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Item - Battle Drive

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Series: Find Your Fate Junior - The Transformers — no. 2
Authors: Siegel, Barbara
Siegel, Scott
Illustrator: Schmidt, William (Bill)
Date: December, 1985
ISBN: 0345326709 / 9780345326706
Length: 73 pages
Number of Endings: 12
User Summary: Bumblebee, the cute little Volkswagen Autobot, is out on a scouting mission when (rather unsurprisingly) he runs across the evil Decepticons.
Demian's Thoughts:

This book is written in the same basic style as the last one, though it shows evidence of a bit more (but only a bit more) skill with the English language. It's still more than a little on the condescending side, and as before, the reader doesn't play a character in the story but instead watches events unfold and then chooses how to influence them. This gets particularly strange on page 32, on which the reader is encouraged to actually write down a warning message for the Autobots (yes, I repeat, the reader is told to write a message in the actual book) so that they don't fall into an ambush! If anyone owns a copy of this book in which some poor reader actually decided to attempt this, I'd be interested (and likely amused) to see the message. In any case, this isn't the only bit of strangeness -- there's also an abrupt ending in which the reader falls out of bed and wakes up (!), thus preventing the story from reaching any sort of conclusion. I imagine that the authors probably thought they were being clever by designing these ways of involving the reader in the book (well, either that, or they were displaying their utter contempt for the genre). Such things might actually be interesting if executed well, but as things stand, the reader's intelligence is insulted and the story is pointlessly derailed. I can't really recommend this book, but it might be worth looking at purely out of morbid curiosity.

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Kveto's Thoughts:

Although it shouldn't come as a surprise, this is probably the worst gamebook I ever owned. I can only echo Demian's complaints in his review. I guess you shouldn't expect much from the subject matter but sheesh.

More reviews by Kveto

Users Who Own This Item: Ardennes, bonhomme, bookwormjeff, Demian, drereichdude, Erikwinslow, exaquint, Fireguard, jdreller, katzcollection, knginatl, marnaudo, ntar, RonaldFrobnitz, spragmatic, ThaRid, twar, waktool (US 1st; US 5th)
Users Who Want This Item: domj29, kinderstef, NEMO, Pseudo_Intellectual, wonderfly
Users with Extra Copies: bookwormjeff
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