Star Wars on the BBC

It is time, once again, for me to plug the name of a popular franchise into the BBC Genome and see what comes up. This time: Star Wars!

Broken Gamebooks #5: Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is probably the greatest single achievement of the Fighting Fantasy range, if not the choose-your-own-adventure genre as a whole. Aimed at an older audience than the main FF range, the four books add up to one massive story with over 2,000 references all told, and are best remembered for some horribly gruesome death scenes, Goya-inspired illustrations and (as befitted the target audience) being really very difficult indeed. But what we’re here for is to discuss the logistical errors in them.

The second book, Khare – Cityport of Traps, has no major errors that I can see – certainly nothing that would render the game (unintentionally) unwinnable. The other three, however...

Long Reads

Bit stuck for things to blog about at the moment, I’m afraid. (There’s a couple of Doctor Who pieces I’d quite like to write, but I want to wait until some of the Series 10 reviews have been bumped off the front page first.) So, to fill time: as the blog is now seven months old and has over 50 posts to its name, I’ve picked out all the long read (or long-ish read, at any rate) articles that I think are particularly good and stuck them in one place for the interested.

The Fighting Fantasy Collection Audit

(NB: Welcome to the new Ludicrously Niche schedule… he said, to both the regular readers. Now the Doctor Who reviews are finished, plan is for a new article every weekend for as long as I can keep it up.)

The 25^th May, 2017 was a stupendous moment for my adventure gamebook collecting, for it was the day I found the only Fighting Fantasy book I’d never read (or, at least, the only book in the main series), number #56 Knights of Doom, in my local second-hand bookshop for the princely sum of 50p. Which was at least £30 less than any online seller was asking for it. (To boot, they also had an original copy of the final book in the original series, Curse of the Mummy, which I only owned as its Wizard Books reprint.)

Now I own every FF gamebook, I thought I’d audit my collection, and in doing so provide a blog post that was literally of interest to me and me alone.

Doctor Who: "The Doctor Falls" Review

“The Doctor Falls” is Peter Capaldi’s third and final series finale, and Steven Moffat’s sixth and also final, although there’s still Christmas to go. Perhaps appropriately, this episode sums up how I feel about their tenures as a whole. The best of it belongs with Vincent van Gogh’s battle with mental illness, whilst the worst of it belongs with the revelation that Davros actually had eyes all along.