Item - The Saturday Night Bash

As noted in the series description, these books are sort of the romantic equivalent of the Nightmares! series in terms of format. As with those adventures, the inclusion of a character list is a pointless waste of space and does absolutely nothing to shade the (at best) two-dimensional characters that populate the book. We're deep in the land of teen stereotypes here, with the standard romance novel cliches mixed in for good measure. That being said, the book could have been worse. There was really not much chance of me enjoying it considering that I fall well outside of its target demographic, but I at least managed not to find it actively offensive; shallow, certainly, but not as odious as romantic fiction often is. The book offers only one innovation in the area of mechanics; at two points, it has a "But Wait!" box which allows you to interrupt the story mid-stream and act as if you had made a different choice at an earlier decision point. If you ask me, this is more than a little bit pointless, but it's certainly never something I've seen before -- some books (like the Zork series) offer a post-ending undo feature, but this is the first time that I recall seeing a chance to go back and try something new before the bitter end.

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