Lost Games: Devil's Flight by Gaetano Abbondanza

Devil’s Flight is my second-only entry into the reviewing genre of gamebook playthroughs, and the world (or at least the internet) has changed since those heady days of playing through Bodies on the Docks. Back then, I was aware of only one site doing playthroughs of those old Fighting Fantasy books, and that was the excellently-named Fighting Dantasy. Yeah, I wish I’d thought of that title (though my name isn’t Dan). Back then,as far as I knew there wasn’t much interest in gamebooks on the net, or anywhere else either. I pictured Dan as a tortured, lone genius, working tirelessly to keep the gamebook flame alight with no help from an uncaring world.

In Celebration of the Ghost Ship

Being an insane over-analysis of one of my favourite sub-genres!

You know this story, you’ve seen it a million times. It’s two parts sci-fi and one part horror, and it owes its ancestry almost entirely to movies and later, videogames; its only direct literary ancestor would by the haunted house story. Usually taking place in the future, the story will feature a group of humans (often military) who either stumble upon or are sent to investigate a mysterious space ship, space station or remote colony or outpost of some sort. At first it seems as if the place is deserted. There will be no signal and no response to any attempts at communications. There may be some evidence that the previous occupants came to a sticky end. The characters will wander around in the dark with flashlights. Sooner or later, they will encounter whatever it was that killed the original crew, and things will get nasty. It’s often aliens, zombies, ghosts, demons, or some combination of the above. Depending on the ratio of horror to sci-fi, members of the team may be killed off one-by-one, or they may fight the threat outright.

Lost Games: Bodies On The Docks

It’s popularly accepted by fans of old-school gamebooks that the coming of age of video games finally knelled the death for the paper-and-dice brigade. Gamers no longer had to shirk their computers for truly immersive experiences. But is this the way it had to have been? Surely the new technology ought to have provided new way to play text-heavy gamebooks, allowing them to be played in a way that didn’t have other, irrelevant paragraphs visible all the time and where cheating was not possible?

Lost Games: Adventure Creator

Remember when games came free with floppy disks on the front of computer magazines? Of course you do. They were demos, mostly- games like Lemmings, Wolfenstein 3D and Escape Velocity- designed to sucker you in and make you buy the full versions. There was shareware, too- full games, made by amateurs (usually a single person) that pleaded with you to send ten dollars- just ten dollars!- to some guy in California if you liked the game. Usually there’d be a stack of these games on a single disk. Somehow I often found these ‘homebrew’ efforts more interesting than the proper studio games- they were always small, and usually somewhat graphically impaired, but they had a charm and randomness about them that big company products couldn’t match.

Lost Games: Body Harvest

I haven't cared too much about gaming since my beloved N64 died many years ago. Being an N64 fan back then was like choosing to support the underdog in a a cup final. It was like hiding members of the Rebel Alliance in your basement while living on a planet where everyone wore stormtrooper helmets. Allright, maybe that's stretching it somewhat. What I'm saying is that public opinion, by and large, held that Playstation was bigger, badder and cooler. These things matter when you're 13. The PS did have rubbish loading times, but that wasn't enough of a handicap, and we knew it. The N64 itself was undeniably childish, awkward to programme for, couldn't do FMV, and had graphics fuzzier than Obama's plan for Iraq.