It must have been 30 years ago when a totally unique idea came around: a book-based video game. It was called Ace of Aces. The system was a series of boxed sets, each of which included two books. The core of each book was maybe 120 pages, each of which showed a cockpit view out of a WWI plane, facing towards an enemy plane at some distance in some orientation. If the enemy was directly in front of yours, the picture showed your guns firing. If your enemy was facing towards you, his guns were shown firing.

At the bottom of each page was a table. There were a series of symbols representing maneuvers you could perform, and next to each was a page number. But there was a catch to it:

Each guy would write down the symbol for the maneuver he wanted to perform next -- easy left, or hard right, or barrel roll, or Immelman, or whatever. He'd write down the number that was next to it.

Then each player gave the other player that page number. Each guy then went to the page number he'd been given, again looked up the symbol for his maneuver, and went to the page number shown there. And if everyone did everything correctly, both players would end up on the same page -- and the art was reflexive in the two books. If one player's book showed himself shooting at the other guy's side. the other book showed the enemy plane coming in shooting from the side.

Quite the fascinating concept. A friend of mine and I spent a lot of time at work playing it, during lunch breaks. (It was the same guy I used to play Ogre with. Ah, the good old days.)

I think there were eventually four different sets of books for the series, and the cool thing about it was that as long as you used the "A" book from one set and the "B" book from the other set, it would still work correctly.

Eventually the same guys came up with another game, based on a similar idea, but this one was a fighting game. The books were smaller, and they were sold in singles. Each book represented a single fighter, and had maybe 32 (?) pages showing different positions the fighter could be in, plus showing which moves were possible from there. (If you'd just been knocked on your butt, for instance, you obviously couldn't do a grand weapon down-swing on your opponent's head, right?)

I don't recall the details of that game all that well. It wasn't really quite as good. I did buy several of them, though.

It seems that idea is not dead. The Japanese have turned it into a panty-fighter game. I think I'm in love.

It's called "Queen's Blade" and I just noticed it while looking around at J-List. And because it is a panty-fighter game, all of the following links are NSFW: characters named Menace, Erina (who has nekomimi!), Irma, Risty, and there are a bunch of others, including a miko with a katana.

The FRP version from 30 years ago was printed in books which were trade paperback in size. Given that these are not just games but also "hentai art books", I wonder how large the pages are?

But the coolest thing of all? There's a Moetan book for the series. And reading the descriptions, it seems that the original game I remember was called "Lost Worlds" and came from a company called "Flying Buffalo". (That sounds right.) And these new books use the "Lost Worlds" logo, which means they have formally licensed the gaming system.

I wonder if this is the kind of thing that Kinokuniya would carry? It's a long ways away, especially in winter, but sometime when the weather is warm, I might rouse myself and walk over there to see. Probably it would be wiser to look it up first, though.

Japanese book, so it's got a Japanese title. Looking at the graphics, seems to be クイーンスブレイド ("kuinsubureido"). AND a search comes up empty. But that doesn't prove anything. The title in their database may be different.

UPDATE: Curse you, Amazon! I tried looking up "Queen's Blade" and came up with 7 American fantasy books. Useless. So then it occurred to me to try looking up "Moetan", in hopes of turning up the book specifically about her.

And after turning up 3 hits, none of which was useful, Amazon included the helpful "related search" kodomo no jikan.

Ack! Ack! AIEEEE! Keep it away from me!

UPDATE: Here's the Japanese home page for the product. According to Wikipedia, there were two different series. "Queen's Blade" is straight fantasy fighters; "Queen's Gate" features actual characters from anime. The Moetan book is probably one of the latter, which were announced in December of 2007, so it might be the first.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:32 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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