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📱 your camera roll if you were dating… requests!
since i am on a semi-hiatus i can’t commit to writing for the next few weeks. but i do love this tiktok trend! let’s have some fun!! my qualifications are: my pinterest is very curated
rules:
- send in a “📸” emoji + your character of choosing - be as specific or as general as you want to be in your request - anon or non anon welcome - one request per user; i’ll take the first fifteen???
This is Ace of Aces: WWI Air Combat Game (1980). This is the very first one, called Handy Rotary Series for reasons I don’t quite understand, as it isn’t a series. Maybe it refers to the planes.
Ace of Aces is a genius idea. It’s a box containing two books, one for the Ally plane, one for the German plane. Each book contains a mind-boggling number of illustrations of a cockpit from a first-person perspective (always locked on the enemy plane) and, by calling out the numbers at the bottom, you “perform” dogfight maneuvers. And that’s basically it — use the books to fly around and try to shoot the other player out of the sky. A two-player analog flight simulator.
This thing astounds me. Like the design of it. It is so brilliant and cumbersome at the same time. I can’t imagine the work that went into this. It’s so cool! I will probably never play it!
This is the first product by Nova Games, who would go on to produce the Lost Worlds series of one-on-one fantasy combat gamebooks in the same vein. The form would be periodically imitated by other game makers — West End knocked off both versions in a Luke vs. Vader lightsaber dueling game and an X-Wing vs. TIE fighter dogfighter.AceofAces
At the big VGJunk site today: painfully cute platforming starring a rotund seal in Shounen Ashibe for the Super Famicom! The star’s ironically bad at swimming and anime children keep trying to throttle them, and you can read all about it here!
I’ve talked about the Lost World combat game books at least once before. They’re a novel little modular game in which you hand your opponent the book featuring your character, which is illustrated in a first person perspective, as though that character is attacking them. Players choose moves (which are limited or unlocked by a combination of both players’ previous moves). It’s a clever little beat-‘em-up to pass the time and there are tons of different characters to fight with (some even had tie-in miniatures).
This is Lizard Man with Scimitar and Buckler (1984). Lizard folks are cool. This one is kind of giving me Whiplash from Masters of the Universe vibes.
Hehe, this is the Unicorn for the Lost Worlds combat game, one of only three larger monster type combatants in the early releases (along with the cold drake and the manticore [with wings, alas]). I find this one kind of hilarious.
Mostly because I think modern conception of the unicorn has dulled its fierceness. I think the prime image that springs to mind (aside of countless cartoon versions) is of the unicorn laying its head in the lap of a maiden. Gentle. Quiet. And here’s this book, where it is illustration after illustration of the unicorn kicking your ass. Literally you are on the business end of the ass-kicking, thanks to the first person perspective. This brings me joy.
I also think it is funny because the earliest Lost Worlds books used combatants from the Society for Creative Anachronism as visual reference for the the various maneuvers. Makes sense, what with the SCA being all about armor and medieval combat. But I also like to envision what sort of farcical violence might emerge in attempting to get similar reference out of a real live ornery horse.
Like its companion book, Samurai with Katana, I suspect Ninja with Ninjato (1985) was released to capitalize on the success of Oriental Adventures for D&D. Despite the top bar on both books indicating it was part of a larger series of “Heroes and Monsters of Medieval Japan,” no further installments appeared.
Unlike the Samurai, who is a conventional combat character, the Ninja, of course, comes with a number of trick cards — blinding powder, caltrops, itching powder, kusari-fundo, poison, shuriken, sleeping powder and a smoke bomb — that can be used in place of typical attacks. These draw on a special pool of gimmick points and give the Ninja…I don’t want to say unfair advantage, but like the spells introduced in the Tome of Red Magic, they introduce tactical problems that are challenging to nullify.
So this is Samurai with Katana (1985). If I had to guess, I would say this and its companion volume were trying to grab a little of the market created by the success of D&D’s Oriental Adventures. The art, by Brad Gorby, is a bit more sophisticated than the first series illustrations.
Btw, if y'all were curious about how my honour mode run is going...it got extremely sad lol
We made it to moonrise, but EVERY NPC I love died at the last light and now I don't have the will to continue.
I really wanted to Elle Woods my way to the golden dice, but Idk if I can stand to give that little of a shit about my comfort pixels 😭
