Seventh Sense: Bringing Back Gamebooks!

[ekianjo]

A little review of Seventh Sense, which makes it possible to play to Dever's gamebooks from the 80s and 90s on your Pandora:



--> Continue Reading

 

[rygD]

Thanks for the article.  I skipped over this many times, but now I am going to get it and give it a play/read.  I never read these books back in their day, so maybe I will find something I should have been interested in long ago.  There are a few other games (Zork) that I need to add to my SD card as well.

 

[klapse]

Weren't "gamebooks" just a copy of the "Choose your own Adventure" books of the late 70s/early 80s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Books like these could be had, if you collected tokens off the back of cereal boxes. Then you sent away for them with perhaps a little money also.

Honestly I disliked those books...five pages in...YOU DIE HORRIBLY! Please read book from start again...? Imagine 'war and peace' being like that...Yikes.

Man' the amount of cereal we had to eat just to get those books... :rolleyes:

 

[rygD]

Weren't "gamebooks" just a copy of the "Choose your own Adventure" books of the late 70s/early 80s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

I used to read these and related books.  I always cheated...

As I understand it the types of books that Seventh Sense is for are a bit closer to a game, with stats and stuff.  If the Choose Your Own Adventure books came first I would say that they probably were part of the inspiration.

 

[erico]

Talking about CYOA, check this:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/_

Excellent study on those, lovely animations and you can play if you want to.

Also, there is TWINE nowadays:

http://twinery.org/

Would be a great port for the Pandora.

 

[PowerGod]

As I understand it the types of books that Seventh Sense is for are a bit closer to a game, with stats and stuff.  If the Choose Your Own Adventure books came first I would say that they probably were part of the inspiration.

Joe Dever in an interview (that now I can't find...) told that the inspiration came from the D&D rule books, and he wanted to make his own game out of it.

 

[ekianjo]

As I understand it the types of books that Seventh Sense is for are a bit closer to a game, with stats and stuff.  If the Choose Your Own Adventure books came first I would say that they probably were part of the inspiration.

Joe Dever in an interview (that now I can't find...) told that the inspiration came from the D&D rule books, and he wanted to make his own game out of it.

Yeha it's obviously very much inspired by pen and paper RPGs.

 

[rygD]

As I understand it the types of books that Seventh Sense is for are a bit closer to a game, with stats and stuff.  If the Choose Your Own Adventure books came first I would say that they probably were part of the inspiration.

Joe Dever in an interview (that now I can't find...) told that the inspiration came from the D&D rule books, and he wanted to make his own game out of it.

Yeha it's obviously very much inspired by pen and paper RPGs.

I see that.  I was saying that there may also be some inspiration from other books, and maybe he doesn't admit it, or has never stated it publicly.  I don't mean that he borrowed the idea of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Maybe he had his idea, saw one of those books, checked it out and thought "not even close to good enough" and went back and made his idea real because of the success of what was available.

Either way, I need to discuss them less and read/play them more.

 

[dflatline]

I've been playing Seventh Sense recently and it's pretty good, the only problem I have with it is the tediously long sequence every time you attack in combat though I didn't delve too deep into the settings. The Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks are the best ones though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasythere's a lot more variety in rules/settings the only problem is you need to use a pair of dice.

 

[PowerGod]

There are options to speed up the fights, anyway I like to see them at a reasonable speed, to feel the pain for every turn and to enjoy the victories.

I still have the dice I bought when I was young, to prevent me from cheating, because I played those books for so much, and I was remembering the combat table so well that even with my eyes closed I was able to point always at the 0.