was the real treat: a card-based strategy wargame, which is much better than I may have expected.
Incidentally the fall/winter lineup for the DS is possibly the strongest lineup for any game system I can remember in thirteen years of buying games. There are some 20+ DS games being released – including a dozen or so AAA titles – that I plan on buying between now and Christmas!
Above are some of my recent FF aquisitions. Blacksand is very cool in that it allows you to use characters generated in the gamebooks City Of Thieves or Midnight Rogue (both set in the city of Blacksand). Out Of The Pit (a monster manual) and Titan (an atlas) are both much cooler than I remember them to be. My copy of Titan is particularly impressive (I bought it online from a British used book store). It is in perfect condition and is an original print run – a real gem of a find. You may note that none of the above are real FF gamebooks – that’s because I’m still baulking at the prices I’d need to pay to obtain the 5 books of the original 59 I am still missing…
AW tipped me off to the above gamebooks, and thanks to him for doing just that. Dave Morris wrote several of the FF gamebooks and after they stopped publishing worked on his own mega-series named Fabled Lands. Only 6 of the 10 books were ever published in the UK, and only 2 in the US under the name Quest. I have since obtained both of them at reasonable cost (compared to the prices asked for the UK versions).
Basically quest is one gigantic gamebook spread between 6 (10?) volumes. So an entry in a given book may direct you to another of the books. Combined, these two volumes contain about 850 1350 entries, so I imagine the full six book series would have 3500 or more total entries. The game system is much, much more sophisticated than in the FF series, but the books sacrifice story for content, so it’s a bit of a trade off. The gameworld for instance, feels very underdeveloped.
Much like a Might and Magic game versus a Wizardry game for instance.
At any rate these are very enjoyable books, and the sheer variety in them is impressive. I played both of them out (it took several hours) and my character (who is now level 6) is more than ready to venture into one of the more difficult books. But I doubt he ever will, and if you are curious as to why not go to ebay or alibris and search for ‘Fabled Lands’ 🙂
robert
< Holly
