[Let's Play] Fighting Fantasy 14 - Temple of Terror

[JourneymanN00b]

Yeah, I'm genuinely curious how the Onyx Egg beats the Eye Stinger.

Livingstone really seems to have burned out after Island of the Lizard King. He's had a few duds in a row now. I thought he burned out after Legend of Zagor, but now I'm questioning that. I suppose it's possible that Trial of Champions is a step up though. All I know about that one is its notorious difficulty.

According to the section where the Onyx Egg is used, this happens:

As soon as you reveal the Onyx Egg, the Eye Stinger becomes motionless and closes its central eye. You seize your opportunity and run past the Eye Stinger, holding up the Onyx Egg to protect you.

And yeah, Ian Livingstone has written quite a few washouts, as the main problems seems to be that the adventure is too linear and specific. The one rule that I feel that every game designer should have is that if you give the player more than one route to follow in the beginning that lead to the same place, each route should have the opportunities to get the same items needed to win the game. See the Sierra On-Line game Gold Rush! for a good example. The player has three choices to get to California, and all three choices provide the player with a Bible, which is needed to find the right hotel room to contact the player's brother.

Anyway, I'm done with my ranting and (shamless) plugging for a relatively obscure game that I ran into my youth.