Golden Sword of Dragonwalk

R.L. Stine rose to prominence with his Goosebumps books after I stopped visiting the “young readers” section at the local library, but his stuff was showing up while I was still going once a week looking for the latest literary thrill. Like one involving a golden sword in a land where dragons walk…

You’re paying a visit to Grandma Carmen’s house, and the only thing on your mind is spending the day exploring all the awesome secret passages and locked trunks. Of course, what always happens when you’re looking forward to a day of fun? That’s right, Grandma Carmen promised you’d babysit Stacy the neighbor kid. And what’s even harder than having fun when you’re dragging around a whiny kid? Vanquishing the forces of evil while you’re dragging around a whiny kid, of course!

The first secret passage you explore with your oh-so-helpful companion takes you to the beleaguered kingdom of Dragonwalk where the wizard Merle hands over the kingdom’s legendary golden sword. Right before three dragons (a big one, a little one and one in the middle) swoop down and try to chew up the village where you arrived. The sword has the power to…make you a good sword fighter, but the secret to beating the dragons is picking the right order to fight them out of a list of six. You’re probably saying to yourself, “that sounds pretty dumb.” And it is. It probably wouldn’t improve the way you look at it to hear your reward for beating the dragons is a wish the little girl who ran for the hills makes for you, would it? Didn’t think so. In fact you get sent back in time to before you entered the passage, meaning the dragons you just killed are still alive and still terrorizing Dragonwalk. Nice one, Stacy.

Fortunately, assuming you survive the fight with the dragons or opt out of it in the first place, you can experience the “main” quest of the book which is a little less dumb. You find another secret passageway and a dying knight who hands over the golden sword and his mission to save Dragonwalk from the evil wizard Ravenhurst. This quest adds a little extra depth because you get to pick one of three sidekicks to help out when a magic sword isn’t quite enough: Elkar, a knight, Chalidor, an apprentice magician, and Bendux, the Dragonwalk version of Bill Gates who bribes monsters into not eating him.

You can read the book yourself to find out which one’s the best, but the most interesting is Elkar. After you guys are catching a breather in the aftermath of a fight with a killer tree, an elf comes by and steals his sword. The elf thinks he’s struck it rich, but finds out the sword won’t go anywhere without its owner and Elkar was on the varsity elf-kicking team.

Stine contributed a couple books to the Wizards, Warriors and You series back in the 80’s and it feels like he was covering a lot of the same ground in this book. That is to say when you run into a frog knight or giant lizard that wants to spill your blood, the book asks you to pick a random number or figure out what time it is and that determines whether you kill it or not. Reading at night? Tough noogies, you’ve been turned into a frog. You’re about to be eaten by a dinosaur, pick a number from one to ten! Picked even? Uh oh, you’re in trouble, but maybe your buddy can help you! Chose Elkar? Flip a coin!

If it sounds like a lot of what happens to you is determined by random elements or variables you decided on a long time ago, it should. So like in Wizards, Warriors and You, you actually don’t control what happens that much.

So is Golden Sword of Dragonwalk entertaining? If you’re willing to live without a sense of coherence or control. Seems like people thought the kids going nuts over the Goosebumps books would, because like Stine’s other Twistaplot books it was re-released at the height of his popularity to squeeze a few more bucks out of those squealing kids.

The Video Avenger

TRON. Captain N. People seem to love ‘em or hate ‘em. Same with another book from the Twistaplot series of days long ago, The Video Avenger.

Twistaplot was one of the many series that sprang up in the mid-80’s hoping to get a piece of the Choose Your Own Adventure pie. Most of the Twistaplot books were pretty stupid, but The Video Avenger is…well, less stupid than most.

As a reward for eating 4,789 cheeseburgers, you’ve won an all-new super awesome computer with 64K whole bytes of RAM! Just as you’re thinking of all the fun you’re going to have playing Deathbeam Dinosaurs on this puppy, you open it up and find out it’s a supercomputer with a voice and brain meant for that top secret lab down the street. You’d think a government lab that needed “high wire fences and armed guards” wouldn’t be using the same shipping service to move their evil AI’s around as a fast food company. Or that a sentient computer would be designed to trap people inside it by beating them at videogames.

Before you can say, “I love the Power Glove, it’s so bad,” you’ve been zapped into the cockpit of a rocketship getting blasted at by a multi-headed dino. That sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

If you were expecting to be transported into a realm where games are real, though, you’re in for a disappointment. Instead, if you manage to escape the Deathbeam Dinosaurs, which doesn’t take long because it’s hard to write a fun dogfight scene, most paths involve you running around in the shiny innards of the computer ducking its guards and looking for a way out.

The main problem with The Video Avenger is how it misrepresents itself. From looking at the title, cover and glancing over the “how to read this book” page on the inside, it looks like a swashbuckling adventure that’s kind of fun and a little whimsical. Not a book where you’re a basically helpless in a battle for your life with an electronic madman where the first slip-up could be your last. “You will compete with the machine in all kinds of games and electronic challenges. Make the right moves, and you will have a lot fun,” indeed.

That’s not to say there aren’t some interesting characters lurking inside your new computer. The Gladiator was a pretty nasty piece of work, and the encounter with him involved a light saber battle which was a childhood dream for many. There’s Cluster, your telepathic copilot, and the Glitch, a valuable ally who has no business being in an ultra-advanced self aware computer. And of course everyone else who played the computer and lost before you.

Maybe they’re why if you do end up in another game, it usually means you can look forward to a messy death in the immediate future. Then again, you can look forward to a lot of messy deaths, period. This computer may not have anything on its chips and bits bigger than tormenting kids after luring them in with their favorite videogames, but it’s not screwing around. The sheer volume of nasty endings to good ones may not really be that high for these books, but it really helps the feeling that the computer knows what you’re up to and enjoys toying with you.

So while it’s annoying that The Video Avenger ends up being less about playing videogames from the inside and more about beating a demented computer before it can zap you into binary code, the stories of you trying to escape are if nothing else pretty cohesive with a decent atmosphere.