If you have an Android device, turn to 401?
Or whoops, nothing for you if you aren't using a fruit based tablet :(
This month’s column has been unceremoniously cleft in twain. Why? Because, while May’s big news will undoubtedly revolve around Microsoft’s unveiling of its Xbox 360 successor, there are still a fine number of new releases to discuss. Expect the second part of this month’s Games Theory right after the dust has settled on all …
The appeal of the original was that they were still in book format. And you still had the fun of rolling the dice and keeping track of the stats yourself. And sticking your fingers in the book to backtrack from a wrong turn. And I'd have no objection to simply putting that in electronic format to read on a Nook or similar device.
But as soon as you make a game, the problem is you're competing with the large genre of computer RPGs - and quite frankly, this looks comical. The screenshots seem on par with those 1980s text+graphics adventures, and just compare them to the screenshots of the other games reviewed in this article. Am I supposed to be impressed that a computer can now roll the dice for me? No, I'll get back to my Skyrim (and even classics like Morrowind or Baldur's Gate are ancient by technology standards). And at £2.99, it seems embarrassing compared to the large amount of RPGs available even for free (at least on Windows, Linux and Android - maybe IOS lacks here). The problem is that that people who want to go back to basics would rather stick with rolling the dice; and people who want something more modern, aren't going to be sticking with something so basic.
Of course it will sell, due to the name and marketing of "Fighting Fantasy" (as this article shows - do other RPGs get reviews so easily?). This was apparently a problem with the original series - I read an interesting article by one Fighting Fantasy author, who basically said even if you had a much better gaming system, publishers simply didn't want to know unless you were writing a Fighting Fantasy book. Hence we got stuck with Skill, Stamina, Luck...