All sorts of games coming out lately, but what have I been doing? (Well, okay, playing them quite a bit, but also...)
Revisiting my favorite series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf. If you don't remember gamebooks from the days of yore...they're like the once-popular Choose Your Own Adventure series, except they fancied things up with some minor, usually RPG-like, game elements. In the case of Lone Wolf, you have a Combat Skill rating, an Endurance rating, a handful of skills you can select off a list (that can be added to with each successful book completion), money, and both standard (Backpack) and Special items.Your course through the adventure is determined both by your actual choices and by which skills you picked. Periodically you may have to fight, in which case the Combat Skill rating comes into play, and you may also lose Endurance by other means. Loss of all endurance ends the game, as one might expect. Not only is this system more elegant than many other gamebook series, but the persistence of your character from book to book is, as far as I know, unique and really lends an extra thrill to the series. Moreover, unlike some of the other, lesser series (and many of the CYOA books), the writing is excellent and the setting imaginative.
Unfortunately, gamebooks rather went out of style some time ago, and where one could once go over into the young adult section of a Barnes and Nobles or other major bookstore and gaze at entire shelves filled with the distinctive black binding and wolf icon of the Lone Wolf series, they are now entirely out of print and quite rare. Assembling a full series, or even one of the subdivisions (there's the Kai, Magnakai, Grand Master, and New Order, in that order, representing the stages of power Lone Wolf reaches on his journey from Kai initiate to master of a once more thriving Kai order.) in order is a daunting task at best.
I have several, but with gaps between at least half of them, so the continuing character feature is sadly limited. Were I to rely on my own collection, that is. It turns out that some years ago, due to the out of print status of the series, the creator, Joe Dever, granted a nonprofit group called Project Aon the license to translate the entire series (as well as the sister series World of Lone Wolf and a post-apocalyptic series of gamebooks using a similar system entitled Freeway Warrior) into electronic format and distribute them free of charge via the internet. Of course, since it's a purely volunteer effort based around the fan community, progress is slow, but to date they've managed the Kai and Magnakai series, as well as four or five of the Grand Master books and a couple of the World of Lone Wolf books. I had actually known about this for a while, but when I checked back recently they'd added another book or two. Hence my revisit of the books themselves.
I really like their web implementation. Hyperlinks for all the choices and so forth. Rules clarification where necessary, footnotes about things that are implied but not necessarily clear, and so on. Plus they've put together something called Statskeeper, which is an excellent (if entirely manual) way to record your statistics and refer to them during the adventure. There are also a couple of other implementations of this functionality with more automation, such as the Java-based Lone Wolf Action Chart (which I am using in this run-through. it's quite nice.), but the downside on those is that they make it harder to a) do "house rules" and b) use books that are not of the Lone Wolf series itself, as they have similar, but distinct rulesets that aren't covered, where Statskeeper does. The World of Lone Wolf series is the only such series to have representation so far, but whenever they actually get Freeway Warrior books up, they'll be even more problematic under LWAC and competition.
Link: Project Aon
Revisiting my favorite series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf. If you don't remember gamebooks from the days of yore...they're like the once-popular Choose Your Own Adventure series, except they fancied things up with some minor, usually RPG-like, game elements. In the case of Lone Wolf, you have a Combat Skill rating, an Endurance rating, a handful of skills you can select off a list (that can be added to with each successful book completion), money, and both standard (Backpack) and Special items.Your course through the adventure is determined both by your actual choices and by which skills you picked. Periodically you may have to fight, in which case the Combat Skill rating comes into play, and you may also lose Endurance by other means. Loss of all endurance ends the game, as one might expect. Not only is this system more elegant than many other gamebook series, but the persistence of your character from book to book is, as far as I know, unique and really lends an extra thrill to the series. Moreover, unlike some of the other, lesser series (and many of the CYOA books), the writing is excellent and the setting imaginative.
Unfortunately, gamebooks rather went out of style some time ago, and where one could once go over into the young adult section of a Barnes and Nobles or other major bookstore and gaze at entire shelves filled with the distinctive black binding and wolf icon of the Lone Wolf series, they are now entirely out of print and quite rare. Assembling a full series, or even one of the subdivisions (there's the Kai, Magnakai, Grand Master, and New Order, in that order, representing the stages of power Lone Wolf reaches on his journey from Kai initiate to master of a once more thriving Kai order.) in order is a daunting task at best.
I have several, but with gaps between at least half of them, so the continuing character feature is sadly limited. Were I to rely on my own collection, that is. It turns out that some years ago, due to the out of print status of the series, the creator, Joe Dever, granted a nonprofit group called Project Aon the license to translate the entire series (as well as the sister series World of Lone Wolf and a post-apocalyptic series of gamebooks using a similar system entitled Freeway Warrior) into electronic format and distribute them free of charge via the internet. Of course, since it's a purely volunteer effort based around the fan community, progress is slow, but to date they've managed the Kai and Magnakai series, as well as four or five of the Grand Master books and a couple of the World of Lone Wolf books. I had actually known about this for a while, but when I checked back recently they'd added another book or two. Hence my revisit of the books themselves.
I really like their web implementation. Hyperlinks for all the choices and so forth. Rules clarification where necessary, footnotes about things that are implied but not necessarily clear, and so on. Plus they've put together something called Statskeeper, which is an excellent (if entirely manual) way to record your statistics and refer to them during the adventure. There are also a couple of other implementations of this functionality with more automation, such as the Java-based Lone Wolf Action Chart (which I am using in this run-through. it's quite nice.), but the downside on those is that they make it harder to a) do "house rules" and b) use books that are not of the Lone Wolf series itself, as they have similar, but distinct rulesets that aren't covered, where Statskeeper does. The World of Lone Wolf series is the only such series to have representation so far, but whenever they actually get Freeway Warrior books up, they'll be even more problematic under LWAC and competition.
Link: Project Aon
The thing that really sucks right now is that I just can't afford to devote a whole day to a trip to the cities, let alone all of the other expenses that would come from such a trip. I've heard of the Theatre of the Jeune Lune - I can't remember if something I wanted to see was performing there at one point, or what, but I do know of it. *sigh*