Our Roboteers in the North

In August 2000, at the conclusion of the filming of the fourth series of Robot Wars, five special episodes were filmed, to go out as Christmas specials. Two of these promised to be the most destructive episodes imaginable: the Annihilators, where six robots fought until one was immobilised and eliminated, then the remaining five returned for the second battle, and things carried on until only one was left. The two Annihilators were split into the Northern and Southern groups, with one half of the geographical divide represented by each show.

And if you look at the Southern Annihilator, all seems fine: Bournemouth residents Razer, Hemel Hempstead natives Behemoth, Essex boys Spawn of Scutter, Bedford's Onslaught, Vercingetorix of the Isle of Wight, and finally Atilla the Drum hailed from Southampton. One or two of those actually stray into the East of England, not the South East or South West, but all seems fine here.

Turning our attention to the Northern Annihilator, we start off perfectly acceptably with Chorley residents Spikasaurus. Then we've got Dominator 2 of... Cambridgeshire? Suicidal Tendencies from... Derby? Stinger, residents of... Lincoln? Killerhurtz, native to... Oxford? And Chaos 2, residing in... Ipswich?! This is a very odd definition of "the North" we've got here, isn't it? What's going on?

Bottled

Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the fourth of the nearly twenty different point-and-click adventures released by Humongous Entertainment between 1992 and 2003, and was the first of their titles to use randomised plot elements on each playthrough -- every time you played the game the messages in bottles you had to find would be in different locations. I covered this before, the last time I went insane, but just to recap:

• The first bottle will appear at either the Old Whale Bones, near the beach, or by the volcano
• The second bottle will appear at either the Deep Canyon or in the junkyard
• The third bottle will appear at either the King's Castle or in one of the three caves

As you can see from the previous article, later Humongous games would find more and more ways to experiment with random elements on each playthrough, but as the first game to use the idea, The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds perhaps doesn't take full advantage of the idea. But there's one other element of the game that changes on each playthrough... and it's a strange one, which comes in the penultimate cutscene of the game.

Broken Gamebooks #23: Talisman of Death

Talisman of Death was only the eleventh book in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and one of the earliest (the second, in fact) to be sourced from an outside writer after it became apparent that the range's creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, could not possibly hope to write quickly enough to meet the huge public demand the books generated. The writers in question were Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, who took the book outside of Allansia to set it on a fantasy world called Orb, which they would later use in their own gamebook series, The Way of the Tiger, effectively making Talisman a sort of pilot for that series (which came from a totally different publisher).

Thomson and Smith went on to write many more gamebooks -- apart from two other Fighting Fantasies, Thomson's credits range from two early-nineties offerings based on The Crystal Maze to co-authoring Can You Brexit?, an adventure casting the reader as the Prime Minister in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, whilst Smith's CV is shorter but he also collaborated with Thomson on the highly ambitious Duel Master series and the sci-fi Falcon books, aimed at a slightly older audience than most gamebooks -- and from playing Talisman, their very first foray into interactive fiction, it's not hard to see why. Talisman is a well-designed, well-written tome impressive in its scope and scale, with its authors coming up with several innovations new to the range at that point... which unfortunately leads to one of its most memorable errors!

Taker of Photographs

Here we have some photos I took during my visit to the Game of Thrones studio tour in Belfast when I was on holiday in June; this is mostly just a way of keeping the blog updated whilst freeing up some space on my phone.

Fantastic Advertising Opportunity

Having been alerted to the fact that "Cwickham" sounds like the name of a brand of microwave ham dinners, I would like to inform any executives from Findus that I will consider any and all offers regarding this blog's URL