Tag: choose your own adventure

#oneaday Day 416: Choose your own adventure

When I was a kid, I was really into the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a couple of the arguably more popular and/or well-known Fighting Fantasy ones also, but I always sort of preferred Choose Your Own Adventure. I was very much in a minority on this, but I didn't care then, and I don't care now. I am, however, now a bit more capable of reflecting on precisely why I preferred Choose Your Own Adventure to Fighting Fantasy. And, since I have a selection of the relatively recent reprints winging their way to me (one has arrived so far, but there are, I think, 11 more coming soon) I thought I might as well do just that.

To put it simply, Choose Your Own Adventure is effective because its only "gimmick" is the choices part. That means you don't need anything but the book to get started with them. Contrast with Fighting Fantasy, where you need a pencil, six-sided dice and piece of paper to play — or the oft-forgotten (and really enjoyable) Asterix Adventure Games, which came with a plastic wallet full of "props" to use as part of the proceedings.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the extra gimmicks of Fighting Fantasy, the Asterix Adventure Games and any of the other similar things I might have engaged with in my youth. Fighting Fantasy, in particular, is a good introduction to the conventions of role-playing games — particularly their use of statistics and chance-based mechanics. The Asterix Adventure Games were just thematically quite nice — with the props you'd do things like track how much magic potion Asterix had left, use a scroll to decipher passwords, and use a translation tablet to translate Latin phrases. But you still needed a bit of space to play them.

Choose Your Own Adventure, meanwhile, you can play in bed, on the toilet, in the back of a car, halfway up a tree, in a tent in your back garden… anywhere you have hands free to read a book. And that, I think, is the chief attraction for me.

But there's more. I also liked that Choose Your Own Adventure, as a series, was thematically diverse. They weren't all swords-and-sorcery fantasy tales. They weren't all horror. They didn't all involve the same characters. There were a couple that acted as "sequels" to each other, but for the most part, they were all self-contained affairs that stood by themselves, required no prior knowledge — and often taught you a few things along the way, too.

I've been struggling to remember exactly which Choose Your Own Adventure books I had as a kid. I definitely remember having Space and Beyond, Supercomputer and, I think, Treasure Diver — the latter was enough to put me off ever wanting to try scuba diving myself thanks to its painfully vivid descriptions of getting "The Bends" — and probably a few more besides. Thus far, the only that has arrived from this new batch is Mystery of the Maya, a South American adventure which, depending on the paths you take, may or may not involve time travel. That in itself is quite impressive — the fact that it is not necessarily a time-travel adventure, depending on one of the first choices you make, should give you an idea of the flexibility of these books. This one alone claims to have 39 different endings; I've seen two so far.

I'm looking forward to exploring these books again, and I think I'm actually going to make some videos of me "playing" them, because I think that will be fun. I don't know how easy it will be to make them visually interesting, but it would seem to me that taking a "Let's Play" format for a Choose Your Own Adventure book could potentially make for an enjoyable video.

I'm going to wait until a few more have arrived before I jump into doing that — I didn't fancy doing it this weekend because I was knackered and just wanted to relax — but watch out for those soon. I can't wait to try some of the books from the series that I always wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of!

I've also just learned that the series came about when author Edward Packard used to tell stories to his daughters about a character named Pete, and ask them what they thought "Pete" should do next. It's like it was meant to be!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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2238: Mobile Games Aren't Always Shit: Mister Smith Edition

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A lot of mobile games are shit. Some are just a little bit shit. Some are really shit. The upside of this unfortunate situation is that when something enjoyable and fun comes along, it's all the more noteworthy as it becomes as a sparkling diamond, floating majestically atop the sea of shit that is the mobile games marketplace in 2016.

The trouble with a lot of mobile games is that they try to be something they're not: they try to be big-budget, triple-A experiences — inevitably using the term "console quality" somewhere in their description — but then more often than not ruin the experience in two major ways: firstly, by hobbling the player experience by making it free-to-play and consequently limiting their enjoyment unless they repeatedly pay up (or, in some cases, grind until they want to kill themselves), and secondly, by using god-awful touchscreen approximations of joypad controls, which never, ever work because touchscreens don't have buttons you can feel and consequently you can't do the "muscle memory" thing you can do with an actual controller in your hand.

No indeed, the best mobile games out there make the best use of the platform that they're on and the context in which people use them. Mobile phones these days are used 1) when you don't want to talk to people around you, 2) when you're on the toilet, 3) when you're waiting for some form of public transport and/or friends to arrive and 4) when you can't sleep. As such, the ideal mobile gaming experience is something that you can do during any of these activities without having to think too much, display any sort of manual dexterity beyond tapping a few clearly indicated things with your fat, greasy fingers or commit yourself to any sort of lengthy play session — that train might turn up any minute, after all, despite the automated announcement assuring you that it is "very sorry" for the delay to this service.

Anyway. I found a good mobile game the other evening while I couldn't sleep. It's called Mister Smith and His Adventures, it's published by Ayopa Games and penned by Scotland-based comedy writer Steven McDade whose work, in his own words, "hasn’t quite crossed the line to allow for fame, fortune, adulation or comedy legend status". Based on Mister Smith, however, McDade should have a bright future ahead of him, as his breezy, conversational writing style is immediately appealing, and an excellent fit for a game such as Mister Smith and His Adventures.

But what is Mister Smith and His Adventures? Put simply, it's a very straightforward interactive novel with quizzes. Telling the story of Mr Mister Smith [sic], it unfolds over the course of several distinct stories, during which you have the opportunity to make a number of choices to determine how things unfold, and how farcical the outcome of Mister Smith's various adventures will be. Along the way, based on your choices, you'll be presented with a number of quiz questions in various categories, which will ultimately score you in the fields of Knowledge, Bravery, Friendship and Love and present you with a final score for the story based on how many questions you got correct and how quickly you answered.

To be honest, the quizzes seem a little forced at times, but McDade recognises this and lampshades them effectively during the narrative, and given the light-hearted, silly tone to the narration, it's not a big problem; it gives the game a degree of replay value, after all, particularly as it's riddled with achievements for making different choices and answering certain particularly challenging questions correctly. For those who particularly enjoy the quizzes, there are some "stories" that focus exclusively on the quiz aspect, though these are still written in McDade's distinctive authorial voice, which makes them a lot more entertaining than other, drier quiz apps on the App Store and Google Play.

McDade's business model for the game is a good one: you can download it for free, and play the tutorial and first story without paying a penny, after which you have a few choices. You can unlock new stories by repeatedly playing the ones you've already done to earn "Smiths", which can be spent on the new stories and quiz packs currently available. You can purchase bundles of Smiths to selectively purchase stories without grinding. Or you can slip McDade a couple of quid to unlock the game completely, remove all advertising (mostly for itself) and gain immediate access to all new stories as McDade writes and publishes them into the game through automatic updates.

After playing the first two stories, I was more than happy to take the latter option; McDade's writing is very readable (although there are a couple of typos here and there), the game presents it in short, easily digestible sections with endearing stylised illustrations, and each story is enjoyable and self-contained while helping us to build up a more complete picture of who Mister Smith (and Paul) really is as a person.

It's an extremely simple idea, and one that works very effectively. It's a well put together, well-presented game that uses the mobile format well, and I hope to see a lot more of in the coming months; I sincerely hope that McDade finds some success with it, and that it helps him to kickstart his comedy career.

You can download Mister Smith and His Adventures for iOS here, or Android here.