Sure enough, when I got to the bridge, there he was – a gruff old wizard who told me to bugger off because he didn’t want to help me.

Like is the case with The Warlock, there's really only about one path for you to take, which is one of those things I never much liked: it means that there's little reason for all the other colorful and interesting encounters and challenges, once you've gone through them once and realized that this was the wrong way around. Since Fighting Fantasy's huge success, he has become a major figure in world of computer games, and is currently Creative Director of Eidos, the name behind Tomb Raider.The pre-generated character Helios Wardalus starts with Luck 6, while the minimal possible starting value is 7. This first part of the game was enjoyable and moderately challenging in places - there were a few locations where things could go badly wrong for you, and I benefitted in one place by making what doesn't immediately look like a wise move. Unfortunately, when we got to the tattooist we were ONE GOLD SHORT of affording the white unicorn in a yellow sun forehead tattoo we needed to carry forward. An action-packed, twisty-turny Fighting Fantasy novel set in one of that world's most notorious cities - Port Blacksand, a place that makes inner city London look like the Bahamas.

A few points: when asked to choose between black and white it was pretty obvious which one was which. Originally published by Puffin Books in 1983, the title is the fifth gamebook in the Fighting Fantasy series. Well, I suppose I had to encounter the naked pirate earlier… some mental images you just don’t want to live with. By all accounts things get pretty difficult in the second half, but unfortunately we never made it that far, failing to acquire all the needed items before we left the city.Oh, and then there's the fact that I needed to spend most of my time breaking into people's houses and then often killing then when they quite rightly protested my flagrant pilfering of their stuff. Entering the first house I came to, I met a man who made a deal with me – swallow one of his pills of unlabeled medication.

Further along Candle Street, I found a group of little gnome-like creatures playing a game much like baseball. I don’t know what a moon dog is, but I imagine that their theme tune would be sung by a 1960s David Bowie. If you have never experienced a Fighting Fantasy book before, expect a challenging adventure fraught with peril, puzzles and peculiar enemies at every turn. These books have brought back a lot of good memories, and there have been parts of the stories that I suddenly remember from 25 years ago. It's like reading a book from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, but you have to fight villains by rolling 2 regular dice and find hidden objects in the story.Since Fighting Fantasy’s huge success, he has become a major figure in world of computer games, and is currently Creative Director of Eidos, the name behind Tomb Raider.