Starship Traveller

Yet another book that I've finished recently.

This one is quite special special cos it's a game book. It's an adventure and you make decisions along the way. Different decision leads you to a different portion of the book to continue on your journey. And hopefully, at the end, you survive the adventure or otherwise you die and you can start all over again.

I remember when I was in primary school, I used to have a few of books like that. The series was called 決擇叢書. They were very simple chinese books and there were not too many combination of decisions. I remember loving those books when I was a kid and would read it many many times, even tho I usually died. But they were really exciting for me cos it's usually about mystery and vampires and stuff. I did remember being a little frustrated sometimes cos it felt like no matter what decision I make, I always died.

I managed to find some images of what books I am talking about.

I remember reading both of these. I couldn't remember any of the others ones and I couldn't find any more images of the other ones. (I didn't try too hard finding them tho. The above two are the first two images popped up on google and I didn't bother to look thru all the images to find more.) So, I don't really know if there're other ones nor how many I've actually read.

Anyway, back to Starship Traveller.

詹占 went home to bring some old books from 佢既娘家 over Christmas. It turned out that he had a bunch of game books! (我們真的相襯，原來連小時候的興趣也這樣相似！haha... 嘔...)

挑起了我既引，便揀咗本黎睇睇。

This one is way more complicated than those kiddie ones that I've read b4. In addition to making decisions, you also need to fight your way out (you have a crew and have to fight aliens). Have to keep score and all that. More work than I expected.

And as when I was a kid, I failed in my adventure. I did quite well the first time thru the book. I got pretty far along but then after that, I died very quickly. After a few tries, I started to get frustrated and started to lose patience. I started to cheat. I skipped the fighting, just made decisions to move on. But even that didn't help me to succeed in my adventure. I just kept dying. And then I started cheating on the decision as well by sorta keeping track of my last one or two decision pages so that if I made a bad decision, I could go the other way. But still, I couldn't survive.

So at the end, I was like 'screw this' and I just read the whole thing. But then, even after reading the whole thing, since the clues are obscure, I still can't figure out how to get to the happy ending. I traced back a little bit but couldn't figure out which clues (you need two bearings but there were some false clues along the way to lead you astray) are the right ones. Of course, I didn't try too hard. I was just skimming thru the book, I didn't write down any notes or anything so it's hard to keep track.

詹占 said that this one is the more complicated one. The other ones shouldn't be as bad. But being frustrated at this book, it reminded me how frustrated I got when I was a kid as well. I don't know why I thought that it would be a good idea to read the book cos I should know that I would end up in frustration. I mean, these books are fun cos it's like a game. But then I think a game is fun only if you get to win at least some of the times, not dying all the time... And Starship Traveller is really just about travelling in space and finding your way home, it didn't have the added thrill of vampires and monsters. 

Maybe the other ones will be better. But I think I need a little break from game books to rebuild my interest in them and to reset my frustration level first.