Broken Gamebooks #14: Tower of Destruction

Brace yourself, because this may be one of the most buggy gamebooks ever - certainly of those released under the Fighting Fantasy banner, at any rate. There's a story to be told behind the writing of this one, I'm sure, although I doubt we'll ever get to hear it (it's another one written by the now sadly departed Keith Martin) - note that within what you are about to read I have not covered several notable typographical errors, including "fortunate" being used instead of "unfortunate", accidentally including the word "not" in what should have read "this is hard work", a Snow Fox turning into a Silver Fox, a case where Martin accidentally forgets one of the special rules only used in this book (to wit, hit a Demonic Servant twice in a row and it automatically dies, although the player can reasonably infer it anyway) and using the wrong attributes (such as Attack Strength instead of SKILL when there is an important distinction between the two).

Asterix in Britain's Broadcasting Corporation

Well, the history of Asterix cartoons on the BBC is perhaps not as interesting or mysterious as Tintin, which we covered last week, but there's still some interesting stuff there.

The Black and White Island

By any measure, the first Tintin story to make its way to the United Kingdom was the eighth, King Ottokar's Sceptre. It was serialised in the pages of Eagle magazine in 1951, was the first entry to be published as an album by Casterman in 1958, and in 1959 Belvision's animated adaptation was broadcast on BBC Television on Sundays at 5pm.

Simpson Mania

This is another interesting curio for any collector, released in October 1990 by Consumer Guide at the beginning of the second season of "TV's First Family". The version pictured above is the same as my copy, including the wire-bound spine - there was also a conventionally bound edition at some point, and I can also see evidence of an alternative cover, but I believe this one is the original, and its cover most notably contains the startling revelation that Bartman was appearing on merchandise several months before his first (and, for many years, only) television appearance in "Three Men and a Comic Book". Is the actual book itself as interesting?

Fantasy Robot Wars

After a fair bit of time on the Internet Archive, I've finally found it (or most of it, at any rate): Fantasy Robot Wars, the unofficial RW equivalent of Fantasy Football Leagues way back when during the original series' run, as masterminded by Jamie McGarry, webmaster of the Panic Attack fan site. That this was the best way of inventing and battling your own robots available to us speaks volumes about the quality of the Robot Wars computer games.

Dicing with Dragons

When Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were first commissioned by Puffin Books in the early 1980s, it was with the intent that they would write an introductory guide to role-playing games. They got a short way into the writing process before deciding that they'd rather write their own solo fantasy adventure, which became The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. However, Livingstone did still end up writing the originally promised guide, albeit for a different publisher; this was Dicing with Dragons, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1982, the same year as Warlock.

Alex Rider: "Secret Weapon" Review

Some eighteen and a half years since he first burst into the world of young adult novels, and eight years and three books after author Anthony Horowitz categorically declared he was done with the series and there definitely wouldn't be any more, teenage superspy Alex Rider is still going strong, with Secret Weapon the twelfth and latest instalment in the series. What we have here is a slightly different proposition to the norm - a collection of short stories, some of which have been previously published in newspapers or online, and some of which are completely new for this anthology. This release is more significant than it first appears - it was working on this collection that convinced Horowitz he might have been too hasty in ending the series with Scorpia Rising in 2011 and resulted in its revival two years ago with Never Say Die, with at least two more full-length novels to come before the series really is over for good (the first of which, Nightshade, will be out early next year). But how do the seven bite-sized instalments contained in Secret Weapon measure up?

The Demon Headphones

Q: Who was the first actor to play the Demon Headmaster for the BBC?

You may not be particularly surprised to learn that the A to that particular Q is not Terrence Hardiman. Some 6 years before the CBBC series, the first two books were adapted for Radio 5 Live by Jim Eldridge in October 1990, in a format perhaps coincidentally very similar to how the first TV series would later handle them: a 4x25 series, with the eponymous first book covered in the first two episodes and The Prime Minister's Brain in the second. The only difference is that the TV series gave each book an extra episode; perhaps as a consequence, the characters of Ingrid, Lloyd and Mandy are all merged into Ingrid in the radio version. Anyway, the cast for the radio version was Edward de Souza as the Headmaster and Lucy Speed as Dinah.

To tie in with the TV series, the radio series was released on cassette on 1998, bearing the TV series' logo and font. It doesn't appear to have ever been released on CD, which I find slightly surprising given the series' enduring popularity. If you'd like to hear it, though, you can find it on the Internet Archive. (One wonders if they were ever tempted to realise The Revenge of the Demon Headmaster as a radio play, given it was skipped for the TV series on the grounds of being absolutely unfilmable. Probably not. For yet another little-known adaptation you may not have heard of, there was also a stage musical in 1999, for which Terrence Hardiman reprised his role.)