Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

"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...

  "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...