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Discussing them with a friend (and fellow WebmasterWorld member), and I seem to remember always cheating - you know, you'd reach a dead end or unhappy ending then flip back and re-choose.
Anybody else ever cheat?
Do you think kids today would sit thru one of them though?
that could be fun.
What was really disorienting was reading them straight through like a 'regular' book. :)
Also I could never be bothered to get the dice out so I won all fights by default.
You know, kids of today, no imagination... GTA Vice City, Half Life II etc. Blah.
I also remember keeping my finger in the previous selection page, incase I needed/wanted to go back and re-choose ;)
And no, kids nowadays wouldn't make it. Can kids today actually read when not in front of a screen?
Also I could never be bothered to get the dice out so I won all fights by default.
I'd just re-roll! ;)
Mind you, I can never throw books away.
Check this out:
[lairs.com...]
That's a blast from the past
Ian Livingstone
He was the man! I remember sitting for hours trying desparately not to cheat on a particular section of one book. I gave up and spoiled the ending. The next one I battled through the temptation and felt great. Do they still sell these?
Do they still sell these?
Probably at car boot sales, next to the Scratch 'N Sniff stickers.
Isn't nostalgia a beautiful thing?
TJ
Mind you between me and my brother I think we collected nearly series published... he had FF and Sorcery! and the Ninja series by Mark Thompson (?) and I had Grail Quest and Cretan Chronicles (Ancient Greece) and some history based series which featured (amongst other things) the 1066 invasion and the American Revolution... oh, and Falcon, which rocked.
Falcon was almost but not quite cyberpunk.
I can tell I'm out on a limb here... >;->
Just checked Amazon for the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever (my favourite series), and all volumes are either out of stock or out of print. :(
We bring up the idea at least once a month, talk about how much fun and how "cool" it would be, then the conversation starts to trail when we realize how much work would go into writing one.
Come to think of it, Flash might be a better medium. It would create a more "rigid" read/play, and take the browser back button and tab browsing out of the equation.
Oh dear... I think I'm getting too carried away here...
That's part of the problem. My buddy and I would get to talking out ideas, and soon we'd realize it would be a 6 month to a year dedicated development project.
Overall, though, when you look at those stories in terms of what's possible to do with them now, they were almost ahead of their time.
You could even have alternate storyline submissions. So that readers could submit alternate pathways and such. You could post a base storyline, that could grow and sprout out in infinite directions as time went on.
*sigh* My kingdom for the time and money to develop that project. I suspect I'll see someone else do it and make a pile long before I ever have the chance to do it. Then if I did, I would be the copycat.
'd stick my finger in the page to hedge my bets
I'd use 6 or seven fingers at a time to keep track of my previous decisions, you could call it a digit-al undo.
/groan... sorry!
For an HTML choose your own adventure book to be really good, it would have to have no fancy anything... just straight up text and hyperlinks. :D
I still think its an untapped resource, though. A lot of the "old school" stuff is making a comeback. Someone used bots to port a bunch of the old Infocom text games (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, etc) to AIM, and it got so busy he had to get more server space for it. There was a whole Wired article [wired.com] on the subject a little over a month ago.
Just checked, and they're still responding just fine. So AOL has given it the tacit nod because they boot most AIM bots on general principal.
That was a great read, it's sad but I still remember the name of the guy you take a ride with on the boat to the Lizard King's island, Mungo I think his name was...."Deathtrap dungeon" and "forest of doom", those were another two Livingstone classics. Also Steve Jackson's "Khare cityport of traps" and the thompson series of ninja books, "Avenger" and "usurper" very atmospheric.
apparently there are live choose your own adventure games through downtown Los Angeles, via GPS.that could be fun.
Bite your tongue. Have you ever "strolled" through downtown LA? WITHOUT Charles Bronson AND Clint Eastwood AND Charlton Heston AND Chuck Norris AND.... etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseam....
Y'know, if you want to prove your "manhood", a "treasure hunt" through the above-mentioned portion of LA is probably JUST the ticket....
I quote from the text...
"Mungo's years with the fishermen of Oyster Bay have made him a skillful boatman. He swiftly hoists the sail of the small boat and sets course due west across the silvery-blue sea..."
Well remembered!
Cheers, reading that passage was a blast from the past.
I'm not suprised about his sailing prowess, the guy probably had little else to do with his time. With a name like Mungo It's doubtful he had a high success rate with the chicks in Oyster bay :)
