Author: Andrew
Chapman
Illustrators: Terry
Oakes (cover), Nik Spender (interior)
Published: 1985
Level of previous
knowledge: Something about being an undercover investigator and a narcotics
ring. In space. Yeah, nothing that isn’t on the back cover.
Plot summary: All is not well in the Galactic Federation.
Nasty drugs are being exported from one particular system and the local
authorities don’t seem to be doing anything about it, so they’ve called on me,
a humble interstellar fruit salesman, to investigate and bring down the entire
operation from within. No problem.
Rules: A hybrid of Space Assassin and Freeway
Fighter – blaster combat and ship-to-ship combat are used in this book, the
latter using the ship’s WEAPONS STRENGTH and SHIELDS. Smart missiles are this
book’s equivalent of rockets, winning ship combat instantly. Four energy
tablets replace provisions, restoring 6 STAMINA each. LUCK isn’t used in
combat.
Attempt #1
Stats rolled: SKILL 12,
STAMINA 20, LUCK 8, WEAPONS STRENGTH 8, SHIELDS 5
Grumbling, I headed
to the canteen for a drink and a mingle with the locals. Deciding that a
coarse, burping woman was clearly of interest, I followed her home, where
thanks to a handy sign I discovered her name was Zera Gross, and she was in the
interplanetary import/export business. Congratulating myself on my amazing
detective skills but not quite understanding why this was important at all, I
settled down to watch her apartment for a while. Soon a visitor named Arthur
showed up to see her, so when he left I tailed him carefully. Or not carefully
at all – he spotted me following and ducked into the shadows, from whence he
grabbed me as I passed. He scrawled a note telling me to be quiet because of a
‘spy beam’, and then another telling me to meet him at a nearby hotel.
Arriving at the
run-down hotel, I climbed the stairs to the 12th floor because the
lift wasn’t working. Approaching the door to the room, I met an extremely
shady-looking individual heading the other way. Choosing to investigate the
room rather than follow him, my suspicions were quickly aroused when I knocked
on the door and heard nothing but a groan from within. Smashing the door down,
I discovered Arthur lying in a pool of his own blood. With his
conveniently-timed dying breath he told me to beware Zera Gross and someone
called ‘Blaster B…’. Chuckling slightly at the silly name, I reminded myself of
the gravity of the situation, and looted the corpse hurriedly. The man’s wallet
identified him as Arthur Flange (chortle) and a letter from someone named Clive
(hilarious) told me that he had a meeting arranged for the next morning, adding
that ‘Z’ doesn’t suspect their plans yet.
I decided to go to
the meeting in Arthur’s place, so showed up at the Café Heroes of the
Federation (yes, really) at 9am. The man, perhaps sensibly, didn’t show up, so
I did some searching about and came up with his likely address. At the door I
was greeted by Clive’s rather upset wife, who told me that Clive’s colleagues
had murdered him after he told them he didn’t want to work with them any more
(that’s a hell of an exit interview). Here I discovered that Clive was Zera’s
accountant, and that a customs boss called Kalensus was in on the whole thing.
I headed straight
for the Customs Office and caught Zac Kalensus, standing by a window.
Suspicious. Then an 80s television cop took control of my voice and uttered one
of the cheesiest lines I’d ever heard in an attempt to get the man talking.
Somehow this had the desired effect, and he mumbled something about a satellite
in orbit, that relayed information about shipments. I roughed him up a bit and
he revealed the location of the dealers’ HQ, at the top of a tower in the city.
I tied the man up with a telephone cord (that’d keep him quiet for ages,
right?) and headed straight there.
On the 50th floor of the Isosceles Tower, I found the office of Zera Gross. Reflecting that I could have saved time by simply following her to work a day earlier, I sneaked down a corridor and entered a room where I caught two thugs in the act of shredding documents and incinerating memory chips. A hail of bullets ensued, and I was the last man standing. Helping myself to an automatic blaster which I was told would do extra damage in combat (even though it didn’t when I was the target), I turned to find myself ambushed by a bureaucrat wielding a paperweight. Dodging his attack, I wrestled him into submission and investigated a vidilink which provided the most useful information yet. The message I found informed all staff to destroy all files and rendezvous on an island thousands of kilometres away, and was signed by Zera Gross and Blaster Babbet (snigger).
Making my way to the
remote island by helijet, I parked at the handy landing bay. Checking out a
nearby anti-grav dray (not being Australian I had to Google this one – it’s a
truck without sides) I considered the possibility of ramming the freight doors
with it, but decided not to announce my arrival so loudly just yet, and made
for another tunnel entrance. Inside I was met by some kind of giant cybernetic
dog, which leapt at me and engaged in paw-to-hand combat. Its growl was worse
than its bite, however, and it was dispatched easily.
Taking a turning, I entered a room containing a friendly robot who I called Johnny Five. Johnny Five rolled over to me and offered to clean my gun. I shoved Johnny Five out of the way and helped myself to the only useful thing in the room, a hand grenade, before going back to the corridor. The next room I entered contained four thuggish-looking guards who opened fire without asking questions, but luckily they’d not done the appropriate training yet and were terrible shots. The room was full of crates containing narcotics, but nothing of particular interest except a corpse in the corner, which looked like it had been through a rough time. I found some energy tablets clutched in its hand, which presumably would have fixed the man up nicely if he’d managed to get them into his mouth in time. Oh well.
After a brief
encounter with a riddling robot where I managed to guess correctly without
understanding my own answer, I wandered straight into the office of none other
than Zera Gross herself, dictating to her robot sentry. Opening fire
immediately I was able to put her down without injury to myself, in a brief,
anticlimactic kind of way. The room adjacent to her office was the command
centre of the operation, where I learned that the drugs were being manufactured
on an asteroid, and noted its location before making my way back to my ship.
Blasting off into space once more, I headed for the asteroid belt, to find the asteroid in question well defended. I took out the surrounding mines with my phasers, taking some damage to the ship in the process, and was then confronted by batteries of phasers. Firing both my smart missiles (I figured this might be the last time my ship was involved in combat, and certainly would be if I didn’t) I barely managed a victory, with no SHIELDS left whatsoever. Parking veeeery carefully at a dock, I left the ship and entered a zero-gravity tunnel heading into the asteroid.
Coming to a large
chamber I was met by a bizarre device consisting of metal cubes with bolts of
electricity flying between them. It looked very interesting but was
disappointingly inefficient at impeding my progress, my automatic blaster
making short work of it. The next room was a large cavern where I was presented
with the odd choice of leaping across some floating metal spheres to the other
side, or walking amongst some tentacled creatures below. Wondering how the
regular employees here would get around these obstacles, I leapt from sphere to
sphere until I arrived at the exit, my SKILL making the task a trivial one.
The exit led to the main drug factory, where I amused myself for a while by sabotaging some of the equipment. Opening a door, I was confronted by a big-mouthed, three-legged alien which commanded me to halt so it could shoot me. Climbing over its corpse, I continued to the next room, which was a cube, each wall of which contained a door with a button. Pressing them at random, my very last choice was successful, opening into an identical room. This time I was successful on the second attempt, and I exited at the cost of 5 STAMINA and 1 SKILL point. Slightly sore, I was surprised to find myself facing two identical figures, both of which were apparently Blaster Babbet (heh) himself. Instead of shooting either of them I decided to dive through a folding screen, only to discover the real villain hiding behind it – both of the figures were some kind of reflections. The ensuing punch up did not go well for him, and I soon had him trussed up like a goose, my mission a success.
Conclusion: Success!
Number of combats:
9
Review
Writing: Another
new setting for FF, this one a planet in a Galactic Federation that isn’t
described as ‘alien’ as such, but is certainly weird and wonderful in different
ways. Little touches like ‘crypto-fluorescent signs’ and ‘helicabs’ conjure
visions of a futuristic Blade Runner style environment. The investigation
element of the book is actually quite interesting, the numerous ways in which
you obtain information keeping you moving from one location to another, piecing
together the story. The main problem is the characterisations, both of the
villains and the main character, which are lacking or poor. I’ve never enjoyed
it when a gamebook puts words in my mouth, and to hear myself speaking such
awfully cheesy and stupid lines dropped my immersion quite a bit. The two major
villains had potential but were never fleshed out very much, particularly
Blaster Babbet who I knew absolutely nothing about all the way to the end,
except that he was the boss of the narcotics ring. Overall however it’s a much
more cohesive story than Andrew Chapman’s last effort, Space Assassin.
Writing: 3/5
Artwork: Usually
I don’t care too much for the sci-fi type drawings of robots and the interiors
of spaceships, and while they’re not great here either, they’re certainly
better than earlier books. Some of the illustrations of other environments and
especially of people however are excellent. I’m not sure who is depicted on the
front cover (it might be Zera Gross but doesn’t look like the internal
illustration) but it’s not bad either.
Artwork: 3/5
Design: This is
probably the least linear FF so far in that there seem to be many ways to
progress through each stage of the story. This results in the overall adventure
(at least the path I took) being significantly shorter than most earlier books,
but this could be considered a good thing and certainly makes replaying the
book more attractive, especially as there are actually two different ways to
win. There is no ‘shopping list’ of items and a lot of freedom with decision
making, as the book finds a way to get you back on the right track without it
feeling forced. The disadvantage of this approach is that it does make the book
a little easy, as demonstrated by my completing it on my first attempt without
remembering anything about it. The lack of interesting items (all I picked up
were combat upgrades) takes something away from the experience.
There aren’t many substantial combats in the book which
feels like a shame, especially the lack of ship-to-ship combats (only three in
the entire book), but it does kind of fit with the story that a detective would
avoid combat as much as possible (but perhaps shouldn’t be as skilled as my
character when forced into one).
Finally, although you play a detective in this book, at no
point did I feel like I had to use the information I had learned to make an
important decision – structurally it felt a bit like a tick-box exercise than
an investigation as all conclusions were fed to me rather than hinted at and
referred to later on. Even the riddle I was asked by a robot at one point was
too easy because I just had to choose the first letter of the answer out of
three options – I got this correct even though I had no idea what the answer
was, and don’t understand it even in retrospect.
Design: 3/5
Fairness: From my
somewhat limited playthrough (I only saw one possible path through the book) I
had little trouble navigating the hazards in the book. There don’t seem to be
many ways to find yourself at an instant death paragraph, and those that do
exist appear to be the result of bad decision making rather than random chance.
None of the combats were overly difficult although one unavoidable (I think)
ship combat would have been almost impossible with a low SHIELDS statistic. I also didn't come across any clues that would have helped with the final confrontation - just a slight hint at Blaster Babbet's personality (turns out he doesn't have one) somewhere along the way could have been useful.
Fairness: 3/5
Cheating index: 0
Razaaks
Average enemy stats
Successful path:
11 enemies, SKILL 7.3, STAMINA 7.2
3 enemy ships, WEAPONS STRENGTH 6.3, SHIELDS 3.7
Entire book:
24 enemies, SKILL 7.4, STAMINA 6.9
5 enemy ships, WEAPONS STRENGTH 6.6, SHIELDS 2.6
Instant death paragraphs:
19
Any player can win no
matter how weak initial dice rolls: The book doesn’t make this claim, but
with some lucky rolls this could just about be TRUE.
Final thoughts: A nice change of pace from other books in the
series, this book presents an intriguing story and an alien setting which is
more fleshed out than previous sci-fi efforts. It may be a little easy to
complete because the decision tree is so forgiving but this makes for a short,
fun, replayable adventure which although is slightly ridiculous in places,
doesn’t outstay its welcome and is definitely worth playing.
Final score: 6/10
