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Fighting Fantasy Redux 2

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Almost four years ago now, after a trip to Australia, I decided to recollect all the Fighting Fantasy books I was a great fan of in my youth. In a matter of months I had obtained many of them, and as the years went by I would continue collecting. Not only the old books (from the 1980s) but also the new reprints by Wizard books, including the few new adventures (Howl Of The Werwolf, Bloodbones) they have put out.

In four years my collection has become near complete. I am missing only 3 actual gamebooks, those being Deathmoor (#55), Knights Of Doom (#56) and Revenge Of The Vampire (#58). On the rare occasions when any of these are offered for auction on ebay they are invariably very expensive or in the UK. Just yesterday I missed a winning bid on a copy of Deathmoor. My highest offer was $21 and it went for almost $60…

Other items I would like to have, in the interests of completing the collection, would be the last FF RPG ‘manual’ Allansia. I doubt I’ll ever have it though, for it’s one of the rarest FF-related items ever printed and routinely goes for hundreds of dollars at used book vendors. I’d also like to get the two-player gamebook, Clash Of The Princes (that I once owned) and any of the other peripheral books, such as the Zagor gamebooks, Goldhawk novels or the colour puzzle books (Tasks Of Tantalon, Casket Of Souls).

I remain optimistic I may be able to pick up one of more of such items in my upcoming Australia trip.

Anyway, the true purpose of this post is to report that Wizard books is once again rebranding and re-releasing the FF gamebooks! Renumbered re-releases of Warlock Of Firetop Mountain, Citadel Of Chaos, and Deathtrap Dungeon are already out (in the UK) and a brand new FF book – Stormslayer – is due in October!

ff4new

Furthermore, they will continue to release older books but seem to be planning to prioritize new titles. The next confirmed new book (due early 2010) is called Night Of The Necromancer, and future planned titles seem to include Escape from Oblivion, Claw of the Fleshless King, The Cold Heart of Chaos and Assault on the Fortress of Evil.

I must admit I was a bit leery when I heard about the rebranding a few months back. But this seems like good news indeed – the series must be popular for them to be planning so many new entries! Unfortunately the books will not be available in the US at all, so I’ll have to turn to my usual contacts for sustained FF goodness 🙂

In related FF news, the iPhone game is due in October, and the DS game is due in 2 weeks!

181145b < !!!

You can be absolutely positive I will be getting this. However I may wait until my plane trip to actually play it 🙂

Posted in Games, Otaku | Comments Closed

Warcraft No More

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Today my World Of Warcraft account expires.

I quit for many reasons, primary amongst them that I played too much and the game is a distraction I don’t need going in to what promises to be my busiest teaching semester yet (I am teaching two different courses). Plus, I have to somehow write a PhD thesis during this semester as well.

Secondly, I’ve been playing for 4.5 years. The game is still good; is still fun – in fact WoW is perhaps better now than ever. But over the last couple of months and particularly weeks it was beginning to feel more an obligation than entertainment. Having played hundreds (thousands more likely) of games to completion it’s typically obvious when it is time to put a game down and start another. Warcraft has no end, and will continue to evolve until the servers shut down in 201x. So one has to make their own end to the game, and it’s possible that now I have done just that.

Of course an expansion will be announced mere days from now, which promises to reveal a wealth of new content to get excited about. My hope is to resist the allure. Time will tell.

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku | Comments Closed

Doctor Who Video Games (I have never played…)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Here’s a post for all enthusiasts of Doctor Who and video games… don’t all thank me at once 🙂

As best I can tell there have been only 6 video games based on Doctor Who over the years. I have played precisely zero of these, so I have a bit of a fascination for every one of them (well, except perhaps the most recent one). I have a pretty good idea at least one person reading this (*cough*, AW, *cough*) has played some and if you have, please share your opinion in the comments!

(Note that I am only describing the officially licensed Doctor Who games here – as you can imagine there are oodles of fan-made games, and even-more-oodles of unrelated games with Who cameos. I am also omitting various official ‘flash games’ the BBC has included on the Doctor Who website.)

Doctor Who: The First Adventure (BBC Micro / BBCSoft / 1983)

The first officially licensed Doctor Who game appeared in 1983 and ‘starred’ the fifth Doctor in an action game consisting of four mini-games that were themselves ripoffs of existing arcade games (Pac-Man, Frogger, Space Invaders and… Battleship!). The screenshot shown is from the third stage, the Space Invaders ripoff. Apparently the game was crap (surprise, surprise) and produced in limited quantity. Therefore it is sought after these days by collectors.

Doctor Who And The Warlord (BBC Micro / BBCSoft 1985)

A text adventure in which you play the role of the companion to the (unspecified, presumably Colin Baker) Doctor. Apparently quite an amateurish piece of software, and even harder to find intact these days due to low sales. Apparently it was planned to release a Spectrum version as well, but it was never made.

Here’s an original TV ad for the game, worth watching to hear the description of the advanced features (saving!)

Doctor Who And The Mines Of Terror (C64 & BBC Micro / Micro Power / 1985)

This was a very large, complex and difficult graphic adventure game in which the player assumed the role of Doctor number 6 (Colin Baker) as he squared off against The Master and a collection of alien baddies trying to make a ‘time reset switch’. The Doctor’s companion in this endeavour was a robot cat (seen in the image above).

The game was long in development and very costly for the developer, and poor sales (notice a trend?) led to their demise. I very strongly remember reading all about this one in the UK game mags of the day, and looking forward to getting it once it was released in Australia. Which, alas, it never was. In my youth this was the only Doctor Who game I ever knew about, and consequently the one I wanted to play more than any other.

Here’s a video of what it looked like in action.

And here is the theme song on the C64. (<- this is really, really awesome)

(Doesn’t that theme remind you of the Zelda 2 NES music?)

Dalek Attack (everything / Admiral Software / 1992)

This game, a sort of “Doctor Who meets Contra”, is perhaps the strangest officially licensed Doctor Who game ever made. It’s a run-and-gun in which you (as one of several selectable Doctors) face off against a wealth of baddies and blast the hell out of them with guns. In other words, it’s not very Doctor Who-ish! Be sure to check out the advertisement (on the right above), particularly the list of enemies they boast about (Sumo Wrestlers?!?!?). The game is apparently ludicrously difficult 🙂

The game came out for many different systems. Above are C64, Spectrum and Amiga screenshots.

< Dalek Attack review

Above is an original review of the spectrum version from a gaming magazine of the time.

And here’s a video of what the game looked like running on the Amiga.

Doctor Who: Destiny Of The Doctors (PC / BBC / 1997)

An elaborate CD-based adventure , this game featured all surviving actors that played the Doctor reprising their roles in an epic struggle through time against the Master (played by Anthony Ainley, in his final performance before his death). The game is a weird hybrid of Doom and Myst, and amazingly enough, was even released in the US! Shamefully have to admit I never knew at the time, else I may have bought it. It’s still freely available on ebay or amazon.uk.

There are many videos of gameplay on Youtube. Here is an example. The game looks intriguing, albeit crap.

Also, the wikipedia has a lengthy description of gameplay.

Top Trumps Doctor Who (PS2, DS, PC, Wii / Eidos / 2008)

And now we are launched into the new era, with the latest game being a version of the Top Trumps card game, in electronic form. Reasonably playable, and (apparently) well programmed, I feel I should certainly obtain the DS version at some time…

The above screens are from the PS2 (left) and DS (right versions). Gameplay consists of taking a card from your deck and matching it against your opponent. The strongest card wins. Simple as that!

Here’s some video of the PC version. It actually looks fairly decent.

And that ends my list of official Doctor Who games. As I said originally I have never actually played any of these, although I would love to. Anyone know of any I have missed?

Posted in Games, Otaku | 1 Comment »

MHFU Update

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

For those interested in how I’m doing in Monster Hunter…

240+ hours on the savefile now. HR6, 8-star elder quests. I’ve downed some landmark beasts, such as Shao Gaoren and Lao Shun. I’m alternating between a True Devil Slicer weapon (longsword, thunder element) and a Hellstinger (gunlance, ice element). Wearing 3 pieces of the Ceanataur U armor set and 2 pieces of Death Stench S.

In the near term, I plan to hunt the elder dragons, specifically Chameleos and Kushala Daora. In the long term, well I want to upgrade my flame longsword and my Devil Slicer again, so I need to unlock the G-star quests from the guild 🙂

And, completely, utterly unrelatedly, isn’t it weird I know all the lyrics by heart of this song?!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Music, Otaku | Comments Closed

Unite!

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

If you read the blog entries during the Japan trip, you would have noted the numerous references to the Monster Hunter game franchise. During our trip, the fifth in the series (and the third PSP version) was released in the US: Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (known as Monster Hunter Portable G 2nd in Japan).

The game owns my soul right now.

I imported my save from the previous version, which itself had used the save from the first PSP version. My character (named Miki) is now over 170 hours old and is only (I estimate) about 35% of the way through the game. I’ve completed most of the village Elder quests but have barely scraped the Guild quests, and am not even yet at the level required to take G rank quests (my esteem level is 3 out of 12). Even so I have downed almost a hundred monsters and have amassed a large collection of armour and weapons.

But the best is yet to come.

This is a game about killing ‘monsters’, which often resemble european dragons. It is entirely mission based, and each mission sends you into one of a half dozen zones (a mountain, swamp, desert etc.) with the task of downing one or more monsters. Each zone is filled with ‘fodder’ enemies and lots of places you can gather materials and whatnot, but the objective is to down the big beastie. If you kill it, you can then ‘carve’ pieces from the corpse which can then be used to make better armour and weapons. Even better, you can capture monsters for more rewards (but it’s much riskier).

There are well over 1000 weapons in the game (divided into 9 main types) and over 2000 pieces of armour. If you’re into games that promote character advancement through gear (cough, WoW, cough) then this may be the ultimate game.

But it’s hard. As in really hard. The controls take a lot of getting used to, and any particular fight can be quite different depending on not only the opponent, but your weapon. It’s strangely similar to a 2D fighting game (like Street Fighter) in it’s complexity. Also, the game is designed around multiplay but Capcom has never added internet play to the PSP versions, so most US players solo the game, which means it’s a lot harder. But oh so rewarding!

To give you an idea of what it’s like, watch this brief video of someone killing a Lunastra elder dragon (bad video quality since it is a PSP game).

I haven’t killed a Lunastra, but I have ‘repelled’ one (the Elder Dragons have so much health you have to fight them many times over many missions to actually kill one). There is an amazing amount of opponents in the game, as you can see from this beautiful piece of official art:

monster-hunter-freedom-unite-20090513010910924.jpg < Click on this (it’s big)

The biggest monster I have actually killed is the one whose fishy tail is visible at the extreme right of the image. It’s called a Green Plesioth, and is a amphibious beast who must be lured out of rivers and lakes via bombs. He was tough. But as you can see he’s a shrimp compared to the behemoths lurking in the back of the image. And yes, you actually do fight them one-on-one. Check out the giant octopus thing! The gargantuan tarrasque-y thing! Or the ‘mount from Dark Crystal’-like thing, visible only as legs disappearing off the top of the image.

I can’t wait to kill them! The sweet joy when they fall screaming to the ground and I extract their parts for armour! Wonderful!

I absolutely love this game. I even adore it. The satisfaction of downing a new challenging foe is unparalleled, and I really think I have the skill now to break the HR4 barrier into G-Rank play (solo, no less). Let’s see if that happens.

The series has struggled in the west in the past, mostly due to the difficulty and poor marketing on Capcom’s behalf. But apparently initial sales of MHFU are promising, and it seems western fans are finally realizing the beauty of this game. This bodes well for Monster Hunter 3 Tri, coming next for Wii (no less). Although some suggest MHFU – the version I am playing now – will forever be the highpoint of the series (the Wii version is adding some sweeping changes). Time will tell.