tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post7638467810743286242..comments2024-03-07T13:47:29.810+00:00Comments on Lloyd of Gamebooks: Enjoyable and challenging vs unfair and frustrating 2: Unfair and frustratingStuart Lloydhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15100216520313336932noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-87903880422384917612023-03-04T01:29:32.186+00:002023-03-04T01:29:32.186+00:00I always got the feeling that CotS was where Sir I...I always got the feeling that CotS was where Sir Ian started believing his own press and got the swelled head he carries with him to this day. He's quite the popinjay. Steve Jackson, on the other hand, is still the kind of bloke you can sit down over a tankard and he's a regular chap.Bosk of Port Karhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05382836168231297724noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-48535995974892024362012-07-10T22:29:18.494+01:002012-07-10T22:29:18.494+01:00Every genre has its growing pains. The annoying pa...Every genre has its growing pains. The annoying part is, by the mid-90's we had pretty much worked most of the kinks out of the format... and then the gamebook market crashed hard. Now, we've got a new generation of readers and writers, and they've got to learn the same lessons all over again. Recently, I was on a brief Windhammer Prize kick and dove into <i>Peledgathol</i>. It was a great book... except for the crippling fact that the author forced you to play a character with 3 Skill. Consequently, there's no way to beat the book fairly. It's a pity, because aside from that, it's really well-written and designed. Probably would have won the competition if not for that screw-up.<br /><br />More common and annoying than impossible fights, though, is generic choices. Every author is allowed to occasionally phone it in and throw the player into a blank T-junction, but when overused it becomes tiring quick. Realistically, the only solutions to such a problem are to get lucky or find the right answer by exhaustive search. <i>Wizard Outcast</i> and <i>Hellfire</i> come to mind as examples, and both of them I lost patience and wound up mapping the sucker out. (<i>Hellfire</i>, to be fair, was intended to be insanely hard.) It shows up in <i>Siege of the Necromancer</i>, too, and is a major reason I didn't like that book.LupLunhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-87438215033815049712012-07-10T21:11:26.435+01:002012-07-10T21:11:26.435+01:00As I said on the Fighting Dantasy blog, what must ...As I said on the Fighting Dantasy blog, what must it have been like to have played in an Ian Livingstone DMed D&D game in the early 1980s?Andy Bartletthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06683770320671028815noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-33558067340373490892012-07-09T08:24:53.501+01:002012-07-09T08:24:53.501+01:00Also in Creature (I think it's Creature) if yo...Also in Creature (I think it's Creature) if you don't find the amulet and hence the secret passageways you end up in a crazy loop fighting Chaos Warriors with skill 10...after it goes back to the original reference, the first Chaos encounter, you realise that something is badly wrong. However you have no inkling whether the mistake has come about due to your missing something or a mistake in gameplay. In my more callow attempts as a youth I was convinced it was the latter and so I started the dubious practice of keeping my finger in the page before....you'll be pleased to know my cheating failed because I still couldn't translate the language until much later! Anyway, it's a gripe about a book which has plenty of memorable moments, and one of the best stories in the canon.Blanchothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15374916132097836599noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-60977620943177570452012-07-08T22:18:07.878+01:002012-07-08T22:18:07.878+01:00Coming at this from a game development point of vi...Coming at this from a game development point of view, I'd say that all of the above are pretty much poster examples of what you should not do:<br />- Extreme difficulty boss characters. Check.<br />- Puzzles Requiring Obscure Knowledge from Outside the Game (e.g., from other playthroughs). Check.<br />- Many Combinations, No Clues. Check.<br />- Failure to Provide Clear Short-Term Goals. Check.<br />- Failure to Explain Victory and Loss Conditions. Check.<br /><br />To be fair, this was fairly common in many if not most games of this early period of this kind of gaming (in the same way many arcade games of this period were absolutely brutally unforgiving).<br /><br />There is no good reason to commit the same mistakes today, IMO, other than the kick of nostalgia. In a medium where it is so trivial to cheat, why force the user to do so?Michael A.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05321078010906346868noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-77822480706258922052012-07-08T17:24:54.708+01:002012-07-08T17:24:54.708+01:00Phew - I'm just glad none of my books got sing...Phew - I'm just glad none of my books got singled out for this post :)Dave Morrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14468228790874490693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-28408245066579253712012-07-08T09:59:36.160+01:002012-07-08T09:59:36.160+01:00I think the one that bugs me the most is what you ...I think the one that bugs me the most is what you mentioned in passing on Deathtrap Dungeon, that there's no clear criteria for victory. That's a big problem on a lot of the FF games - the best ones seem to be the ones that make it clear at some points what you'll require in order to succeed, whilst the more frustrating ones just leave you stumbling around without any idea. <br /><br />I'm not too adverse to the 'make a map of it' requirement of Warlock. A lot of these dungeon-crawl games kinda expected it, because they stemmed so much from 80s D&D. It can be tedious, but it's still a fair challenge, especially when compared to the less-than-fair "You didn't pick up a magic sword that was hidden early in the book, so the army of ghosts stamp all over you now and you die" endings.Zanafarrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17588951783248424353noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-417337570309175061.post-16168951502946712382012-07-08T02:39:34.632+01:002012-07-08T02:39:34.632+01:00Ah...the ever amusing bagging of Crypt. In truth, ...Ah...the ever amusing bagging of Crypt. In truth, I agree at all that was being said, but there is still something that draws me to Crypt (maybe the unbelievable cover art of Razaak with his stunted arm in his majestic crimson robes). Through the years, it is (surprisingly) one of the few gamebooks I have kept, and Razaak was always used as a name for all my CRPG magic wielding characters. Perhaps it is proof that we are sometimes drawn to such notoriety...Abe Heronhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00213172632867512423noreply@blogger.com