My first home computer was a Commodore 64 that I got around 1984, at the time I was awestruck with the thing. It had its own little tape deck that was used to load up games via cassette and I played using an old Atari 2600 joystick on a hand-me-down black and white TV.
There were limited games available at the time, but there were also books and magazines available that provided step by step guides to coding your own entertainment. (There was of course the inevitable, "syntax error", that meant you had to go over pages of code again to find a typo).
Positively ghetto by today's standards, but the start of a lifelong adventure for me.
So what did we do before the advent of digital entertainment? The pinnacle of analogue fun was Dungeons & Dragons. Pen and paper adventures with a group of friends. But this was dependent on a certain amount of organization between the participants, easier said than done in a time without email and mobile phones. Games would usually be set up during the week to held at the following weekend.
So when Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone came up with a revolutionary form of entertainment that required no organization and no additional players it created an impact that many gamers still remember fondly to this day. In fact I'm guessing the image below will strike a chord of nostalgia and even a vocal "ahhhhh" in many gamers of an age.
For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, the Fighting Fantasy games were in effect a solo Dungeons & Dragons style adventure. Each page of the book was filled with shorter, numbered paragraphs, that usually ended in a decision.
For example paragraph 21 might say " a towering animated skeleton appears from behind a crypt as you enter the room, will you prepare to fight (turn to 76) or turn tail and run (turn to 218)"
You get the gist? These books also offered many of us the first form of "hacking" as we kept our fingers in multiple pages as makeshift placeholders should we make a fatal decision, effectively creating "save slots" with our own fleshy digits.
These games have been dragged into the digital age, upgraded and ported to various formats over the last few years, but have proved most successful when they appear on a portable platform. Steve Jacksons Sorcery series proved a great hit on mobile.
The latest iteration is "Fighting Fantasy Legends" on the Nintendo Switch from Nomad Games. It includes the first three 80's classics, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, City of Thieves and Citadel of Chaos.
Rather than transfer the books separately it wraps all three up neatly in one adventure and introduces a unique dice based combat and luck system, along with thousands of choices to make across all three books. Fighting Fantasy Legends adds new mechanics that advantage of it being a digital title
Fighting Fantasy Legends may seem a little simplistic compared to todays more in depth CRPG's such as Divinity and Baldur's Gate, but it makes for a very accessible pick up and play for a commute or to fill some downtime; not to mention a nostalgic trip down memory lane for many.
It's a great port and very faithful to the original material, so, as you can imagine it's a little text heavy. Perfect for the Original Switch but I found text a little difficult to read on the Switch Lite....but as I remember reading the original books that might just be my old, old eyes!
Fighting Fantasy Legends is available now on Nintendo Switch priced $9.99.
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