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WAR WITH THE EVIL POWER MASTER
Jan. 18th, 2009 06:23 amRecently, I was reminded of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I read as a child. This lead to us looking them up on ye old internet and laughing ourselves nearly into unconsciousness at some of the awful titles. But one stood out as the greatest book title in the history of literature. That's right - WAR WITH THE EVIL POWER MASTER. You cannot go wrong with that title.
Riding a wave of insane amusement at all of this, I requested both the original and the 2005 re-issue through interlibrary loan so we could compare the two editions. I wondered what sort of look I would get when I went to pick them up, but the librarian somehow resisted mocking me.
Having now studied the book extensively and completed following the many twists and turns of the story, I have learned 3 things (Caution! Spoilers!):
1) Your Martian friend Flppto is a smug jerk whose advice or involvement in the story will almost always get you killed.
2) Under no circumstances answer an SOS.
3) Never got to planet Follop. Seriously.
I can't remember how lethal these books tended to be, but this one seems awfully brutal. Two thirds of the endings are bad, usually involving your death and probably the deaths of many others. In one particularly memorable ending, 60 percent of all life forms in the universe die in the first few minutes following a terrible battle, and the rest linger on in terrible agony for a while before expiring. In the end, THE EVIL POWER MASTER is the only being left in the universe. Ouch.
There are a few sort of neutral endings in which you don't beat THE EVIL POWER MASTER, but you also don't die horribly.
Finally, there are some good endings in which you actually win. The lamest of the good endings involves some other character having already captured THE EVIL POWER MASTER for you. Wow. Why did I bother going on this quest again? It almost makes me wish I'd gone to Follop. But not quite.
Riding a wave of insane amusement at all of this, I requested both the original and the 2005 re-issue through interlibrary loan so we could compare the two editions. I wondered what sort of look I would get when I went to pick them up, but the librarian somehow resisted mocking me.
Having now studied the book extensively and completed following the many twists and turns of the story, I have learned 3 things (Caution! Spoilers!):
1) Your Martian friend Flppto is a smug jerk whose advice or involvement in the story will almost always get you killed.
2) Under no circumstances answer an SOS.
3) Never got to planet Follop. Seriously.
I can't remember how lethal these books tended to be, but this one seems awfully brutal. Two thirds of the endings are bad, usually involving your death and probably the deaths of many others. In one particularly memorable ending, 60 percent of all life forms in the universe die in the first few minutes following a terrible battle, and the rest linger on in terrible agony for a while before expiring. In the end, THE EVIL POWER MASTER is the only being left in the universe. Ouch.
There are a few sort of neutral endings in which you don't beat THE EVIL POWER MASTER, but you also don't die horribly.
Finally, there are some good endings in which you actually win. The lamest of the good endings involves some other character having already captured THE EVIL POWER MASTER for you. Wow. Why did I bother going on this quest again? It almost makes me wish I'd gone to Follop. But not quite.
