To participate in battles, members need to do more than just bring their swords. "The neck and up is off limits, but everything else is fair game." "All weapons are checked at the beginning of every battle, and everyone has to be trained and tested before they are allowed to fight," Lee said. The combatants wield all kinds of weapons during battles: swords, daggers, javelins and axes, all of which are made by the participants with PVC pipe material and padded with hard foam so they can battle with a minimum risk of injury.
"But it's a full-contact sport, and you have to expect to get hit in the battles." "It's intended to be a sport with improvisational acting thrown in," Lee explained. Hopefully there are more to come, though it would be nice to see the developers take their obvious talent and passion for the source material and apply it to a platform better suited to gamebooks next time.While Dagohir's purpose is fantasy, its battles are real. Laughing Jackal has done a good job of tweaking the source material just enough to make a gamebook that feels just that bit more relevant in the world of PlayStation Minis, without changing things enough to risk offending the players. While simple, this game of skill does provide a fairer way to dealing with combat than a random dice roll, which in turn makes survival a much more fair proposition.
If the opponent is the more skilled, then it's harder to pick a safe icon. If the hero has a higher skill rating than his opponent, then there are more friendly icons. These are jumbled over the grid, displayed briefly, and then disappeared, and then it's time to choose one. There are two icons - one will damage the enemy, the other will damage the hero. Here, combat plays out over a grid, in a memory-style mini game. To compensate, Laughing Jackal has instead made the combat a skill game, rather than a dice rolling exercise in luck. On the downside with this Minis version, there's no way to "cheat" and go back to earlier passages if things turn sour. Combat is rarely stacked against you in an single melee, but attrition wounds build up quickly. A single wrong decision can lead to the Game Over screen. No one goes to a Michael Bay film to see an Academy Award-winning turn by Shia Le Bouf, and no one reads a Fighting Fantasy gamebook because the author is a Pulitzer laureate.Īs usual with gamebooks, The Talisman of Death can be brutally-hard. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks aren't remembered for being literature classics they're pulp fiction, Conan the Barbarian style fantasy experiences, but that kind of B-grade experience is exactly what you'd want from this kind of game anyway. Generic fantasy music is appropriate as well, because the story itself is entirely generic. The music background especially, is generic fantasy, but also ambient enough to provide a comfortable scene for the action. Since these fill the role of bonuses or unlockables, it's not necessary to have them prominent, so it is a sensible decision by Laughing Jackal.Īlthough the text resolution isn't perfect, and you won't be able to sit and read this for hours on end without ending up with tired eyes, it's as good as it can be, and the presentation aside from that is first class. Other, less important details, such as character and monster artwork and backgrounds, and a list of the pages in the book that you've visited so far, are squirreled away to a secondary menu. If need be, that text page can be zoomed into to increase the size of the characters, and players can use the PSP's circle pad to scroll (at a comfortable speed) up and down to read the entire 'page.' Laughing Jackal's solution is surprisingly elegant display the character statistics and inventory on one "page" of a virtual, opened book. You can't even turn the console on its side comfortably to emulate a book, like you can with Nintendo's DS and 3DS titles.
Real estate is limited, and the resolution, while workable, is not a patch on either the iPad or proper e-Readers.
To start with though the PSP is not a good e-Reader.