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19 comments

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teilo
Now there is a complete waste of time that I can really dig! Very cool. Brings back lots of memories.
WilliamLP
In life, too, most choices lead to death.
redherring
Life is a bitch after all.
ovi256
And then you die.
kingkawn
that's why we get high / cause you never know when you're gonna go
zandorg
Unless the choice is to live forever?
nfriedly
I would always fold the corners down so I could "undo" if I ended up dying. This usually got confusing after a while..
wallflower
I remember using all of my fingers to "cheat" and do a forward-path seek.
witten
There was at least one CYOA "competitor" series of books in which there was only a single ending in a book. And if you got to that ending, you won. Punishment for making a wrong choice involved simply being sent back to a page you had already seen. This was done in such a way that it made sense within the plot (such as going back to jail).

This always struck me as a much better way to implement a CYOA-style book: An implicit acknowledgement that you would just go back and try again if you made a wrong turn.

listic
Can someone please dig its name? Coming from different country, I hadn't been exposed to such kind of books at all.
zandorg
Fighting Fantasy (very vivid, huge fantasy world)

or

Interplanetary Spy (a classic for the most silly ways to die, like getting trapped in a prison bubble on the outside of a ship for the rest of your life...).

kingkawn
When I was 7 I read a choose your own adventure where you had to try to get to Utopia. I read through it 4 times without success, so I flipped the pages to find the picture of Utopia in the middle. Scanning through page by page, I realized there was no way to get there. Fuckers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_UFO_54-40

Edit: Just saw that this enraged and educated other kids just the same.

jknupp
Two especially interesting nodes (95, 91).

On one you either win or you die on the next page. On the other you win no matter what.