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Jan. 6th, 2006 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnyI am having random nostalgia.
I don't know how prominent these were, but does anyone remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? The classroom bookcase was inordinately full of them, written by Iain someone, mostly, and they were really noticeable and slyly attractive due to the NEON GREEN spines. They were fantastic, and I got much respect for reading them when I was younger; that may have been a contributing factor in my beginning to read them, but soon enough I was completely lost.
There's nothing quite like reading a book with an entire hand's worth of fingers marking pages, just in case something goes hideously wrong and you have to backtrack. I had no truck with dice and suchlike of course, being a humungous and quite unrepentant cheater, which is possibly obvious from the amount of spine cracking fingerwork. And doesn't that sound an interesting skill for an RP character? Hunh.
Of course, then I asked for one from my mum for my birthday, and I got one on showjumping. SHOWJUMPING, I ask you. And the weird thing about it was that I totally died way more times in the showjumping one than I ever did in the ones where goblins were attempting to cleave my head in twain with a battle axe. I blame the fact that it was a lot shorter than the proper ones, leaving very little space for fingers, even fingers so small as mine were then.
They even made me write one, at school. Which... do you have any idea how bad such a thing is, when written by a ten year old with the attention span of a gnat? Most pages, I seem to remember, ended in people dying. With no rationale, whatsoever, and a distinct overtone of HA!
Aah, childhood.
I don't know how prominent these were, but does anyone remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? The classroom bookcase was inordinately full of them, written by Iain someone, mostly, and they were really noticeable and slyly attractive due to the NEON GREEN spines. They were fantastic, and I got much respect for reading them when I was younger; that may have been a contributing factor in my beginning to read them, but soon enough I was completely lost.
There's nothing quite like reading a book with an entire hand's worth of fingers marking pages, just in case something goes hideously wrong and you have to backtrack. I had no truck with dice and suchlike of course, being a humungous and quite unrepentant cheater, which is possibly obvious from the amount of spine cracking fingerwork. And doesn't that sound an interesting skill for an RP character? Hunh.
Of course, then I asked for one from my mum for my birthday, and I got one on showjumping. SHOWJUMPING, I ask you. And the weird thing about it was that I totally died way more times in the showjumping one than I ever did in the ones where goblins were attempting to cleave my head in twain with a battle axe. I blame the fact that it was a lot shorter than the proper ones, leaving very little space for fingers, even fingers so small as mine were then.
They even made me write one, at school. Which... do you have any idea how bad such a thing is, when written by a ten year old with the attention span of a gnat? Most pages, I seem to remember, ended in people dying. With no rationale, whatsoever, and a distinct overtone of HA!
Aah, childhood.
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Date: 2006-01-06 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:42 am (UTC)God, I hated those things. I think because I could never manage not to die.
On the other hand... you just gave me a very fun idea for something in RP that is going to make someone hate me. :D!!1
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Date: 2006-01-06 01:48 am (UTC)ROCKS FALL, EVERYBODY DIES.
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Date: 2006-01-06 01:49 am (UTC)I cheated disgustingly too. The best one was one I frequently stole from my brother - Red Something. About space missions and being a diplomat to alien races and having to escape from giant robots and fly through asteroid fields. The pictures were disturbingly graphic.
And I too had to write one! I was kind on the cheaters, and each decision either ended in failure or a continuation of the story, which as far as I can recall involved going down a well and finding a big mine where all these kidnapped children had been put to work and having to rescue them. I think I was going through a Joan Aiken stage.
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Date: 2006-01-06 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:07 am (UTC)I had one with injuns, and the injuns just, like, killed everyone for NO REASON!
But it was okay, because it was in the '70s, before they had PC.
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Date: 2006-01-06 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 04:01 am (UTC)I made sure to reading every possible route to its end, because to miss one was LETTING THE TERRORISTS WIN.
And hey, I loved that showjumping one. It had horsies.
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Date: 2006-01-06 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 05:31 am (UTC)I read so many. And I had to write one in school too!
Oh man. Now I want to go read them again.
I liked the Goosebumps versions quite a bit as well...
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Date: 2006-01-06 05:52 am (UTC)I remember reading through one completely -- reading each possible distinct storyline from start to finish. This takes several times longer than a normal book of the same length. My main reasoning was that there was this one page that looked absolutely fascinating, but I couldn't figure out what you had to do in order to get to it. . .
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Date: 2006-01-06 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 07:25 am (UTC)I think I played ZORK, the oldest computer game in existence (OMG I am old), because it was kind of similar to those. All text, and you had to keep these elaborate maps to figure out where you were actually going, typing NORTH, SOUTH, UP, IN, etc. I would constantly get lost in the maze, where your only information was that it was dark and you couldn't see a damn thing, and wander around hopelessly until the inevitable, repetitive ending: YOU HAVE BEEN EATEN BY A GRUE. XD
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Date: 2006-01-06 07:56 am (UTC)But I got irritated by the horror novels because THERE WAS NO LOGIC. Sensible courses of action ended in DEATH.
I quickly left my logic behind, of course.
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Date: 2006-01-06 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 12:23 pm (UTC)Huh.
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Date: 2006-01-06 06:13 pm (UTC)