28 on 4

In the ever-changing and increasingly uncertain world in which we live, here's one thing we can rely on: at some point between now and mid-November, Channel 4 will have the terrestrial premiere of Season 28 of The Simpsons, first shown in the UK on Sky One four years ago. Last year's post predicting what episodes might be cut or even dropped together, and the subsequent comparisons of my guesswork against reality, seemed to go down quite well, so they're back for a second year running. As ever, keep an eye on the Simpsons Archive's UK & Ireland Schedules page for exact scheduling details.

Broken Gamebooks #18: Clash of the Princes

A special release outside the main Fighting Fantasy range, Clash of the Princes (published 1986) was a two-book boxset (both written by Andrew Chapman and Martin Allen). Each book could function as a solo gamebook if you didn't have a friend to play with (let's rise above jokes about the likelihood of that, please), but if you did happen to have a friend to hand, then you could play the first - and, to date, only - two-player Fighting Fantasy adventure!

Commentary on Some Commentary

So, somebody on YouTube has ripped all three and a half hours of Jonathan Pearce's commentary from the PlayStation 2 version of Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction (functionally identical to the PC version) and uploaded it in one big video. There is a large amount of dialogue not heard in the final game amongst this, much of which points to game modes, robots and other material which was cut during development, so here's a list of everything that apparently didn't make it to the finished product:

In the Dark

Homer's Night Out, then. Not a particularly well-regarded episode from the first season of The Simpsons, perhaps, but it does feature one of the show's earliest guest stars - Sam McMurray as nightclub singer Gulliver Dark, pictured above.

But did you know that this role is actually a crossover with The Tracey Ullman Show? McMurray played the character in live action on the show where the Simpsons got their start, and at least one of those sketches survives online, specifically here.

This Be the Verse

The other day, friend of the blog John Hoare wrote this - on how he found, and indeed finds, the life force meter on Knightmare the most terrifying thing on the world. And it has prompted me to share my own traumatic memory of interactive fantasy nominally aimed at children.

A Comparison of the Radio Times Listings for the Radio and TV Versions of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

	Original radio version (1978)	TV version (1981)
Episode 1	In which the earth is unexpectedly destroyed and the great hitch-hike begins. An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day.	Arthur Dent is not convinced when his best friend, Ford Prefect, tells him that the world is about to end in 12 minutes. Should he remain lying in front of the bulldozers intent on demolishing his house to make way for a bypass? Or should he accept the offer of rescue from Ford, who reveals that he is an alien from the planet of Betelgeuse (pronounced Bee-tle-jooce), and not from Guildford after all?
Episode 2	An epic adventure in time and space. Fit the second: after being saved from certain death during the demolition of the earth, Arthur Dent now faces a hopeless choice between meeting certain death in the vacuum of space or finding something pleasant to say about Vogon poetry.	Rescued from Earth, moments before its destruction to make way for a vast hyperspace bypass, Arthur Dent and his alien friend, Ford Prefect, find themselves on board the actual demolition spacecraft in the capture of the evil, heartless, callous, slimy-green Vogons. But all is not well. They have a major decision to make! Should they face certain death by being flung into the cold vacuum of space? Or should they tell the Vogon captain how good they think his poetry is?
Episode 3	An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the third: after being improbably rescued from certain death in the vacuum of space, Arthur Dent and his new companions now face a missile attack and certain death.	Zaphod Beeblebrox heads the stolen spaceship Heart of Gold for the legendary planet of Magrathea in the company of his girl-friend Trillian, and the two hitch-hikers Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Success seems at hand, when one or two problems arise which must be solved. Will they avoid the pursuing nuclear missiles? Will they pull the ship out of its perilous downward spiral? Will Arthur Dent find any tea on board?
Episode 4	An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the fourth: It has been revealed to Arthur that the earth has been built by the Magratheans and run by mice. Meanwhile. his companions have been suddenly confronted by something nasty (probably certain death).	Arthur Dent is astonished to learn that the Earth was not what it had seemed, and astounded to learn that the small creatures he had called mice were not what they had seemed either. But he is quite put out to learn that they are after his brain, and that the pleasant dinner party with Ford, Zaphod and Trillian, is certainly not what it seems.
Episode 5	An epic adventure in time and space, including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the fifth: Sent to find the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent and his companion have been cornered by two humane cops who, nevertheless, have left them in a certain death situation at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe.	Having been blown to smithereens when a computer exploded on the planet of Magrathea, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox are somewhat mystified when they find themselves in some sort of restaurant—apparently at the end of the Universe.
Episode 6	Fit the Sixth (the final): Will the Ultimate Question to Life, The Universe and Everything (to which the answer is 42) be discovered? Will our heroes be able to control their newly stolen space-ship and the enormous fleet of black battle cruisers that is following them? Will it end happily or in the certain death that has threatened them so persistently?	As a spectacular finale to 'Disaster Area's' rock concert, the megabig superstar 'Hotblack Desiato ' crashes an unmanned black spacecraft into the sun. When Arthur. Ford, Trillian and Zaphod realise that the black spacecraft they have stolen is relentlessly heading towards the sun, certain doubts arise as to the wisdom of their decision.

Listings taken from BBC Genome, as per usual.

The Phantom of Ghastly Castle and Other Killer Puzzles

The Killer Puzzles series was authored by Kjartan Poskitt, and spanned four titles released in the mid-to-late nineties. They diverged from the Usborne Puzzle Adventures and other series of around the same time in several aspects: apart from a rather twisted sense of humour, they were also extremely difficult, to the point that Poskitt received almost as much correspondence asking for help from adult readers as he did from children - because the series also did not include any answers or solutions.

Killer Puzzles also had one other selling point: if you managed to complete every puzzle in the book, then you could solve its big secret. In three of the four entries (to wit: Decode the Deadliest Joke in the Universe, Titus O'Skinty's Gruesome Gameshow and Attack of the Killer Puzzles), this was a coded message of some kind, although the specifics as to how you decoded it and how the puzzles gave you the key were very different in each book. The other book, Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle, took a totally different approach: for one thing, it wasn't just a puzzle book, it was a sort of adventure gamebook.

And "sort of" has always been good enough for this blog.

The War Games

A comparison between Crasha Gnasha's computer game and real life versions which does not bode well.

There can have been few things more inevitable at the turn of the century than a computer game based on a hugely popular television programme about members of the public building robots and making them fight each other. In fact, no fewer than five games based on Robot Wars were released, the first popping up just in time for Christmas 2000, and the last in late 2002, shortly before the final BBC series was broadcast.

The first game, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem, was released for the Game Boy Color. The idea that you could hope to recreate the show with any great degree of accuracy on such a platform could charitably be described as ambitious. But surely what entailed could still have been better than this. I have made several attempts to write this article before now, and each time I have stopped because I find it hard to find anything that sums up Metal Mayhem better than just linking to a YouTube video of someone attempting to play it. But let's have a go anyway.