Sonic the Hedgehog

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1. Metal City Mayhem  - Score = 6.2   Tier = OK

Sections: 300
Attempts to Beat: 3

When I cracked open the first book in the "Sonic the Hedgehog" series, I was totally expecting it to be very similar to the "Nintendo Adventure" series, even though the Sonic books are physically larger in size. That is, I was expecting them to be extremely light gamebooks that involve tasks such as getting from one side of a maze to another, or in examining 3 seemingly identical pictures to determine which contains slight differences from the others, etc. Heck I wasn't even expecting them to use any dice. What I found instead with book 1 was a fairly lengthy 300 section adventure with half a dozen stats to track, and even more items to collect, not to mention having its own combat system (although not a very intuitive one). This is also the first book I have played from author James Wallis, and it looks as though he has only ever written two, so I guess my time with him will be rather short. That said, as different as the design is from the Nintendo books, the overall story for this entry is rather similar. Instead of playing as Mario and Luigi trying to defend the Mushroom Kingdom from Bowser, here we just substitute in the different mascots and villains from the respective game systems, and we play as Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog who tries to defend his beloved Green Hill Zone home against the machinations of the evil Dr. Robotnik. While relaxing in the Green Hill Zone one day while playing a handheld video game (Sega's Game Gear of course), Sonic realizes he will need help in passing the final level of the game, so goes off to find one of his friends who might be able to assist. On the way, Sonic comes to the realization that something bad has happened, as he encounters areas of devastation to the countryside, and none of his friends are anywhere to be found. So, he thus determines to find out what the heck is going on. 

Before you begin, Sonic has six attributes that you will need to assign values to: Speed, Strength, Agility, Coolness, Quick Wits, and Good Looks (mistakenly called "Cool Looks" on the character sheet, but referred to as "Good Looks" throughout the rest of the book). From these, you get to choose any one attribute to assign a value of 5 to, then choose another to assign a 4, and then a third attribute to which you can assign a 3. The remaining three attributes then all get assigned a value of 2. Then as you play through the book, any of these stats can be tested at various times and you will need to roll one die, add or subtract any given modifiers, and try to get equal to or higher than the given value for that stat to pass the check. There is no Health or Stamina stat to speak of, but you do begin the game with 3 "Lives", and Sonic's "death" can lead you to being sent back to an earlier point in the book, unless he has no Lives left of course, in which case it's Game Over. There is also a place on your character sheet described as "Egg-o-matic Hits", which remains something of a mystery until you get to later in the book where you are told that you need to hit Dr. Robotnik's flying vehicle, The Egg-o-matic, 8 times in order to defeat him. In addition, there is a place to track how many Gold Rings that Sonic collects during the adventure, and these are meant as a way to keep score to see how many you can collect during the game and compare your final tally with your friends (kind of like the Gold Coins in the Nintendo books). These Rings serve an additional purpose however, as should you take a hit in Combat, you lose any Rings you have gathered, but get to keep a Life. (If you get hit when you have no Rings, then you lose a Life). Finally, you have a place to track all the Items that Sonic can collect during the adventure, with him beginning with his Red Trainer shoes, Sega Game Gear, and "Botman" game cartridge. Phew! As mentioned earlier, this was a hell of a lot more to track then I was expecting from a video-game based gamebook series, but I was glad to see it was going to be much more involved than the Nintendo books. I should point out here that I am much less familiar with the world of Sonic the Hedgehog than I am with Mario and Luigi (I was a "Nintendo kid" all the way), so I will be unsure how close these adventures all hew to the actual games.  

The gamebook features a basic Combat system as well, as when you find yourself in a fight with an enemy, you will be given a number you need "to hit" in order to defeat them, and also in which of your 6 attributes you will be rolling against. For example, if you find yourself fighting an enemy where your Agility will be the deciding factor, you might be told you need to score a 7 to hit the enemy. So you roll one die, add your Agility score, and if you get that value or higher, you hit the enemy and they are immediately defeated. You also get to add +3 to your roll should your friend Tails the fox be fighting alongside you. If you miss on your roll, the enemy then gets to take a shot at you, with them needing to score higher than a 10 after rolling one die and adding the result to their given number. This is all rather confusingly written in the rules, and while the odds are usually on your side in these fights, this can still make combat rather tense, as it only takes one hit for either of you to defeat the other, but I suppose this makes it more like earlier video games after all. Even should you be hit, it won't lead to game over unless you are out of Lives. Should you have a Life left, you are just sent back to a prior section of the gamebook instead, so this acts as a checkpoint system. This doesn't come without some problems though, as I found that looping back to earlier sections brings the expected continuity issues, as you can find yourself collecting multiple instances of different items. 

For my stats, Speed and Agility seemed to me to be the most likely to be needed for the more key dice rolls, so I decided to give them the values of 5 and 4 respectively. For the value of 3, I decided to put it into Quick Wits, and with the rest of the attributes thus set to 2, I set off into the Green Hill Zone to locate my missing friends. This then began a rather deceptively linear quest as I travelled along rescuing those friends one at a time. It begins with freeing your fox friend, Tails, who is in the process of being dragged along by robots who are bringing him to a newly constructed city on the edge of the Green Hill Zone called Robotropolis. Once Tails is freed, the two of you sneak into Robotropolis, where you learn several other of your friends have already been taken. The adventure then plays out in several sequences where you need to free your friends one at a time by overcoming the robots that are holding them captive by making various decisions and passing dice checks. First you encounter Boombox the rat, who has already escaped on his own but still needs your help in rescuing his rat girlfriend, Dancer, and your rabbit friend, Johnny Lightfoot. From there you move on to free Joe Sushi the walrus and Tux the penguin, who are currently being used as slave labour by the robots. Then it's on to free Sally Acorn, the squirrel currently trapped inside a glass box, and after that it's onto freeing Flicky the bird, currently trapped in a birdcage located at the top of a tall crane. With the exception of Tails, who comes along with you for awhile, whenever you free a friend they do not accompany you on the journey to face Dr Robotnik, but instead flee the city while you carry on. This really establishes Sonic as the true hero of the world, as he sends everyone else off to safety while he goes on ahead to confront the dangerous Dr Robotnik alone. Feeling heroic isn't the only reason for freeing your friends though, because as you do so you will also be picking up useful items that will help in later stages of the adventure. 

On the subject of those useful items, the adventure is heavily built around the fact that the various robots you encounter are all powered by different game cartridges that have been inserted into their chests. Sonic will come across many of these cartridges scattered throughout Robotropolis, and when encountering a potentially dangerous situation, he can usually attempt to plug one of the different cartridges into a robot and see what happens. This provided for a nice bit of experimentation with the various cartridges to see which ones would be most effective and where, although I could have done without the relentless "egg" puns that all the names of them have. The names of the cartridges include: Blitzkri-egg, Ren-egg-ade, Eggs-ecute, Eggs-plode, and even Pter-egg-dactyl. Enough already! Dr. Robotnik flies a giant egg and all his robot minions use egg-themes, I get it! Seriously, this aspect got really old for me, really fast. There are several other items that can be found though, such as sunglasses that increase Sonic's stats in Coolness and Good Looks, and a set of Robot Armour that when worn requires an enemy to roll a score of 12 in order to hit you. 

Once you have freed all of Sonic's friends, you will find yourself making the final trek towards Robotnik's headquarters in the city, where you find that the evil doctor has constructed a massive Godzilla-size robot called the Technobot. You then travel up inside the robot before arriving at its head, where you have a final confrontation with Robotnik, and this is where the number of hits you make to his Egg-o-matic flying machine comes into play, as you need to hit it a certain number of times in combat in order to damage it enough so that Robotnik goes careening off into the sky, at which point you still need to stop the Technobot which continues to stomp towards the Green Hill Zone with the aim of destroying it. While I thought the final confrontation with Robotnik was rather good, allowing you to use some items you may have gathered up to that point along with requiring to hit him a certain amount of times which made it feel just like a video game, the final requirement of stopping the Technobot just felt like a big guessing game, as I needed to make a random choice from among 3 options on how to successfully stop it and win the game, at which point Sonic is thrown a lavish party back in the Green Hill Zone with all his friends in attendance. However, he promptly ducks out of the party in order to go play video games instead. (Is this Sega trying to send some sort of consumerist message?)   

Probably my biggest complaint with the adventure was in how abruptly my character deaths came. Both of my failed attempts at the book came, not because I ran out of Lives, but because I made a "wrong" choice near the end of the book and was then met with an immediate insta-failure. Wait a minute, I still had Lives left, why couldn't the book have sent me back to an earlier checkpoint instead of killing me off outright as had been the case up until now? This felt like a cheat to me, as the book would just seem to ignore the whole Lives mechanic when it felt like it, not to mention that those insta-failures occurred during what seemed to me like rather arbitrary random choices. The one that frustrated me the most was the choice I mentioned above that was given to me right near the end, when I was attempting to destroy the Technobot which was now under my control, and I was asked if I wanted to: (a) walk it off the highest cliff in the Green Hill Zone, (b) walk it into the deepest lake in the Green Hill Zone, or (c) walk it into the thickest forest in the Green Hill Zone. These all sounded like they "could" work depending on the author's logic, and I just figured that each of them would come with a different attribute test or some such in order to be successful. I was then greatly surprised to find that the option I picked the first time I got here just led straight to an instant failure, and was told to start the book over. That's some City of Thieves level of final choice crap right there! Although maybe I should be grateful, as this did end up extending the total playtime of the adventure (and maybe this was the point?), and I got to try a few different things on my next playthrough.  

The gamebook definitely isn't afraid to be "meta" either, as a few times Sonic addresses the reader directly to either compliment or admonish them on their playing of the adventure. There was one section where Sonic even notices how the background music has stopped playing, which I thought was rather clever. Heck, he even makes a joke about Mario in here should you try and send him down a pipe. The adventure also at one point comes VERY close to doing something incredibly cool, which occurs when Sonic finds himself sucked inside a computer screen, where he is then forced to play through 3 different arcade games that he finds himself inside of. These appeared to me to be based upon the classic arcade games: Sky Kid, Karate Champ, and Spy Hunter. Playing as a video game character, Sonic, who then finds themselves entering and playing yet other video games is some Inception-level shit, and it could have been brilliant if only the arcade games had actually been fleshed out into actual mini-games. Instead, for 2 of the 3 games you are just asked to make a single choice, and if you get it right, you move on. If you get it wrong, you lose a Life and go back to a checkpoint. Ugh, what a missed opportunity! Unfortunately I also did find a few places where I felt "Sutherland-ed" (a phrase I use to describe a situation commonly found in author Jon Sutherland's books, where a gamebook player is given a choice among several options, which all lead to the same thing). There felt like more than one instance during the adventure where I was asked to pick from among several options, and if I didn't pick the "right" one, the others just basically had me go back and pick again until I got the one that allowed me to continue. Was there some kind of "gamebook design class" that taught this style or what? 

Anyone else remember the awful port of Karate Champ for the NES? One of the worst games I have ever played hands down.

Ranking: I had expected to be using my "out of 5" rating system for this series as opposed to the "out of 10", but once I learned how much more involved it was than I had believed, I really had no choice. This has much more gameplay to it than the Crossroads series of books for example, and I used the "out of 10" for that one. As far as gamebooks go, this was also better than I was expecting, although I wouldn't say it's anything special either, so I guess that just means that due to my experiences with the Nintendo gamebooks, I wasn't expecting much to begin with. Experimenting with the various game cartridges and items and figuring out the optimal place to use each one is the best thing about this adventure, and the writing was surprisingly good too for a video game-themed gamebook (except for the damn egg puns....sigh). The abrupt insta-failures were annoying though, and I found the continual encounters with a stream of bland robots to wear out its welcome rather quickly. Still, a decent enough start to the series and I look forward to seeing if Wallis can introduce some new mechanics to keep things fresh with the next book.

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2. Zone Rangers  - Score = 8.0   Tier = Good!

Sections: 300
Attempts to Beat: 6

Whoa! Well that was a step up and then some! Not that the previous entry was bad by any means, but this was a clear improvement in just about every area. This adventure, also written by James Wallis, actually starts out somewhat similarly to the last one as it involves the apparent destruction of the Green Hill Zone, which is the home of Sonic and his friends. With Sonic and Tails sleeping in after a late night of movie watching, they just manage to avoid being run over by a bulldozer that crashes through the trees that they were sheltering under. So as with that last book, the Green Hill Zone is under attack, and Sonic and Tails set out to find out just what the heck is going on. 

Right off the bat the indications are there that this adventure is going to be more involved than the previous one, as we have not one but two separate Character Sheets provided for us, one for Sonic and one for Tails, as we will be controlling both of them during the course of the gamebook. After assigning values to each of their attributes using the same rules as the last book, both of them head off to solve the mystery of that bulldozer from the opening scene. They soon realize that the Green Hill Zone is apparently being paved over, and the bulldozer eventually leads them to a large metal building where they discover that all their friends, including Sally Acorn, Joe Sushi, and Porker Harris, appear to be in some kind of trance and are actually aiding in the destruction of their beloved home. Our friends, while under this trance, capture Sonic and Tails and bring them before the mastermind behind the evil plan, who not surprisingly turns out to once again be Dr. Robotnik. (I hope we get to see some different villains at some point in the series). 

It turns out that Robotnik is using a TV broadcast signal to hypnotize the denizens of the Green Hill Zone into doing his bidding, which Sonic and Tails managed to avoid as they had been watching movies on video tapes the night before, and not a TV broadcast. Not wanting Sonic and Tails to interfere with his ultimate goal of world domination, Robotnik uses a transporter device to send them to the dangerous and far off Jungle Zone. (Why he doesn't just kill them outright is up for debate, but I guess video game villains don't work that way). Our heroes quickly learn that the presence of a Chaos Emerald within the Jungle Zone has turned its inhabitants against each other, with the Crocodile tribe of the Zone now at war with the Wart Hog tribe. Using decisions and dice checks, we need to find a way to lead Sonic and Tails inside the Crocodile fortress, steal the Chaos Emerald, and escape through another transporter. 

Now, this is where the adventure starts to get really good, as after entering the transporter, Sonic and Tails find themselves separated, with Sonic materializing in an urban centre known as Scrap Brain City, while Tails emerges inside the mountainous Hill Top Zone. Both Scrap Brain City and the Hill Top Zone are also under the influences of Chaos Emeralds which have also turned many of their inhabitants hostile, and each of the heroes needs to find a way to steal the Chaos Emerald in their respective area and escape. What the book does so well here is in having you alternate playing as Sonic and Tails. You will play as Sonic for a bit, but then at some point you will be left on a cliffhanger with Sonic finding himself in a sticky situation (surrounded by enemies for example), at which point the perspective switches over to Tails, and so on back and forth. This is a great storytelling device (and Sonic even humourously asks the reader how he can leave him at a time like this), and it made them feel like part of a team with both of them needing to be successful independently should they wish to defeat Robotnik, so that it's not just about Sonic dragging Tails around and doing everything himself. 

Like with the Jungle Zone, you need to make decisions and pass dice checks (for the most part, but more on this later) should you wish to obtain the Chaos Emeralds in each area. Sonic needs to escape from the clutches of the large Cat tribe currently under the influence of the Emerald, and then hook up with the resistance forces currently camped outside the city. Together, you can then assault the city in an attempt to capture the Emerald. For Tails, he needs to join forces with a Monkey tribe, then battle his way past a robotic Shark, before confronting a non-robotic Woolly Mammoth who is guarding the Chaos Emerald. Once both Sonic and Tails are successful, they each transport out of their respective Zones, and join up together again as they find themselves materializing inside a space station currently orbiting their home planet. 

Before I get into that, I have to call out the boss battles that occur before the heroes can obtain those Emeralds, as I thought these were notable and very well handled. For Tails, I guess technically his "final battle" occurs against the Woolly Mammoth guarding the Emerald, but I felt the battle against the Robotic Shark that happens before this was far more deadly and really the key confrontation in the Zone. For Sonic, his boss battle occurs at the top of a tower in Scrap Brain City where he needs to defeat the leader of the Cat tribe, along with his number 1 spy (who also happens to go by the name Number 1). You need to defeat Number 1 first, then continue on against the leader. In both Sonic and Tails' battles, there is a wrinkle involved because as they travel through their respective Zones they will have picked up allies from the friendly tribes, and the number of allies you have remaining when you get to these battles can be used to help you influence your dice rolls (and you badly need them, as your opponents have very high combat scores). The Sonic fight adds another wrinkle, because should your opponent successfully strike, there is a chance that they will hit one of your allies instead of you. Should this happen, that ally is not only removed from your dice roll, but they might also be mutated into a hostile enemy who you now have to fight before you can continue against your main opponent. While these combats can still end up being over very quickly due to how the system works, in this case I thought it added to the tension, and I eventually found myself maximizing my starting attributes with these two battles in mind. So while I see how they could be frustrating depending on your starting stats, I really enjoyed these, and Sonic's battle in particular was one of the more enjoyable gamebook combats I have had in a bit, as I felt it toed the line just right when it comes to adding unique rules to a particular fight without going overboard.  

Unfortunately, the final act isn't quite as good as everything that came before it, though it does have its moments. Once Sonic and Tails arrive on the space station, they quickly have the Chaos Emeralds stolen from them by a small robot who serves Robotnik. (Are these Emeralds hot potatoes or what?) They then need to pursue the fleeing robot in a spaceship, and you get to choose from among 3 different ships docked in the hangar bay, each coming with different capabilities, which is a nice touch. One thing I did really like about this final act was when you need to pass through the "Warps of Confusion". The adventure gives you a couple of ways to do this depending on which way you go, as you can do so by passing a Good Looks dice check, or if you have managed to obtain at least 50 Gold Rings. This gave me good reason to plan out my route in advance (always a positive), and gave more importance to the discovery and gathering of Gold Rings throughout the adventure. You then follow the robot back to Robotnik's secret base for the final confrontation. This final confrontation does not involve a combat though, as you will need to outsmart him by making correct decisions across several sequences. Good news and bad news for me here. The bad news is that just about any wrong move results in an automatic "Game Over" section, with no being sent back to a checkpoint. You just start all over. This could be rather frustrating seeing as how the adventure is rather linear, and quite long considering the book is "only" 300 sections. The good news though is that, at least in my case, I felt that by stopping to take my time and think my decisions through, I was rewarded for doing so, and found myself winning the adventure the first time I made it to Robotnik's base. (I only learned of all the "Game Over" sections in this stretch by going back afterwards to examine unselected options). Now, for all I know I just got lucky with my choices, but it really did feel like there was logic behind the correct decisions, and that I wasn't just making random guesses. Once you successfully retrieve and return the Chaos Emeralds via rocket ship from whence they came (the Warps of Confusion), you return to the Green Hill Zone where Sonic and Tails enjoy a celebratory party with all their friends.       

As enjoyable as the adventure was, I can't quite say it makes it into greatness for me for a few reasons. The main one, and this one really ticks me off and is also something that occurred in the last book, is that there are times when you are confronted with a seemingly key decision between several options, but what you decide to do doesn't really matter at all. One of the worst examples of this occurs when, playing as Sonic on his own, you crash through a glass skylight into a party being held by a group from the Cat tribe. These large Cats are under the influence of the Chaos Emeralds at this point, and so are the "hostile bad guys" until Sonic can find a way to remove the Emerald. After crashing through the skylight into the middle of this party, check out below how Sonic's options play out:

Section 16
Option 1 - Be cool about it
Option 2 - Offer them a Chaos Emerald
Option 3 -  Attack the most important looking person there

Option 1 leads to a Coolness dice check. Fail the dice check and the Cats grab you thinking that you must be a spy so they will put you on trial, go to section 69. So what happens if you pass the dice check? You play it cool but the Cats don't buy it, and grab you thinking you are a spy and so put you on trial, go to section 69. What the hell was the point of this? 

Option 2 offering them a Chaos Emerald (the one you picked up in the previous Zone), immediately leads to the Cats thinking you are trying to bribe them so they decide to put you on trial, go to section 69.

Option 3 attacking the head Cat, despite feeling like a really dumb idea, doesn't even lead to a fight, as the guards immediately grab you before you can make it to their leader. So what do they do with you? You guessed it, they decide to put you on trial as a spy, go to section 69. (It's fitting that the author used section 69 for all these, because he really blew this one!)

But wait, it doesn't even end there, check out the trial itself:

Section 69
Option 1 - Plead innocent
Option 2 - Plead guilty

Option 1 sees you trying to protest that can't be a spy because you just got here. They predictably don't believe you, pronounce you guilty, and throw you in a jail cell. Go to Section 259.

Option 2 just has the lead Cat saying "So you admit it!", at which point they throw you in a jail cell. Go to Section 259

Look, I understand that the story requires Sonic to get thrown in this jail cell so that he can meet the resistance leaders (the real spies), but should there not have been at least SOME gameplay differences between all the above options? An actual fight against the head Cat might have put you in danger of losing Rings or a Life for example, even if eventual victory saw you getting put on trial anyway. Or perhaps you could have managed to swipe something useful from the guards before you got to your cell depending on how you arrived there. Heck even if some of the options led to acquiring some plain old Rings while other options didn't would have given some point to it all. As it is, from the time you crash through the skylight you are guaranteed to get thrown in the jail cell with no differences to your Character Sheet no matter what you do. Sorry, but this kind of thing really bugs me. I'm sure there are other instances of this happening in the gamebook, this one just really stood out to me for how noticeable it was. I also don't want to look too hard for other examples either because I really don't want to taint any more what was otherwise overall a very good experience that I had with this adventure. 

Any other complaints I have with the gamebook are relatively minor. The adventure is quite linear, but unlike a lot of players I don't have a huge problem with that because the story was so entertaining. There is also yet again the odd "looping" issue where you can find yourself circling around the same group of sections. For example, after meeting up with the spies in Scrap Brain City, one of the options is asking them to turn out their pockets, in which case you obtain a Key and a Gold Ring. After picking another option after this, you can once again find yourself with the choice of asking them to turn out their pockets, and an unscrupulous player could use this loop to rack up unlimited Rings (not to mention a ridiculous amount of Keys). The Rules section also states that if in combat an enemy scores more than a 10, it hits you, and if it scores less than a 10, it misses. No word on what happens if they get exactly 10. My final niggle would be with once again how the Lives system is sometimes just abandoned. This is especially noticeable whenever you encounter an abrupt "GAME OVER" section. This can sometimes be the result of just failing certain dice checks, which is how most of my failures at the book occurred. Why do I not lose a Life and return to a checkpoint instead? Ah well.  

For gamebooks I give a higher score to, I like to end the review on a positive note in order to avoid leaving a bad taste or the wrong impression. In this case, I absolutely need to touch on the writing here. This is excellently written, but I don't mean that in the way that I would say a Dave Morris or Stephen Hand book is excellently written. In those cases, I am likely referring to the overall prose and the atmosphere those authors create. Here though, I am referring to how cleverly author James Wallis maintains a balance between humour and tension, and his overall ability to weave a story. He is also not afraid to break the 4th wall at times (Sonic knows he is inside a game, but Tails does not, which leads to some great moments when Tails wonders who the hell Sonic is talking to). But he never overdoes it either. Even those aforementioned Game Over sections were often written in a highly entertaining way. (My favorite might be when you choose to press a Self-Destruct button on a rocket-ship and are sent to a section with merely three words...."The rocket does"). Maybe most impressively though is how he works in references to other properties without showing off and calling too much attention to it. For example, when Sonic meets up with the other spies in Scrap Brain City, he discovers that in order to conceal even from each other who they really are, they refer to each other by a number instead of their names. Now look at part of the exchanges between Sonic and the spy called "Number Two":

Number Two: "You're Number Four."
Sonic: "Who is Number One?"
Number Two: "You are Number Four!"
Sonic: "I am not a number, I'm a hedgehog!"

I'm not imagining things right? That is a reference to the 60's television show "The Prisoner"? (Although truth be told I have never seen the show, and the only reason I know the reference at all is thanks to the Iron Maiden song of the same name, being the huge Iron Maiden fan that I am). There is also an incredibly amusing "Alien" sequence that takes place nearer the end of the adventure, where robots start bursting out of other robots chests. Brilliant! I now wonder how many other popular references were put into this gamebook that may have just gone over my head.    

"Who are you?"
"The new number two."
"Who is number one?"
"You are number six."
"I am not a number, I am a free man!"
"HAHAHAHAHA!"

Ranking: A real gem of an adventure! Experimenting with different values to your starting attribute scores for both Sonic and Tails is a treat in trying to figure out an optimal configuration that gives you the best chance of victory. The story is excellently told too, with the shifting of perspectives back and forth between the two heroes a highlight along with the enjoyable outside references. While some grey areas in the rules along with some of the "no choice choices" held it back a bit for me, the endgame helped to overcome this to a degree if even overall it wasn't as good as what came before it, by making me feel rewarded for putting thought into my decisions, so Wallis was certainly capable of giving his choices meaning when he wanted to. This was easily better than the first book, it's only a pity that I see now this is the last gamebook written by Wallis. What a shame considering the trajectory he was on. I only hope the other authors in the series can pick up where he left off!