Reviewed by: SingleEyePhotos
Genre: Fantasy
Approximate word count: (varies – this is a
create-your-own adventure)
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
Smashwords store
Author:
Dominic
O’Reilly lives in Manchester, England and has many temporary jobs, all
including the typing up of very mundane, and totally uninteresting, information. When he needs to escape from the mundane, he
writes. The genre depends on his mood at
the moment. Dominic has a blog you can visit and also a page at Deviant Art.
Description:
A
sea voyage to trade spices with a distant land promised great fortunes for you
and your friends. However, a vessel flying a pirate standard had other
ideas. How well can you deal with the
unexpected? Find out in this
create-your-own adventure!
Appraisal:
Anyone
remember Zork, one of the first
interactive computer adventure games? I
do. I played it while I was in college
on one of those ancient Apple computers – back before they were Macs, back before
they came in colors. Way back… And I loved it. It was my first experience with just how
addictive a computer can be. Well, I
think that this author probably grew up with Zork, and loved it, too.
I
spent about 45 minutes gleefully building my own adventure and snickering to
myself and thinking “Boy, this is just like Zork!” OK, I admit it… I
wasn’t able to accomplish much except to wander around in a circle picking up
herbs and offering a guard some very odd bribes. But neither was I ever able to do much of anything
in Zork, and that didn’t stop me, nor
did it dim my enjoyment.
This
book has the same snarky, tongue-in-cheek humor – usually at your expense. The baddies aren’t really bad – just offer
them a potion that you were able to have mixed up by one of the witches on the
heath using herbs that you picked up while walking in circles, and they’ll be
your friends. The pirates steal your
cargo, but they don’t kill you – it’s much more fun to watch as you walk in
circles picking up herbs and encountering odd characters. There are bandits with spiky clubs, but their
aim isn’t any better than your prowess with a sword is. Everything’s all in good fun.
The
book has 3 chapters, and if I understand it correctly, you can ‘save’ your
adventure, when you inevitably end up getting killed, by jumping to the next
chapter (as opposed to starting over).
So, in effect, you get three ‘lives’.
I’ve read a few ‘create your own’ adventure Kindle books, and this is
more elaborate, with a greater number of options than the others I’ve read (not
to mention having a much more wicked sense of humor).
Highly recommended, if you have a good
sense of humor, and even more so if you can remember playing Zork.
FYI:
This is very
family-friendly. The humor is snide, but
not mean. The ‘baddies’ are bad in name only.
Even getting killed is an opportunity for the author to poke fun at the
reader.
Format/Typo Issues:
In all the
jumping around I did during my game, I saw only one minor typo, so I’d say
formatting is excellent. On the Kindle, the
links to select the next scenario work perfectly, and some are worth a laugh in
themselves.
Rating: ***** Five stars
No comments:
Post a Comment