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Demons of the Deep

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to dive under the sea to face the Demons of the Deep!

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, founders of Games Workshop, released the book ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’. Intended as an introduction to tabletop role-playing games of the era, the book’s choose-your-own-adventure format mixed with simple dice-based combat proved massively successful, giving rise to a full series of books – Fighting Fantasy. With over 65 books in the series by a legion of authors and illustrators, the series’ legacy continues to this day. Come along with us as Cybe and co play through each one – with no prior knowledge, no hints or walkthroughs and no cheating!

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This is another of my ‘car boot sale’ books, because when I was a kid my grandparents would drag me around each and every car boot sale in the whole of Scotland, and digging through boxes of children’s fantasy books in the hopes of finding a good Fighting Fantasy I hadn’t played yet was the only way I could fend off the growing boredom.

I remember very little about this one, except that it involved a large underwater kingdom which you could explore, and that you had to find some black pearls. As I learned in the video game Ultima 7 some years later, black pearls are phenomenally rare, but still only slightly more expensive than garlic.

We start out as a sailor, who is possibly the unluckiest sailor in the world. He has a luck score of only 7. Also, his ship is raided and he got captured by pirates, who kill his entire crew and then throw him overboard into the ocean by the evil Captain Bloodaxe-chopper-thingy. Which is pretty unlucky. I’ll call him “Chuck the Unlucky Sailor”.

But when Chuck gets to the ocean floor, he discovers that he is surrounded by a great ruined city. And can breath water. A friendly mermaid swims up and explains to him that since he landed in a magical courtyard, he can breath underwater for a full twenty-four hours. She gives me a lucky charm, which is sure to off-set my terrible luck score somewhat, and tells me to seek out the black pearls.

Once the mermaid swims away and leaves me to my own devices, I stumble around the cliff-side for a while and fight a moray eel. Satisfied that I’m not going to suddenly drown, I head off into the main ruins of Atlantis. I swim down towards one of the large domed buildings, to find that it is indeed still occupied. A few armed guards offer to introduce me to their king, the great King Seamoss.

I happily pop along with them and meet Boss Nass – I mean, Seamoss. Who is a big fish-type beastie. See, George Lucas clearly stole ideas from Fighting Fantasy books. Also on that subject, why does Boss Nass look utterly and completely different from all of the other Gungans? No, I mean really, look at the design for him – he bares no similarities to the other Gungans. He’s not just a big fat Gungan, he’s a different type of alien beastie entirely. It makes no sense. Which is… perfectly in keeping with the Star Wars prequels, I know. Wait, why am I talking about Star Wars? I hate Star Wars! On with the show!

King Seamoss seems a decent sort, and agrees to help me in my quest. But first, he makes me fight his royal gladiator, a Deep One called Sharkscale, and this makes me marvel at the idea of being surrounded by Deep Ones. Very Lovecraftian. Anyway, I beat up the gladiator a while, which proves my strength to King Seamoss. He promises to help me, and the book tells me that while he does so, ‘a fishy doctor examines you’. Urrr, not sure if I want that…

With the promise of help from King Seamoss, I leave his palace and explore the rest of Atlantis. I quickly locate a ruined sea galleon, and decide to explore the wrecked ship. As I head over to it, a giant clam damn near bites my leg off. I stab it, but it seems to have a guardian companion, a sea spider, which I fight with for a while. The clam has a silver pearl – not a black one, a silver one.

I examine the wreck thoroughly but find nothing of any significant use, so I decide to ditch that idea and look at an undersea park. Yes, a park! Atlantis is evidently a bustling cosmopolitan city, after all. The trees are full of fish and the coral fountains are very lively this time of year. There’s even a little Jamaican crab who sings for passers-by. In a nearby fountain I see something that looks shiny, so I reach out to grab it in the hopes that it’s a black pearl. Instead it’s a poisonous sea fish. Ouch.

It’s been a rather odd adventure so far, but it suddenly takes a turn for the bizarre when I find the next area includes a small wooden house. Not an undersea house, a normal one. In a big protective bubble. An old man and a cat live there. Please note that I’ve said it’s a wooden house, and not a pineapple under the sea. That would be silly. I head inside and talk to the old man, a wizard called Greylock. He tells me that because I haven’t found any black pearls yet, my quest for revenge on the pirates is probably already doomed to failure.

Out of what I suspect to be pity for me, he makes me a potion that’ll turn me into mist. He then strongly advises that, because I suck so badly at gathering black pearls, I should go and see if I can get the Sea Dragon on my side. I think this is a damn good idea, so Greylock creates a tunnel that will set me in the right direction.

I follow the tunnel for a while and eventually find a powerful, trident-wielding merman. I get chatting to him, and he tells me that as long as I am not one of the Deep Ones, we can be friends. I assure him that I’m not a Deep One, and he shows me around the caves, suggesting I try out the warm spa. I…. don’t know how you can have a spa underwater, but there is one anyway. I try it out, and it makes me feel like a new man. A totally new man. I re-roll all of my stats. This is pretty odd, but also a lot of fun. My stamina is a bit lower, but my skill and luck are way up.

Before I go to meet the Sea Dragon, I decide to head to the local cathedral, hoping to find some useful information there. I plan to go to see the Sea Dragon afterwards. This does not work out quite as I had planned. And in future, I will be going to see the Sea Dragon first. I will see the Sea Dragon in the sea, you see. Instead I went to a cathedral, which had magic windows.

But before I arrived at the cathedral, I managed to approach and tame a wild seahorse, by jumping on its back and riding it around the field. Given that sea horses are nothing like land horses, I can only picture this as a very entertaining sight. Still, I ride the sea horse to the cathedral, and I assume I tether it to the hitching post outside. Once I get in, I notice that the windows do indeed move. Some tell the future, others show the past. One shows a devil fish, which is very realistic. It looks like it’s coming right at me. Oh wait, it is.

After the fight with the devil fish, and as I snarf down some provisions to get my stamina back up to a good level, I see that there’s a window in which I feature, fighting off some horrifying tentacles. Then, suddenly, I am pulled inside a window. Looking around, I am standing beside Cyrano, a dandy swordsman fish. No, I’m not joking. He’s dressed like one of the Three Muskateers, and has a rapier sword and feathered hat. And a fish’s head. It’s possibly the most awesome illustration I have ever seen in a Fighting Fantasy book.

Cyrano trains me in sword-fighting, in exchange for two gold coins. Before long, I am eager to get on my way, and he teleports me to a ruined wreck of a ship. The wreck is being assailed by octopus, which I bat away. The fight is much easier now, as the training has raised my skill level up higher. I assume at this point that I’ve been teleported too far away to meet the Sea Dragon, though.

In desperation, I head on over to a large coral reef. It’s there I see what I can only assume to be the thing I’d witnessed myself fighting in the window earlier – a titanic sea Kraken. Realising that there’s bound to be some great treasure in exchange for fighting this thing, I charge into battle. It’s a bloody long fight, as it has thirty stamina points, and I’m down to single digits before I’m finally able to win. The book explains that I am clearly the stuff of legends, and rewards me three black pearls for my trouble.

Time is not on my side, though. The last rays of sunlight seek across the horizon, and I know I’m going to run out of time. The book asks if I know the name of a friendly dolphin, and sadly I don’t (although I’m sure they’re all called Flipper. Every dolphin. In the entire world. They’re all called Flipper). Not wanting to be stuck underwater when the spell wears out, I swim for the surface, breaking into the air just in time.

I’m sea-wrecked, stuck in the middle of the ocean, stranded, and have no way to get to the pirates that I want to extract horrible revenge upon. Still, at least I’m alive. The book tells me that I’m sure I’ll get back to land shortly. Maybe I’ll run into the pirates again one day, and I can then go on a rampaging, rollicking rampage of revenge. Until then, I’ve got a great story I can tell the other sailors down at the Dog & Duck pub.

This is a lovely book, it really is. The atmosphere is both otherworldly and familiar. It keeps the sense of three-dimensional movement throughout, and the monsters you fight are all imaginative. Bob Harvey’s artwork is really at its best here, really making all of the creatures you encounter look otherworldly. There are some major flaws to it though, mainly in lack of direction. You’re never really told why the black pearls are any use, how to use them, where to look for them and so on. The best direction you’re given is to talk to the Sea Dragon, which is the one piece of advice I was given in the entire book that I had a clear way to follow. I still buggered it up, though, but that’s my own fault.

Despite all that, it’s still a very nice adventure and it’s one I could happily play through again.

Cause of death: Gilligan’s Island

House of Hell

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Join us on the tenth adventure, into the horrific House of Hell!

House of Hell was always one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy books. Almost certainly due to its horror roots, and I do love my horror genre, yes I do. So let’s waste no more time and get stuck right in! First up, my stat rolls were truly dreadful – skill was a passable 9, but I rolled a mere 16 stamina and 7 luck. My fear rating was far better, at 10. Fear is a unique statistic in this adventure – as you experience horror, you add to your fear points, and if you reach your maximum you die of fright! I’m hoping this will be enough to get me through at least a chunk of the game – I know I won’t win, because this gamebook is insanely difficult, but at very least, we can have some fun in the meantime! Just remember – do NOT go into the ktichen!

The story starts with you driving through a forest in order to get to an important appointment – you’re lost, having been given directions by a crazed old man in town. The adventure is already off to a unique twist, setting in a modern day era rather than a fantasy world. While you’re driving, you catch sight of someone on the road. Despite slamming on the breaks, you accidentally run over the figure, only to realize that it is same old man who gave you directions – you scramble out of the car, but his body is nowhere to be found! Clearly the old man is a ghost of some sort. Any way, your car won’t start back up, probably because ghosts can really mess up your ignition. Stumbling through the forest, I found an old house, which surely has a telephone that I can use – even though we are in a more real-world setting, the book was still written in the 1980s before mobile phones!

I listened at the window for a while, and overheard two men discussing an impending visit. Glancing through the glass, I notice that they are dressed in white robes – yeah, not ominous at all. I knock at the front door and am greeted by the butler, who ushers me inside and asks me to wait for the master of the house in the sitting room. While I wait there, I look at one of the room’s paintings, examining a portrait of a young lady. The woman in the painting then turns, looking at me, and tells me not to drink the white wine. Rather than fleeing the house before Doctor Frank-N-Furter makes his big arrival, I stupidly decide to sit in the room with this portrait of Nearly-Headless Nick’s sister, until the lord of the manor turns up. He invites me to stay for the evening, and offers me some wine.

Oh god, the wine! Damn right I choose the red wine – when a painting of a woman tells you to choose red wine with your night of carnage and horror, you damn well make sure that you choose the red wine! Over a dinner of roast duck, the lord of the manor tells me of the history of the fall of his house, leading to himself as the last survivor of his family line. It’s all very Edgar Allen Poe, which is just charming, so we retire for cheese and coffee in the study – at this point I fully anticipate meeting a raven perched on a pallid bust of Pallas just above the chamber door. Instead I meet a whole bucket of sedatives in the obviously drugged coffee, and collapse. Damn, I thought it was just the wine I had to watch out for! When I awake, I am tied up in a bed, just like most Saturday nights.

I get up and after a bit of trouble I manage to cut myself free from the bed. Carefully I sneak out of the room and start to explore the manor. The house is laid out over several floors, with multiple rooms, each of which bears a distinctive nameplate. I find my way to one that is called the Azazel Room. Sometimes I wish regular rooms had names like this – “No, it’s not the bathroom, it’s the Malachi Room”. Anyway, inside the room I find a laboratory, and I arm myself with a sturdy letter opener. There’s another interesting fact about this book – in order to fight at your full skill, you need a weapon. You don’t start with one automatically.

I slip quickly past the Erasmus Room, and am confronted with the ghost of a young woman, who tells me that the lord of the manor is… evil! Y’know, given the way he drugged me over dinner and tied me up, I’d have never guessed he might be a bit shady. Not that I haven’t ran into several guys like that at gaming conventions – don’t leave your drinks unattended if you’re at Origins, ladies! Either way, she tells me to find the Kris Knife, but is then ripped apart by ghost dogs before she can tell me where. Which is as strange as it sounds. Also, I need to rescue another hostage, before the lord of the manor can sacrifice her to the powers of nastiness. Maybe I should make a list.

Off to the Mephisto Room, which is empty except for a piece of rope. I take the rope, and go to the Balthus Room instead. Balthus room contains some billowing curtains, behind which is a zombie. Zombies, of course, are known for lurking behind curtains. As a side-note, I love the art for the zombie here, its claws are very sharp and jump right out the page at you. The damn thing knocks me down to 10 stamina, though. Ouch Leaving the room, I stumble around until I get the choice to go into the Diabolus Room. Oh yeah, that sounds really safe. I avoid it entirely. Y’know, if you’re ever building a house and need names for your rooms, perhaps naming them after demons isn’t the best idea?

As I walk past the hallway window, I notice the words “Mordana in Abaddon” written in fog-like ghostly writing upon them, and the instruction to turn to section 88 if that is ever useful. Great, all I need to do is find the Abaddon room, wherever that is. The next room I open contains a dead body that falls on me. Oh how lovely – the cleaners are obviously on holiday. Now I definitely know that this book is just documenting a usual Saturday night for me. Either way, I run right past the Asmodius Room, the Elbis Room, the Mammon Room and the Shaitan Room (bloody hell! None of these sound dodgy much, eh?) and start searching for the Happy Puppies And Candy Room.

I avoid all the other rooms until I find the Abaddon Room, which is full of plants and contains a dead lady in a bed. Except that she’s not quite as dead as she should be – as I approach her eyes flicker open, and sets a pair of dogs on me. Amazingly, I kill both dogs, without sustaining damage. I imagine that this must annoy her – after all, I’ve woken her up from her death-sleep and killed her puppies, so she refuses to answer my questions until I state her name, Mordana.

I have a few options as to what I can ask her, so I choose to ask her who the ‘man in grey’ is. I don’t actually have any idea who this person might be and haven’t seen any reference to him earlier in the book, but I figure he’s important. She doesn’t know, either. Oh, well isn’t that just so very helpful! Anyway, to make things more difficult, the book then declares that I have explored enough of the upstairs rooms (NO I BLOODY HAVEN’T, let me go back to the other rooms I avoided!) and guides me downstairs.

I head into the drawing room, sensing the end of my adventure rapidly approaching. The drawing room has an ample supply of alcohol, like any good drawing room should, so I fill a hip flask with brandy, and head into the study. Once there, my fear score skyrockets. I find a piece of paper which tells me to ‘find Shekou’ – but the words appear all by themselves! This bumps my fear score up to 9, and remember my maximum is ten. Uh-oh!

The book then asks if I want to check out the bookshelf. I decide that it would be a good idea to look at a book on hypnosis, in case the lord of the manor tries to put the mind-whammy on me. The book I choose has a massive eye on the cover. The pupil contains the faces of people screaming in terror – so basically, it’s like what Facebook would be if it were an actual book instead of just a place for angry people to argue with each other while a large company steals and sells your private data (and I’m not sure which is worse). Either way, this sends my fear score right over the maximum, meaning that my character is so terrified that his head literally explodes all over the study.

I love House of Hell. Even with a relatively poor stamina and luck score, the real danger’s in the fear score, which jumps by 3 points at several parts, and can be quite lethal. I know I spent far too much time chasing one clue that never quite paid off, so this may be one of those that is meant to be played several times in order to figure out the way through it.

Either way it’s still a load of fun. Navigating around the house is much easier than in Vault of the Vampire, mostly due to the name labels on the doors, so although it’s very difficult, it, it doesn’t feel unfair. Definitely one that deserves high marks!

Cause of death: Terror-induced head-explodey.

Rebel Planet

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to venture into the sci-fi ruins of the Rebel Planet.

Oh hey look! A fighting fantasy sci-fi adventure. Those always end well, don’t they?

The more of these I play, the more I realise why the FF series would develop to specialise more in different types of fantasy. The sci-fi ones tend to be the bane of my life, filled with techno-babble nonsense and ridiculous situations. Let’s get this over with, shall we?

Our book starts off with a history section explaining humanity’s exploration of space, venturing from the planet earth to other colonies blah blah blah. It’s really dull. The Arcadian empire has taken over the galaxy and uses humans as a slave race. As a highly trained ninja space type guy with a laser sword (urgh), I have been asked to go from planet to planet in order to find codes from different people on each planet, and use those codes to blow up the empire’s computer. Be still my beating heart.

It occurs to me that, already this far into this book, I’m starting to sound like one of those annoying and cringe-inducing ‘angry internet review’ type people. I’m sorry for that. In general, I just have no interest in this book. I suspect I’m burned out on underwhelming FF sci-fi books, as both of the last two I played were very underwhelming.

I roll up my character, who we’ll call Duke Skyhopper, because he is the hero of the rebellion. The adventure begins with Duke piloting his ship to the planet Tropos, all the while wishing he could be starring in House of Hell instead. Funny thing about your character – if you’re fighting with this powerful mystical laser sword weapon, you do normal damage. But if you lose your weapon, you’re not penalised for it – instead when you injure an enemy, you roll a dice and if you roll 6, you hit the enemy’s pressure point and kill them outright. Which makes you more dangerous without the weapon….

Touching down on Tropos, I’m promptly dragged from customs into a small office by the imperial secret police who ask me why I avoided their ship while I was travelling to this planet. I tell them that I was worried that they were pirates, which they find hilariously funny, so funny that they beat me up.

I get a taxi to my hotel, which is a dingy flea-bitten place in the dregs of town. The receptionist ignores me, and when I get into my room, I met a extremely depressed man who wants to kill himself. Then the police barge in and proceed to pick a fight with me. I flee into the street with the depressed man, who tells me that he knows somewhere we can hide out. He dives into a nearby house, and calls the police, who come along in a large group, ready to beat me up.

At that moment, a street riot erupts around me, with a bunch of rebels throwing bricks and sticks and so on. They promise to take me to see their leader, who should have the code I require. In fact, they blindfold me, and then beat me until I pass out.

Y’know, at this point, the entire ‘adventure’ is eerily familiar to my last holiday to New York…

I wake up in the rebel’s lair, and speak to Bellatrix, their fanatical leader who tells me about her code of honour. I eventually convince her that I’m on their side, and she asks if I will kill a double-agent for her. I tell her that I would like some proof of his crimes first, and instead she simply tells me that I have displayed a sense of justice and gives me the code instead. Actually the code is disguised in a little poem, but I have it now and I can finally get off this silly planet full of people that punch you as a means of saying hello.

Our next planet is Radix, which sounds like a vegetable-flavoured toilet disinfectant. It’s a bit more cosmopolitan than the previous planet – humans are allowed to walk down the street without being hit by sticks. Almost as if it reflects the planet’s less stringent atmosphere, I am given NO clues on how to locate my contact. None at all. Nothing. Let me repeat this – I am put on a planet and told to meet someone… one person, in an entire PLANET. With no name, description, nothing.

I’ve really no hope of finding this person on my own, so I opt to simply wander through the city checking out anywhere I can until I hopelessly stumble upon something. I book in to the cheapest hotel I can find, and spend a while discussing philosophy with the owner. This planet is far more laid-back, and humans are generally free to do as they wish, under the supervision of their empirical overlords.

As a result, it has a slightly more bohemian feel to it, so I can’t really argue with the idea that the planets in this book have a different feel to them. Whereas the previous one seems to have a feel more similar to New York, this is much more of a San Francisco type of a planet. There’s a museum, which I spend a while checking out. The book gives a bit of history into the planet’s previous inhabitants, which adds some flavour, but doesn’t really advance my mission any. I’m given the chance of bribing the tour guide to gain access to a store room, but I don’t much want to spend 500 credits in order to look at a room full of boxes.

I finish off the day lounging around the university quarter. As you can guess, I achieve very little. In the science building I try to chat with some of the students, but they don’t want to talk to me. I head into the arts section, hoping that maybe I’ll find someone there who is an intellectual anti-establishment type, but without any idea of who to look for, I wind up just whittling away my afternoon. Having made no progress, I decide to head back to the hotel.

On the way, I notice that I’m being followed by a few imperial grunts. I manage to avoid them, but stumble across a robot that seems to want to kill me for no apparent reason. It manages to knock my stamina down to half its score by means of crushing me with bricks and masonry. It’s a very tough fight, for two reasons.

Firstly, it has a stamina of 16. Secondly, each time it hits me, the damage it deals doubles (from 2 points to 4, to 6 and so on). But after I hit its antenna a few times, its skill score drops low enough that I’m able to slowly carve down its health points and eventually kill it. By the end of the fight, I still have no understanding of why it attacked me. Random wandering monster, I guess.

I retire to my bed, and wake the next day to have no further luck finding the rebel leader. The book doesn’t even give me the option of trying on the second day, it simply asks if I have arranged to meet someone, and if I don’t then I’m told that I have failed. My mission fails, because my illustrious leaders of the rebellion couldn’t be arsed to give me the name of my contact on this planet, leaving me no way to get in touch with him. I assume that I spend the rest of my life lurking around the university quarter, asking the student girls if they want to take part in my biology experiments, and offering to show them my laser sword.

Can’t help but feel that I’m being rather harsh on this book. I want to be fair, so I’ll give a few good points about it – the background material is very in-depth. The history given to the setting is quite involving, documenting human exploration of space. The planets are quite well realised, with Radix having a rather interesting roots to its cultural differences, and a few hints we encountered at the museum indicate previous extra-terrestrial life-forms.

But really, I just didn’t care for this book. The adventure itself is illogical (why divide the code among four people on four different planets, and not give me any clue as to who to look for?) and the whole Star Wars parallel is just excessive and banal. You know that sound you make when you’re falling asleep, and then wake up suddenly with a grunt? That sound pretty much sums up Rebel Planet. Robin Watefield’s other FF books (Masks of Mayhem, Phantoms of Fear and Deathmoor) are all significantly better than this one.

I remember Masks of Mayhem. It was challenging, but not because of the lack of information you were given to work with. It had a rich history and background (I think, I’m working from memory here). And I seem to remember genuinely enjoying Phantoms of Fear, too.

Now that I’m writing this, I feel as if I’ve been terribly unfair to this book somehow. I went into it with low expectations, and they were pretty much met, but I feel a pang of guilt about that. I should have, at very least, been hoping for more.

Cause of death: Inept rebel leaders

Appointment with F.E.A.R.

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to don our capes as we have an Appointment with F.E.A.R.

Never had this one as a kid. In fact, it didn’t much appeal to me as the cover makes it look like a sci-fi adventure, and I wasn’t much into sci-fi. I was quite familiar with the cover though, because it featured in the Fighting Fantasy poster book, which was a lovely collection of high-quality prints of the covers. Also included were Daggers of Darkness, which featured the evil viking man jet-skiing on two tigers. But it turned out in the end that this isn’t full-on sci-fi – it’s a comic book superhero adventure! If anyone is interested, I’m reading Green Lantern these days, mostly.

I never owned it as a kid, purely because other ones appealed to me a whole lot more. And I’ve never really been into superhero comics until the last few years. I’m one of those kids who cut his teenage teeth on Sandman, y’see. In fact, remember that Sandman poster that Darlene had in the sit-con ‘Roseanne’? I had the very same one. Currently, I happily read Batman, Green Lantern and a few others. Because Green Lantern is boss, man.

This book is a little different from most FF books in that you’re given an identity right off the bat – you are Jean Lafayette, aka The Silver Crusader. The mission in this adventure is to uncover the meeting of the terrorist organisation FEAR (the Federation of Euro-American Rebels) and defeat their villainous leader, the Titanium Cyborg. We get to choose from four possible super-powers, and because I’m not feeling too imaginative tonight, I go for super-strength. The ability to hit things really hard, with my fists.

Even before the adventure begins, we’re given a full background on the character, who was the result of genetic experimentation to create the perfect superhero. Which has evidently failed, because I wind up as the Silver Crusader instead of Batman. But even so, I am superhero enough to be given a couple of useful clues and sent out to save the city.

And so it’s morning in the city, and I’m given a few possible courses of action. I can continue walking down the street on the way to work. Or, off in the distance I can hear a police car speeding down the road, and I have the option to follow and help out there. Or, there’s a third option. A man and a woman are arguing in the middle of the road because the woman’s dog has left a pile of poo in the middle of the street. Obviously, this is the option that requires the attention of the Silver Crusader! I give the woman a firm talking-to about good manners, and use my super strength to throw the dog into the sun… no, I head to the police car.

The car is parked at a crime scene, where it seems a businessman has been murdered. I change into my Silver Crusader gear and investigate the area. I find a gold medallion, possibly belonging to the victim, and decide to take it to a local jewellers to see if he can tell me anything about it. Instead they try to offer to buy it from me, so I hit a dead end in my investigation. Shortly thereafter, I receive a call on my superhero wrist watch communicator thingy that tells me there’s some nefarious goings on at a local chemical plant.

It seems that the people who’ve been performing studies here have been breeding dangerous radioactive dogs, and they’ve now got loose and… sorry, why were they doing this in the first place? “Hey Bill, know what this alsatian dog needs? More radioactivity in its teeth!” I just… Oh who cares. I go and beat up some puppies. This game has a system where you can defeat an enemy if you reduce their stamina to 2 or less, which does make combat work quicker.

As I’m standing outside the plant, signing autographs and generally enjoying people’s adulation and worship (y’know, like any superhero should), I’m called to help a shoplifter who has been robbed. I chase down the robber and find that it’s just a kid who swiped a chocolate bar. Urgh, so this is the life of a superhero? I can’t help but think that Aquaman has a better deal at the moment… He’s surrounded by fish most of the day, but at least he doesn’t have to clean up dog mess.

I sulk off back to my one-bedroom flat, eat a lukewarm microwave lasagne and watch reruns of Home & Away all night. The next morning, I get an urgent call to head to the local dairy, where a chain-saw wielding murderer is on a killing spree. En route though, I encounter a stray cat and I’m given the option of instead taking the cat to an animal shelter. Or stop a chainsaw wielding murderer. Or help a stray cat. I… this is so weird… It does kinda showcase us Brit’s excessive obsession with animals that these two incidents are even thought to be comparable, though. I ignore the cat (or possibly just punch it into the middle of the sun) and beat down on the criminal.

Finally I decide to go to work. But I’m going to be late, oh no. Never mind the fact that I didn’t actually turn up to work at all yesterday, and I decide that the best way to handle this will be to waste even more time by buying my boss a present to apologise for being late. So I head to the local shops and, expecting to find a note on my desk telling me that I’m fired, try to decide if my boss would like a copy of Trivial Pursuit. While I’m shopping (as opposed to going to work), four bikers come into the shop and start causing trouble. When the shop assistant confronts them, they turn into fire. Because the book needed a weirder thing to happen, so it gave us four Human Torches trying to set fire to the local board game shop.

I manage to beat up all four of them, but I’m rather injured by the end of it and there’s no way to recover stamina at this point. The game tells me that I’m still late for work, so I assume that I just forget my idea to buy my boss Hungry Hungry Hippos as an apology, and sprint for the subway train in order to get to the office, figuring that this will get me to the office nice and quick. Naturally, I wind up chasing a pickpocket halfway down the subway train instead. By the time I get to the office, my boss screams at me and sends me home without pay. So I decide to cheer myself up by going to the local amusement park. What? Anything unusual about that?

So I decide that the best thing for the Silver Crusader to do is play on the dodgem cars. I drive around for a while, my cape flapping behind me, cackling like a madman… it strikes me that this is a rather strange adventure. Sadly when a kid falls off one of the cars and gets injured, I decide to finish playing around and leave the theme park. Instead, I decide to go to see the smash broadway musical ‘Rats’ which is currently showing in town. This is how superheroes spend their afternoons, ladies and gentlemen.

Naturally, I can’t go anywhere without some crime happening, because I’m a giant magnet for this kind of thing. The star of the show is almost kidnapped by a supervillain called The Serpent, and I’m able to find them and beat the silly bugger down. He tells me of a plan to assassinate the president, which is something that is so utterly shocking and deadly that I head right home and go to bed. The next morning I get up, go in to work, and am a little confused as to why there’s no big crimes happening on that day.

I go down to the police station to ask them where all the crime is, because the only other option is to go and visit my ageing old aunt instead (no, I don’t know why I’d do this either). I get to the station and talk to one of the officers, who tells me that there was a prison break earlier, and although I really would like to go and round up some of these super-villains, there’s something far more important I need to look into – a man has turned up at a local hospital with some really weird hands.

I go to the hospital, and I’m told that the man has died, presumably from weirdhanditis. I head down to the morgue to investigate the body, but IT’S GONE!! I’m so shaken up by this shocking and frankly rather confusing turn of events that the book asks me if I want to go and visit my aunt again. Given that the only other option would be to go and see Georgie Boy and the Vulture Club in concert (possibly singing their hit song Karma Colour-Changing-Lizard), I rush to see my aunt as if my life depended on it.

I catch the bus over to my aunt’s neighbourhood, and am promptly mugged by a bunch of thugs. I decide that I’d rather like to beat the living snot out of them for the insult. In doing so, though, one of them manages to look at my driver’s licence, and realises the true identity of the Silver Crusader. Soon, my secret identity is public knowledge, and the book tells me that I have to retire from my life of superhero-ishness. Given that I pretty much just spent my time wasting the afternoon shopping and going to theme parks, I doubt anyone will really notice.

I’ll give kudos to this, the book does point out that the superhero keeps his identity secret in order to protect not himself, but those who are close to him. I mean, remember what happened when Spiderman revealed his identity…. It lead to his aunt being put in hospital, and Spidey making a deal with the devil in order to save her life in exchange for his marriage to Mary-Jane. Which was weird. Not quite as weird as his current “Hey, I’m a ghost now, and my arch nemesis is Spider-man. We’re like Randall and Hopkirk, only with tights!” storyline, but still damn weird. Anyway. This book is weird too. I’ve laughed more at it than any FF book I’ve read in a long while. It feels very crazy and quite wild. I’m not sure if I was even close to winning or how well I was doing at all. I certainly managed to beat up a lot of criminals and had a lot of very silly encounters. I doubt I’ll leave the same kind of legacy at Batman did, though.

Yeah, overall I rather enjoyed this book. It’s definitely not the kind of book I’d have thought I’d enjoy, and it has some very random moments which seem to come out of nowhere and offered some very twisted and unusual sense of humour. I’d say this one is worth trying out.

Cause of death: Outed as a superhero to the world