The Crystal Ship

As you enter the harbour square, you pass a line of wagons laden with heavy machinery, which are queueing to enter a dry dock. There, illuminated by the glare of huge oil lamps, is the largest ship you have ever seen -- a monstrous ironclad juggernaut bristling with awesome weaponry. You stop to stare at this terrifying vessel, and overhear two Drakkarim engineers talking about their work. Your blood runs cold when you hear one of them reveal why this juggernaut is being built. It is to be used to destroy Holmgard, your country’s capital city.

If you enter the harbour at Argazad in the twelfth Lone Wolf gamebook, The Masters of Darkness, whilst infiltrating the Darklords' base, and so discover this terrifying juggernaut, you are given the option to enter the dock and find some way of sabotaging the ship. Sensible players will reason that the aim of your mission is to destroy the Darklords before the behemoth can ever set sail, and thus this is an unnecessary risk, and their suspicions should only rise if they attempt sabotage anyway:

A group of slaves are at work near the stern, hoisting into position a strange spherical tank made of a sparkling orange metal. As soon as it is secured, the Drakkarim engineers begin coupling heavy springs and thick copper cables to the tank, linking it to a massive propeller at the rear of the craft.

Carefully you study the complex machinery, soon realizing that if the orange tank were destroyed, or damaged beyond repair, the vessel would be unable to propel itself. However, the shell of the tank appears to be constructed of super-hard metal, and the only way you can think of destroying it is by using your Crystal Explosive.

Bananamanrama

In 1983, Bananaman -- at the time appearing in D. C. Thomson's weekly humour anthology comic Nutty -- made his onscreen debut in a series of animated five-minute shorts on Children's BBC. As explained in this interview with Steve Bright, who co-created the character with artist John Geering and wrote many of the scripts for the comic strip over the years, the animation executives had originally thought they'd make a series about a more iconic character such as Dennis the Menace or Desperate Dan, but during a focus group at the publisher's headquarters they happened to catch sight of the relatively new Bananaman and decided they'd rather focus on him; hence, the Big B became the first DCT character to appear in animation less than four years after his strip debuted.

The shorts were repeated many, many times on the BBC over the years, and in late 1998, during one of the final runs, someone at the Dandy (where the crime-fighting hero had resided since the Nutty ended in 1985) had the bright idea of adapting the TV episodes into comic strips to tie in, beginning with issue #2975, dated the 28th November 1998:

The Harbour of Lost Ships, helpfully labelled as the very first one.

The publisher had gotten a lot of mileage out of Bananaman's status as a TV star over the years, and it's possible someone at the BBC tipped them the wink that these were likely to be the final broadcasts and the adaptations were intended as one last hurrah. (In the event, they would be reprinted circa 2007, tying in with the series' DVD release.)

Sub-Optimal

The six Transformers Adventure Game Books were released between 1985 and 1987 by Corgi. Gamebooks based on licensed properties are rarely high points of the genre, and whilst these don't plumb the depths of Dick Tracy: A Catch-a-Crook Adventure, they're not especially remarkable: each runs between 67 and 72 pages, and can have as few as three possible endings. They were authored by Dave Morris, who also wrote the Knightmare gamebooks and The Crystal Maze gamebook, as well as other series based on Enid Blyton's Adventure Squad, LEGO, James Bond Jr. and HeroQuest, but is best known for his work with Jamie Thomson on their own original ideas, most notably the incredibly ambitious Fabled Lands series.

The second book, Perils From the Stars, is the one that only has three possible endings -- one good, two bad. One of those bad endings, though, is a stunning example of one of my favourite ways to die in interactive fiction: The game allows you to voluntarily do something incredibly, lethally stupid. (Much thanks to regular commentator Ed Jolley for putting me on to this.)

You look to JAZZ, but he is still too groggy to act. STARSCREAM's homing beacon, which is attracting the falling weapons pod straight towards it, lies on the floor beside the telescope.

If you want to get the homing beacon and hurl it at STARSCREAM, turn to page 44

If you want to put it in your pocket, turn to page 46