The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part II

Last time, I set out to write a complete guide to all the monsters and foes you could face in J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo fantasy gamebooks, but it quickly became apparent I would have to split it up into multiple parts; Part I includes a recap of how the combat system worked (as well as, courtesy of Ed Jolley, one of the greatest comments ever left on this blog), and here comes the part of the Bestiary covering adventures four through six, kicking off with Voyage of Terror -- which, owing to Merlin's Net Spell going wrong, sees a sideways move from Camelot to Ancient Greece, a consequence of which is that all your usual magic and equipment (including Excalibur Junior) are not available to you...

A Short Post On the 1990s Dennis the Menace TV Series

In 1996, having been appearing in the Beano since 1951, Dennis the Menace and his faithful Abyssinian wire-haired tripe-hound Gnasher made the transfer to television for a series called Dennis the Menace, which ran on Tuesday and Friday afternoons on CBBC for two series until 1998, then managed to survive in repeats until the start of 2009, when it was supplanted by a rebooted version. And yes, over here it was called Dennis the Menace, at least at first.

There was a version of the show retitled Dennis and Gnasher, but that was solely for the United States, to avoid confusion with their own Dennis (who infamously happened to make his debut on the exact same day as the British Menace). The belief that it was always called Dennis and Gnasher probably arises because later Region 2 DVD releases used the ...and Gnasher versions; perhaps this was so they could also be released in Region 1 with minimum fuss, or perhaps because by this point the 2009 reboot, which was always called Dennis and Gnasher, was a thing and they wanted to be able to advertise both series under one banner (by this point the comic strip itself had also been retitled, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of the word 'Menace').

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part I

Whilst J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo adventure gamebooks were principally meant to be a more comedic take than usual on the idea, he also came up with one of the best combat systems I've ever seen for an RPG -- simple to understand, but allowing for a diverse range of encounters. Unlike other series of the time, in fact, a complete guide to all the monsters and villains you could fight across the series' eight titles would probably make for quite fun reading. So here we go.

Keep it Light

I was in the audience for last night's recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue at the Bath Forum, which saw Rory Bremner and Marcus Brigstocke locked in combat with Tony Hawks and Pippa Evans. I was going to wait until the two episodes aired (which will be on the 10th and 17th July) to try to do my thing of remembering as much about what didn't make the edit as I can, since ISIHAC is a difficult show to write spoiler-free notes on, but I do have one or two things that definitely won't make the edit or can be suitably vague about now.

One of the biggest laughs of the evening came when Jon Naismith was introducing the panel: whilst he was describing the first panellist Tony started to walk on and was halfway to his chair when he realised Jon was actually talking about Rory, and hurriedly ran back behind the curtain before Jon noticed him!

There was a tense moment at the top of the second show: Jack Dee got a few lines into his opening monologue when there was a power cut, which was followed by a uniquely funny yet worrying few minutes of ad-libbing (and Jon making some perhaps-only-semi-joking remarks about already having enough material for two episodes from the first one) from the darkened stage.

There was one new round which will be interesting to see if it makes the edit or not for reasons I can't really get into; I can't think of much else to say that doesn't cross the line into spoilers, the relatively new game of Songstoppers seems to be a permanent fixture now, and one of them brought the house down.

Oh: Watch out for a moment in Pick-Up Song that reduced everyone, including the rest of the panel, to literal tears of helpless laughter.

Broken Gamebooks #22: Battleblade Warrior

And suddenly the roar of battle ceases, and the ranks of warriors part. Atop a mound of human bodies, right at the centre of the fighting, is the Lizard Man Champion. Nearly three metres tall, four-armed and splattered with gore, the immense creature is swinging a barbaric war-axe and a huge knife larger than your own sword. The Champion howls insanely, drunk with blood-lust, calling on any brave warrior to challenge him to a fight. Will you step forward to take him on (turn to 26), or take advantage of the distraction to break through the lines (turn to 213)?

So section 333 of Battleblade Warrior sets the scene for the only notable error in the thirty-first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, originally published in 1988... an error if, were it not for the fact that I find it quite funny, might not be covered here.

Mirror Man

The second episode of Would I Lie to You? I was in the audience for, with guests Henning Wehn, Michelle Visage, Simon Gregson and Chizzy Akudolu, was recorded over a year ago, and I've been patiently waiting not only for the episode itself to air, but also for the outtakes show to go out, so I can go into more detail about anything I can remember without spoiling anything that might make the edit. (There's a second outtakes show next Friday, but the description indicates there's nothing from this episode there so I should be on safe ground publishing this now.) And here we are.

Caption Captured

Okay, if you're reading this, by this point I'm going to assume you know the whole deal this blog has with the 1991 TV series The Diamond Brothers: South by South East at this point. If not, why not start at the beginning, then come back here? I'll wait.

Welcome back. Anyway, the exciting news here is that I have been made aware of the existence of another off-air recording of the sole UK broadcast in 1991, this one the property of Paul TG of theTimeVault podcast. And this one has slightly more of the transmission error that afflicted episode 3.

Paul shared a few videos with me on Twitter, confirming what I already believed to be the case: the 9 April interrupted broadcast cut off just after the Diamond Brothers leave the guest house, and the following week's one-third-episode began over the long panning shot of the railings. Most thrillingly of all, though, he shared with me the caption added to the beginning of the 16 April portion of episode 3:

See here for the crucial video of the beginning of "Episode Three Cont..."; Paul also shared with me videos of the end of the 16 April recommencement and the point at which his recording of the 9th April cuts off, which are nice to have but I don't think show anything that isn't on the existing YouTube upload of Neil James' copy. (Paul did mention that his original VHS recording captured the whole breakdown, including the entirety of Tommy Boyd and Neil Buchanan's dead air, but unfortunately the person who transferred it to DVD for him cut it out and the original tape is long since broken!)

Anyway, this is going to be tremendously useful when I finally get round to writing my episode guide on the show (still pending my finding out what the cast list for episode 3 should have read, so do get in touch if you have any thoughts on that).

Revision Quest II

A few weeks back, I compared the 1997 and 2011 editions of an obscure adventure gamebook called Egyptian Quest, the latter of which was self-published by the author and contained several intriguing additions compared to the original printing.

I had a hypothesis for those additions -- specifically, that they were written for the nineties edition but that had to be pared back to hit a strict word count -- and I had also intended to cover Egyptian Quest's sibling, Aztec Quest, in the same post. However, it turned out that there were far more changes than I was expecting, and I was able to make a much stronger case for my theory than I was expecting to from just the first book. So, like some weird DVD extra nobody asked for or watched, here are a selection of the changes between versions of Aztec Quest.