Thoughts on the Car Wars gamebooks
Jan. 23rd, 2022 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellThe SO collected all six Car Wars gamebooks (choose-your-own-adventure plus dice rolling) back in the day, and lately I've been reading through them.
For those unfamiliar with Car Wars, it's set in the dystopian future of the 2030s when the United States has split into bickering mini-nations and the only way to travel is in heavily armed cars. Those same cars also participate in the organized sport of autoduelling.
#1: Battle Road by Steve Jackson - You have 24 hours to drive to Houston to rescue the daughter of the king of Louisiana before she is forcibly married to a powerful Native businessman as part of his plan to usurp the throne.
Mechanically, very much a first book. The combat system would be unchanged throughout the series, but the timekeeping part would come and go, and the "generic garage" and "generic clinic" sections it uses do not reappear.
#2: Fuel's Gold by Steve Jackson and Creede and Sharleen Lambard - You accept a job to take a very important package to Boston, then get mixed up in trying to stop some anarchists who have gotten hold of a rare stash of gasoline and decided to build a bomb with it.
Much stronger than #1; it has one of the more coherent stories in the series.
#3: Dueltrack by Scott Haring - You're an autoduellist about to compete with the aid of a special robot gunner. Some people object to the robot strongly enough to start trying to kill you.
This is about investigating a mystery, which gives it a very different structure from all the other books. There are lots of options you can visit and revisit as what you can do changes according to which day it is. On the other hand the amount of recordkeeping needed to keep track of everywhere you've been and where you need to go again when puts a much higher load on the player. Also there are a lot of sections which tell you where to go next based on a die roll; possibly that increases replayability, but it's frustrating to think that you're missing things just because of the die. In some ways it feels like Haring really wanted to write an Infocom computer game.
#4: Badlands Run by Creede and Sharleen Lambard - You must take an elder of the Mormon church to a summit in San Francisco. A faction of hardline Mormons would prefer he didn't make it there.
While you get some choices about what to do along the way, the options start getting repetitive. At some point I decided to make it my goal to visit every restaurant in the book.
The SO tells me this was expanded from a shorter adventure in Autoduel Quarterly, and that the bit with the giant scorpion was infamous in the day.
#5: Green Circle Blues by Scott Haring - Terrorists who believe that a worldwide disaster was a hoax cooked up by big business are going to blow up a building in Seattle to expose the alleged hoax, and you need to get the one guy who can defuse it there from Boise ASAP.
Haring nails it this time. Replayability is increased by providing several opportunities for side quests, balanced by time pressure which means you can't do them all. There is also a twist lurking in the story which you are given a fair opportunity to notice and do something about before it is revealed. Far and away my favorite.
#6: Mean Streets by W. G. Armintrout - A new gang lord is rising in Houston, and he may have gotten hold of some nuclear weapons. As an agent of Texas Intelligence, you need to sneak in, swipe some key components, and get out of the urban jungle alive.
Houston, in this future, is so overrun by gangs that it has been walled off to keep them from contaminating the rest of civilization. You may suspect a touch of racism in this setting, but let me hasten to assure you that the book is actually quite extravagantly racist. Before you even start your mission, you're warned about a very very Asian assassin who is out to get you, and the gang boss wears "primitive African dress" and makes his gang members wear animal skins. Yeah.
You have a partner working with you, who you can ditch immediately if you want, but then you keep reading sections where the partner who isn't there is still talking to you, which is disconcerting. There is also a confusing array of spy gear to keep track of. Not great either on story or mechanics.
For those unfamiliar with Car Wars, it's set in the dystopian future of the 2030s when the United States has split into bickering mini-nations and the only way to travel is in heavily armed cars. Those same cars also participate in the organized sport of autoduelling.
#1: Battle Road by Steve Jackson - You have 24 hours to drive to Houston to rescue the daughter of the king of Louisiana before she is forcibly married to a powerful Native businessman as part of his plan to usurp the throne.
Mechanically, very much a first book. The combat system would be unchanged throughout the series, but the timekeeping part would come and go, and the "generic garage" and "generic clinic" sections it uses do not reappear.
#2: Fuel's Gold by Steve Jackson and Creede and Sharleen Lambard - You accept a job to take a very important package to Boston, then get mixed up in trying to stop some anarchists who have gotten hold of a rare stash of gasoline and decided to build a bomb with it.
Much stronger than #1; it has one of the more coherent stories in the series.
#3: Dueltrack by Scott Haring - You're an autoduellist about to compete with the aid of a special robot gunner. Some people object to the robot strongly enough to start trying to kill you.
This is about investigating a mystery, which gives it a very different structure from all the other books. There are lots of options you can visit and revisit as what you can do changes according to which day it is. On the other hand the amount of recordkeeping needed to keep track of everywhere you've been and where you need to go again when puts a much higher load on the player. Also there are a lot of sections which tell you where to go next based on a die roll; possibly that increases replayability, but it's frustrating to think that you're missing things just because of the die. In some ways it feels like Haring really wanted to write an Infocom computer game.
#4: Badlands Run by Creede and Sharleen Lambard - You must take an elder of the Mormon church to a summit in San Francisco. A faction of hardline Mormons would prefer he didn't make it there.
While you get some choices about what to do along the way, the options start getting repetitive. At some point I decided to make it my goal to visit every restaurant in the book.
The SO tells me this was expanded from a shorter adventure in Autoduel Quarterly, and that the bit with the giant scorpion was infamous in the day.
#5: Green Circle Blues by Scott Haring - Terrorists who believe that a worldwide disaster was a hoax cooked up by big business are going to blow up a building in Seattle to expose the alleged hoax, and you need to get the one guy who can defuse it there from Boise ASAP.
Haring nails it this time. Replayability is increased by providing several opportunities for side quests, balanced by time pressure which means you can't do them all. There is also a twist lurking in the story which you are given a fair opportunity to notice and do something about before it is revealed. Far and away my favorite.
#6: Mean Streets by W. G. Armintrout - A new gang lord is rising in Houston, and he may have gotten hold of some nuclear weapons. As an agent of Texas Intelligence, you need to sneak in, swipe some key components, and get out of the urban jungle alive.
Houston, in this future, is so overrun by gangs that it has been walled off to keep them from contaminating the rest of civilization. You may suspect a touch of racism in this setting, but let me hasten to assure you that the book is actually quite extravagantly racist. Before you even start your mission, you're warned about a very very Asian assassin who is out to get you, and the gang boss wears "primitive African dress" and makes his gang members wear animal skins. Yeah.
You have a partner working with you, who you can ditch immediately if you want, but then you keep reading sections where the partner who isn't there is still talking to you, which is disconcerting. There is also a confusing array of spy gear to keep track of. Not great either on story or mechanics.
