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

"...Which is Definitely Going to Make the Edit"

The two episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue recorded at the Bath Forum that I was in the audience for were broadcast on 10 and 17 July, they're still up on BBC Sounds for a few weeks here, here's some stuff that didn't make the edit, and so on and so forth.

Robin and the Three Hoods

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men -- Tony Robinson's take on the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children, running for four series on Children's BBC between 1989 and 1994 -- was in many ways a direct sending-up of Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode "The Whitish Knight", where the mysterious knight has his own song which is clearly a specific reference to RoS' theme music.)

However, you can draw a straight line -- like an arrow, if you will -- from Sherwood, to Marian, to later adaptations of the legend. The character of Barrington, the Rastafarian Merry Man in the latter, was a reference to Sherwood having a Saracen (Nasir) join the ranks of the outlaws, and may be what really popularised the idea for later adaptations; is it even possible, however unlikely, that Robinson parodying the idea is part of what led the writers of the 1991 Prince of Thieves film to believe Nasir was not a character solely created by Carpenter, but the idea went back much further, forcing them to change the name of their own Saracen to Azeem mid-shoot when they found out?

Black and Grey

Here's something that really does live up to this blog's name. I was looking through the archives of the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons -- an amazing history of contemporary fan opinion on the show, stretching back to 1990! -- when I came across this post by Matt Garvey, regarding a 2012 repeat of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire" on Fox:

At around 12 minutes, when Homer asks when he gets paid, the Santa school instructor barks "not a dime till Christmas Eve!" In the version just broadcast tonight, there's a funny cloudy coloring over that line (see some of the original takes for 7G01), and the right arm is noticeably lighter, with the suit close to black. The entire suit snaps to the lighter gray in the same shot as he gathers himself and continues. On the DVD, it looks like a retake, perhaps from a later (1989-90-91-93-94, though I'd suspect 89 or 90) repeat... it seems unlikely to have been done at the DVD stage. The only other copy of the episode I have is from a tape of unknown origin (full-length, possibly an airing or the retail VHS), and it does have the glitchy take. I don't know about syndication.

I am able to go one better than Matt's description, and provide visual comparison of the two. This is from the DVD version of the episode:

And this is the erroneous version, taken from the old The Simpsons Collection UK VHS from 1992 (the one with "Bart Gets an 'F'" on the same tape):

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part III

If you've just joined us, over the previous two articles of this series I've been listing all the monster encounters in the GrailQuest gamebooks of the 1980s; Part I and Part II can be found in those links I've just made, and this concluding article starts off with the last two books in the series.