Goblin Bane
by Combatdisk,
Price: $4.99
Reviewed February 2003
There was a time when interactive ebooks
flourished; a time before dungeons and dragons took their
shapes in the 3D gaming realm. The time when playing RPGs
via email was cutting edge is gone, but thanks to the interactive
ebook faithful, some of the popular stories made their way
to our current PDAs. Written by Robert Vance and published
by Combatdisk, Goblin Bane is the first in Heroes of Redmarch.
If you want to get familiar with the world of Redmarch, you
can check our its official website here.
With some RPG elements in the story, Goblin
Bane reads as if the student of Tolkien wrote it. In these
familiar dark woods hides the fortress of Goblins. On the
night of the Winter Solstice in the year 690 AC, the evil
green goblins invaded a small village of Branholm, slaughtered
everyone and took away their young. A journey begins for
Thomas Havelock, a villager who escaped from the attack and
soon will find his way into the darkness of the Goblin domain
and slain the monsters to rescue the children. The game is
played in the way of making decisions. After you read a little
bit of the story, you will be presented with choices, which
will ultimately determine where the story goes. Some choices
will prolong the story; others will end it. The attraction
of the game (story) lays in replaying the game multiple times
to see different progress and various endings.
Goblin Bane drew inspiration from Heroes
of Redmarch, and gives the story a good number of twists
and turns. Though it seems a bit too short with a small number
of NPCs (non-playable characters) and quests even after I
checked out every possible branch of the story. The good
writing style and a few still images inserted in the story
help to create this fantasy world.
Even though there is an option to turn
the sound/music on, I couldn’t get any sound on either
Palm or Pocket PC. Goblin Bane will run on any Palm OS 3.5
or higher devices and any ARM or Xscale Pocket PCs with 457K
of RAM.
For the old die hard inebook fans,
Goblin Bane marks the beginning of a promising RPG fantasy
story. A story that tells the fortunes and misfortunes
of the Elder World, as Talkie called it, where the warg
howls and the orc prowls. Are you brave enough to face
it?
Playing Hints and Tips
Try all the choices; replay the story
until you’ve explored all the possibilities.
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