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Steve Jackson's Sorcery! gamebook coming to the App Store
Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is an old series back from the early 1980s where you "played" through a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-style story, except that instead of just flipping pages, you actually cast spells, fight in combat and do other fantasy-based activities. These books were reprinted back in 2002, but it's been announced that they're coming to iOS soon, as fully interactive books to play with. Most interactive books on the App Store are either meant for children or show off only a limited amount of interactivity, but these seem different -- they're heavily dependent on text, but they do offer some nice interactive touches from the original books. There's even some fun procedural stuff: When you do combat in the game, the book creates custom-made text for you to read about the outcome of the battle. It all looks very cool, and it's a nice throwback for those of us who played with these books all those years ago. Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is set to be submitted to the App Store right away, so we should see it for ourselves very soon.
Fabled Lands co-creators discuss their canceled Eidos MMO
Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, prolific co-writers of a number of RPG gamebooks, recently spoke to Bit-Tech about one of their most ambitious and, ultimately, unsuccessful projects: An MMORPG commissioned by Eidos in the late 90s. Despite being bankrolled by the ocean of Tomb Raider money the publisher was floating in at the time, the MMO, which was to be based on the pair's Fabled Lands series, never got off the ground. The game's downfall was the result of the team's overambitious goals and the studio's directionless development process. The project began to lose money, and as Eidos' success began to falter, the MMO was canned. The duo haven't given up on the Fabled Lands franchise, however -- virtual versions of the gamebooks will hit the iPhone sometime this summer. For an interesting read on how wacky game developers were in the late 90s, check out Bit-Tech's feature on Eidos' doomed foray into online gaming. [Via Eurogamer]
Fire on the Water almost as awesome as Smoke on the Water
Having garnered near-unanimous praise and placed first in the NEO Spring Compo's DS game category with Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark, Project Aon is readying another homebrew port of the Lone Wolf "gamebooks," this time for the second book in the series, Fire on the Water.Project Aon has already posted a release candidate for the game, allowing users to download and try out the visual novel before its final release. As with Flight from the Dark, the sequel allows readers to take control of the story with RPG-inspired elements, such as branching narrative options and character customization (e.g. skills, disciplines).In addition to fixes and general improvements, Fire on the Water now features four new music tracks, an improved game engine for handling more complex events, merchants, and mini-games. If you haven't jumped into the homebrew scene yet, now is a good time!%Gallery-17942%[via DCEmu]
Reading is fundamental (for playing Lone Wolf)
Though we couldn't manage to load the game employing our usual methods of homebrew wizardry, LoneWolfDS: Flight From The Dark looks to be a very polished and complete release. It's a port of the first book released for the Lone Wolf series, a collection of "gamebooks" that allow the reader to take control of the story through branching narrative options, character customization (e.g. skills, disciplines), and other RPG-inspired elements. Think of it as a more involved and satisfying Choose Your Own Adventure. It's clear from the official site and screenshots that Project Aon put a lot of thought and time into Flight From the Dark's presentation, so you should definitely try it out if the visual novel experience we described above sounds like something you'd fancy. Peek past the post break for a four-minute video of the game's character creation process and story progression.%Gallery-17942%See also: Snatcher Pilot Disk ported, fantastic
