Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

  "Your twip to Cwete will now be vewy wough." I have mixed feelings about the first volume of Cretan Chronicles, Bloodfeud of Altheus . It manages to strike a perfect balance of great and terrible, and anyone who has read it will probably already know what I'm on about. This post will record my general impressions of the book and its contents, rather than a professionally organized review, since I try to avoid spoiling things too much for people who are interested in the books I blog about. Also because I tend to write these posts late in the evening before I go to bed. The most obvious plus about this series is that it eschews the tired old medieval European fantasy setting in favor of ancient Greece and Greek mythology. I can't stress enough just how refreshing this is, and as a mythology nerd I was thrilled when this trilogy finally arrived in the mail so I could sink my teeth into it.  In fact the story retcons a lot of myths so that you, the be-all catch-all cha...

Meet & Greet Uncle Mac and Get an Autographed Copy of Holiday in Castle Quarantine! Come see me at these Fry's Food & Drug locations: Sept 5 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 2727 W. Bell Rd, Phoenix AZ 85053 Sept 12 & 13 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 18420 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85023 Sept 19 & 20 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 4315 W. Bell Rd, Glendale AZ 85308 Sept 26 & 27 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 6611 W. Bell Rd, Glendale AZ 85308 Oct 3 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 25401 N LakePleasant Pkwy, Peoria AZ 85383 Oct 17 & 18 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 1815 W. Glendale Ave, Phoenix AZ 85021 Oct 24 & 25 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 18420 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85023 I will also be at Drawn To Comics's Halloween author event at the Velma Teague Library in Old Glendale!  Oct 28 @ Velma Teague Library, 5-8PM 7010 N 58th Ave, Glendale AZ 85301

"You mean you go to your doctor for a flu shot, tetanus shot--even the booster shots little kids get--and you get souped up with COBRA mind potion number one?" There are a lot of GI Joe gamebooks by Find Your Fate, but this one came highly recommended, so I decided to snatch it up. It didn't disappoint, either.  Obviously it's written for kids around ten years old, but I was surprised by how readable it was for an adult. Operation Poison Dart puts you in control of a new Joe called Headset, an expert in mind control and hypnotism whose gadget is a special strobe light that instantly hypnotizes people. There are several points throughout the book where you get to use this ability to trick people into doing your bidding, and Headset does prove himself useful during the rare scene when he's been deprived of his precious gizmo. Your mission is surprisingly topical: stop Dr Mindbender and COBRA from using a bogus vaccine to control people. I can hear the Google fact ch...

You'd go great with syrup, if they can ever peel you off the wall. So I was planning to review an especially cool GI Joe gamebook next, but then I happened upon another Twistaplot book, and after riffing the last one I couldn't resist grabbing it. I know, I'm ignoring my own advice by not just reading it in the bookstore, but remind me which of us is the one blogging about these in detail. Yeah, that's what I thought. Unlike Crash Landing!,  the lucky 13th entry in the Twistaplot series managed to entertain, in that it made me laugh. Had I gone in expecting something that was actually scary, I would have yeeted this book across the room after the first couple pages. Right from the cover you can tell this is not an outing that takes itself seriously. The background is genuinely creepy, with an especially frightening face superimposed over the castle, but then when you see the blatant Universal movie monster lineup in the foreground, you know this is going to be a lighthe...

  "I bet I can think up worse curses than you can." Most gamebooks open with a page explaining what a gamebook is, and that you won't be reading it from front to back like a regular book. It is standard gamebook practice to do this, just in case the reader hasn't read a gamebook before, and each series tends to add its own little flavor to this arbitrary introduction. Crash Landing's take is to straight up tell me my plane is gonna crash, and hint at the exciting things I'll be doing during my adventure, which feels not only redundant but lazy. I already have an idea what's in store for me based on the front cover of the story called Crash Landing , with the crashed plane in the jungle. The back cover goes as far as listing page numbers and what I'll find there! That's three shades of spoilers! Let me discover this stuff myself, Twistaplot and/or Arthur Roth! Despite the bad initial presentation, Crash Landing does have a strong premise that promis...

  "This book is your passport into time." I have mixed feelings about Time Machine #7, and the series as a whole if Ice Age Explorer is anything to go by. The premise is that you, the reader, are an explorer who travels through time for scientific research purposes. In this case, we are trying to identify a weird and possibly extinct animal depicted in cave paintings, which has left contemporary scientists (for 1985 anyway) utterly baffled. Its presentation is pretty bomb, there's no doubt about that. The cover with the raging mammoth is eye-catching, and the interior has a nice balance of text and imagery to give each chapter a flourish that more bog-standard gamebooks lack.  Time Machine books also have a databank in the first few pages, which gives an educational crash-course of the time period you are about to enter; and a list of hints in the back, which you sometimes have the option to consult when you reach certain pages. I found the databank more helpful than the ...

 "All systems GO. It's awesome down here." The book that kicked off the initial gamebook craze, Journey Under the Sea puts readers in the role of a deep sea explorer who comes equipped with a special sub called the Seeker,  and an experimental diving suit designed to withstand the crushing depths, should you actually leave your sub for some insane reason. Your mission? Locate the lost city of Atlantis. Secondary mission: don't get eaten by creatures. The series was originally titled The Adventures of You , in 1976. Bantam Books changed the series title and published half a dozen volumes to kick the series off a few years later, including this volume. The rest, as they say, is history. The Choose Your Own Adventure series was aimed at young readers, and the narrative reflects this. Lots of short, basic sentences and light on immersion for an adult reader. For a young reader, though, the idea of piloting a mini-sub to the dark, uncharted realms of the deep is exciting...

 Welcome to the Gamebook Shack, where I will be posting reviews of gamebooks, talking about board games, possibly video games, and other weird stuff. I'll post updates about author events as well for anyone who wants to come say hello. What is a gamebook, anyway? Gamebooks are interactive fiction. You probably know them as "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which is actually the name of the brand that kicked off this fascinating sub-genre of fiction way back in 1976. Gamebooks allow you, the reader, to decide what the hero does and, to an extent, how the story ends. There have been many interactive fiction experiments since the early 1940s (look up authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Raymond Queneau for examples), but CYOA launched the genre into the mainstream. Countless publishers jumped on the bandwagon and launched their own gamebook brands. Some were simple and straightforward with chapters consisting of only one or two pages, while others read more like s...