Oh, I understand perfectly - I was just making some light conversation myself. :)

Oh actually, I just remembered, there is one thing that is proving an inconvenience - my watch stopped about a week-and-a-half ago, which presumably was just the battery running out but of course Timpson's isn't open right now so I have to wait (presumably till the 15th, which so far sounds like when "non-essential" shops will reopen) and use things like wall clocks and the Windows system tray to tell the time (depending on where I am, obviously). Boooo :P.

I tend to buy batteries in bulk; I tend to buy most anything in bulk, in fact. Mostly because I don't like to go out, but it helped in the current situation.

Although I must say that I'm curious - I thought nobody bought watches anymore, now that everybody has a cellphone that does the same thing? I mean, I never bought any watch anyway (every watch I've ever been gifted with somehow broke within two weeks at most; I remember one time when I was given a beautiful anti-shock metal watch for my birthday and it was broken by the time the party ended), but it was my impression that they've become a rarity in the western world in general.

I dunno. I was given my first watch as a birthday present on my tenth birthday, which lasted till I was around 26 or so before it just kept running down so I decided to get a new one. I think that one has had the battery replaced once since I got it. I wouldn't want to try and buy a battery myself and change it because I'd have to pry the back off the watch and there's all the inner workings and stuff in there that I wouldn't want to risk breaking.

While I do have a mobile phone it's basically for emergency use only (so it is very rarely used), and lives in my backpack switched off unless I need to use it. I wouldn't want my timekeeping device to be something I specifically had to carry around and try not to drop or accidentally leave anywhere, while a wristwatch is just a case of moving my arm slightly and glancing downward - much easier :D. I don't particularly care for phones in general (they are a pretty rude device, when you think about it), and wouldn't want to risk getting addicted to a mobile like so many other people who apparently can't bear to go five seconds without looking at theirs. I have a PC with things like e-mail, Steam, and Discord (as well as forums like this one :D) if people want to contact me, where I can respond on my own terms and not just because some impatient so-and-so thinks I should ;).

I would agree with most of what you're saying; a typical complaint a lot of people have with me is that they call and I don't answer because I only ever keep the cellphone on vibration and, when I'm home, about half the time I forget it next to the bed (since it's also my alarm), and thus don't notice. In general, I find it useful for instant-messaging with my family in Italy now that I'm living in Germany, or when I'm in a waiting room to read (there is a lot of text-adventures that work just like Lone Wolf or other "choose your own adventure" style stories out there! ^_^), but don't really use it too much.

To me, it's primarily a combination of clock, calendar, calculator and notepad for when I'm not at home; I've also rarely used the camera, but generally only when I need to take note of something like a posted schedule and don't want to risk making mistakes by noting it down. So, in that sense, it's more practical than a clock because it does a few other things that can occasionally come in handy... but I can agree on not wanting to grow too dependent on it.

But for me, having it my pocket rather than around my wrist is really the best thing about it - because I tend to gesticulate a lot and, as I said, unlike my arms, watchs rarely seems to survive that kind of abuse for long! :P

Yeah, I really don't like using my mobile for the time (I hate draining battery on it, or even carrying it with me since phones started getting bigger again).

Sadly my really good watch finally gave up the ghost after a long time, and two almost exact replacements from the same company both just didn't last that long (wrist strap breaking both times). I had the second one in my pocket for ages, then lost it during a long distance beach walk, and haven't replaced it since. But yeah, just totally go with a watch as a dedicated time thing. Habit from long distance walking, not wanting to have to rely on things with short battery life that also have other uses for keeping me informed of my time!

Edit: I'm the same as you in some ways with my mobile Shadow, except I do not lean on it as anything but a phone, rarely get to use the internet if I'm away somewhere and need a map or whatever. Google doens't get my google details even though it claims it needs them, i don't install apps.

I really hate stuff on my wrists, that's why this old watch was such a heartbreak, It was finally a perfect watch for so long, and replacing it to find the supposedly equivalent version from that company was subtly terrible was just meh. Most of my watches mnever wanted to be pocket watches ,but for one reason or another always became pocket watches!

Someone once bought me a pocket watch thinking this was a perfect gift for me, but pocket watches - just like mobile phones - are just too bulky and annoying to be in the pocket all the time :p

My own phone actually doesn't have internet - I mean, I've been told that in theory it could install it, but I never have, and really, never saw the need to either; to my understanding, it's a old enough model that they hadn't perfected the internet phones yet, which suits me just fine.

I guess pocket anything isn't really a problem for me because I've always put a lot of stuff in my jackets (in fact, I often go outside with my heavier jacket just because it has a ton more pockets, even when it's warm enough I should not be wearing any jacket at all), so I guess it's hard for me to understand why it'd be annoying. On the other hand, you have all my sympathy for your misadventures with watches - as I said, I had the same problem, except with every watch ever throughout my entire life. It's just how it works for me, I guess.

Although I will agree that the current trend of moving mobile phones ever close to tablet is a bit silly - I mean, if you want a tablet, just get a tablet. I miss my old phone - it was one of the super-compact flip types which made it really handy, because I could put it in the smaller pockets and leave the bigger ones free for other stuff. :)

By the way, since I mentioned in my last post I've been reading the new iteration of gamebooks, has anybody ever read Magium? It's really awesome - I honestly haven't read a "choose your own adventure" thing this good since Lone Wolf, and even if it's still in progress, I found that it's already a worth read.

No, not heard of that Shadow - will have to give it a look sometime with a recommendation like that though :)

If you do, let me know what you think of it; it's always interesting to discuss where a medium is going, and it's not like this kind of storytelling is very pervasive, so chances to chatting about it are a bit scarce.

I believe there is a version for PC as well as the one for cell phone, although I only have the latter because my brother, who actually uses his phone a lot, added it to that one when he recommended it to me.

When the strap on my watch breaks, I just buy a new one (strap, not watch :D) - it's not exactly expensive. My current watch is on its second strap, I believe, and it's getting a bit worn but still has plenty of use left in it yet :).

My mobile phone, incidentally, also doesn't have Internet or anything. It's a phone, therefore it is for phoning people...or, more usually, sending a text message because that's easier and doesn't require the other person to be immediately available in order to receive whatever it is I'm sending :D.

Haven't heard of Magium, but then I'm not really into choose-your-own-adventure stuff. I know the old Fighting Fantasy stuff was super bad for having unavoidable death as the result of picking a seemingly-harmless option. Seems rather frustrating/pointless to me - if I want to play an adventure game, I want the results of my choices to make sense and if they are potentially fatal, for said fatality to at least be foreshadowed (and therefore avoidable), so that if it does get me I can go "Ohh...yeah, I missed that. Whoops" rather than "Wtf, why does opening this one door mean a demon leaps out and insta-kills me when there is no indication there is anything there?!" or whatever.

Really, I prefer my adventures a little less "passive" than just picking from predefined options. I like to feel as though I have some input beyond "Pick from A, B, or C - two of them will cause a game over and we're not getting you which one or why so haha, good luck!" :D.

With watches, I tend to break the clock, not the straps - although there have been the occasional broken straps which resulted in the clock falling and smashing itself into the floor. I really think that watches are allergic to me.

I wouldn't say that there's situations that unfair, but the "you made this choice and lacked the specific abilities to survive it, so dead you are" is really a staple of the genre, so if you dislike that, then I agree that "choose your own adventure" stories aren't really for you.

With the well written ones, generally you will realize why you died if you've been paying attention to the small cues in the text - but there have been plenty of bad written ones through the years, and even with the well-written ones, sometimes you and the author just have inherently different thought processes, so that what the author classified as "foolhardy, this will get the character killed" you might read as "this is brave, and thus the best path forward", or maybe it's the other way around. I find that interesting, but again, tastes are always personal.

Well, every year in the Yogscast Christmas livestreams they do, one of them is two of the guys playing through a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. I remember one of the first ones they did was called something like "House of Hell", which involved exploring a spooky mansion inhabited by various gribbly monsters and such things. At one point they were exploring a downstairs corridor and found a door - the option was presented to open the door or leave it (as with all other such doors) and they went in to discover it was a kitchen. Every single option in that kitchen lead to a game over, whether immediately or after a few pages of poking around with stuff.

There's also those points in these games where you can screw yourself over without even knowing it - you are offered the choice to go left or right along a road so pick right and have all sorts of adventures before eventually arriving at some spooky castle (or whatever) in whcih a big demon-monster tries to kill you. And then the game says something like "If you have the anti-demon wand, turn to page X", where every other option results in the demon instantly murdering you. Unfortunately the anti-demon wand was along the left route of that road you were following earlier, in the possession of a witch in a hut in the middle of a swamp that can only ever be accessed if you took that one left turn. And the only way you would know that is to have read through it. Oh well, looks like that's game over for you, then!

I expect not all such gamebooks are like that but the ones I've seen all look to be incredibly arbitrary in such things. Feels like a lack of control on the player's part. There are probably better ones that do actually drop hints and stuff, but that would require bothering to play them in order to find out which ones screw you over or not. And I'd rather just play more controllable RPGs on my PC, where I can actually run away from stuff or whatever. I suppose in a way, every page in a gamebook is an unskippable cutscene, with a multiple choice question at the end that will determine the next unskippable cutscene. I prefer to have a little more input into things, but I suppose gamebooks are a thing that somewhat pre-dates the ability to do them much better on a computer, because computers weren't really a proper thing yet when these were first written (I expect the oldest ones go back at least as far as the '80s).

According to Wikipedia, the first gamebook in the form we understand them was published in 1972, but the art form of "books with variable endings determined by the reader" dates back to the early thirties. So, indeed, much much older than computers.

And yeah, the "you need this item to proceed" is something that is a typical fault of a badly written gamebook. Lone Wolf itself, despite being generally well written, isn't without this problem - the second book, which was edited something like four times to correct the issue, was very much full of such events during its original print - I mean the situations with "you either have this item or you lose" scenarios.

So... I understand your points; however, I will hold that it's just a matter of finding the well-written ones, and videogames are no more excluded from this than gamebooks are. Famously, Final Fantasy XIII is a set of cutscenes strung together with a corridor of fights in between them, and that's inferior to even the worst gamebooks, because there, at least you get to choose which cutscenes you will be watching, which is more choice than a linear progression from cutscene to cutscene would grant you in a badly made videogame.

Basically: you have a point, but in the end it's all about how well written something is; the medium, I find, is really not that important.

Last person on Earth without one here ;)

I have a very rare type of phone.  It has no camera, no screen, and is attached to the wall with a cable.  You don't see many of them around any more, could probably get some cash from the local museum for it.

As I say, I can understand that; to be honest, I don't really care too much about these things - my current cellphone is a gift from my mother, as were the other two I've had before (since this is my third), meaning each one lasted me over five years, which I'm told is a long time.

I didn't really need a landline phone when I last relocated, since I do have the mobile, so that'd be a pretty silly expense for me to set up; in the house I grew up in we had one until my mom relocated in 2014, at which point installing a new one in the new house seemed, again, like a pretty useless thing to do.

In the end, it's really one of those things that are a "first world problem"; technology spreads even to people who don't much care about it, because at least somebody next to them finds it useful, and when somebody needs it (like I do, living in a different country from my family), it's just too practical not to use it, even if they'd otherwise not much care about it. Or that's my read on the matter, at least.

But how do people let you know they're going to be late five minutes after you're supposed to meet them though :p



The Fighting Fantasty books, or I believe at least Ian Livingstone specific books, are notorious for the 'one true path' where you just have to grind through the books to learn the right path and many choices are not flagged up with clues, and there are only a few mitigation points. I think that's why we love the Lone Wolf books. The Disciplines and the fact you have a cohesive story running through the whole thing make it far more likely you can get through the book and are just exploring it your way. Some of the deaths are more like video game deaths (bad numbers in combat, etc) and if you can drop a save in a video game and try again, why not a gamebook :)

I really liked the TV series Knightmare, which was basically a gamebook on TV. There was never a 'yeah, you went the wrong way, you died' but it was still a very brutal game and few god through the dungeon. The main way they'd lose would be you've have clue rooms with three items, you could only take two, and you needed to take the right two. However, tgere would be a guardian who would ask three questions - get all of them wrong, they died, get more than one right, and they'd be told one of the items that was correct for each additinal right answer. So while they could intuit the right two items, there was also a way using knowledge to know the right items :)

While I don't think I've ever saw that - not likely for that kind of niche programming to make it to Italy - I've seen a couple shows with similar premises, so I understand that.

And yeah, the best game-books are those that really let you run through them multiple ways; not only does that makes them more fun, it also adds a ton of replay value. There's a reason mostly everybody agree that Shadows in the Sand is the best Lone Wolf book of the lot, after all! ^_^

Ahhh Knightmare was great, loved that show :D. I think there were always hints as to how to solve everything, though - there was no "death" that truly came out of nowhere. Any time there was a table with items on it, there was either a scroll there with hints as to which was correct, or perhaps a previously-encountered NPC had mentioend having a problem which, if you thought back to that, would suggest that one of these items might be of use to that NPC the next time you met them.

The guardians who asked questions was a different kind of obstacle - they were usually blocking the path onward, so you had to answer the questions/riddles in order to get through. Alternatively you would be rewarded with a spell if you got enough correct answers (and said spell would be vital in surviving a upcoming obstacle). I say "you", I mean the dungeoneer :D.

While some dungeoneers did indeed come to an unfortunate end after not having picked the correct item or after getting too many incorrect answers, there were also many who fell foul of the scenery, falling off cliffs or being too slow maneovuring in the dreaded "Corridor of Blades". Having the advisors give bad directions was even worse than saying the wrong thing to an NPC or whatever...well, unless that NPC was a bad guy you needed to deceive in order to pass without them realising you were the dungeoneer they were after (one particular henchman of the Big Bad was very much not very high in the Int department ;)).

Ahh, I so enjoyed Knightmare...used to watch it when it was first on, on the maybe a decade(ish) later once there were many more channels on the TV and we got ourselves our first digibox (Telewest, woo), I discovered the channel called "Challenge", on which they showed gameshows...and at some point they started showing every single series of Knightmare in order, so I was able to watch it all again. Great stuff :D. I did also own the board game but I can't remember if I still do. Might've ditched it a couple of years ago...

I LOVED Knightmare! :)

Always thought I'd have loved to go on that show, but I didn't know enough people to make up a team then.  (Yep, I was always the nerdy loner as a kid.  Still am in fact!)

As one of the adventurers or one of the team advising them? :)

Personally I think I'd rather be an advisor - you have more control, in a way, and get to make notes and stuff on solving the puzzles. I suppose from the advisors' point of view it's more like sitting at a computer playing an RPG, where your dungeoneer friend is your avatar within the game :D. For the dungeoneer I suppose it's like VR but you can only see what's right in front of you.

Advisor probably.  My reaction time would be a bit fuzzy when my only perception of the situation is someone shouting instructions at me and I can't see anything.  (My eyesight has always been my sharpest sense by far, so I rely on it too much.  If I ever go blind, I'm in big trouble!)

Also I'd get too stressed during the tricky bits like the Corridor of Blades when everyone is all panicking and shouting at the same time and I can't see what they can.
"GO LEFT!" "NO, YOU NEED TO GO RIGHT!" "NO, LEFT!!!"
I wouldn't know where to go at all then :)  So yeah, I'd be hopeless in the Dungeoneer position there.

I'd probably make sure, prior to starting play, that we allocated one advisor to the role of "obstacle-guider", who would be the only one to provide instructions during any of those puzzles which involve dodging oncoming obstacles or navigating dodgy pathways or whatever. And would make sure that person was the one least likely to become flustered in an intense situation :D.

But as a dungeoneer you get to actually meet the creatures! :p

True, but you don't get to properly see what they look like because your head is covered. I imagine Smirkenoff doesn't look quite so impressive when all you can see is his saddle in front of you :D.