You are an intrepid pirate captain, commanding the corsair crew of the dread vessel the Banshee through the shipping lanes of Khul’s so-called Inland Sea on an avaricious quest: to amass a hold full of lucre through treasure-hunting and outright plunder, transporting it safely through the troubled waters from wretched Tak in the north to the distant southern isle of Nippur.
A loose adaptation (using many of the original’s locations and situations, but often in new, streamlined ways) of Andrew Chapman’s Fighting Fantasy gamebook #16, published earlier the same year, while this computer game version still ignores the gamebooks’ Choose-Your-Own-Adventure multiple-choice design in favour of a limited two-word text-game-with-graphics interface, important elements of the FF system rejected in the earlier Adventure Soft conversion of Temple of Terror have been re-integrated into this adaptation — notably the trademark Fighting Fantasy SKILL & STAMINA RPG stats-management and (simulated) random die-rolling for tracking damage and resolving combat. (Players hoping for the books’ third dynamic are, well, out of LUCK.)
An additional extraordinary element is carried over from the gamebook: ship-to-ship combat, with your crew manifest standing in to represent an analogue to your boat’s STAMINA score (ability to sustain further damage) — handy to maintain at high levels while attempting to fend off menaces both nautical and land-based drawn from many fabulous and folkloric sources including Homer’s Odyssey and the annals of Arabian hero Sinbad the Sailor. The conversion also continues the imposition of the text adventure convention of carry limits unknown in the gamebook, as well as pre-set character stats. Perhaps in an attempt to increase the game’s length (at the cost of its replayability), mutually exclusive side-quests from the gamebook all become mandatory stops here toward a larger new goal of not merely maximising one’s treasure-accumulation, but systematically denuding the entire coast of anything shiny and not nailed down.
Platforms
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