Brand, Ideas, Story, Style, My Life: The 7 Most F***ed Up Real 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books ( 3/8 ).

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The 7 Most F***ed Up Real 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books ( 3/8 ).

#6. Inside UFO 54-40 -- A Hidden Ending You Can Find Only by Cheating

Bantam Books

The rules of Choose Your Own Adventure were pretty straightforward: You, as the second-person protagonist of the story, made choices to guide the plot. Making the right choices led you to the best ending, while making the wrong ones led you to one of myriad horrible and agonizing deaths. Sounds fair, if a bit Dante-esque for a children's book, right?

Inside UFO 54-40 does not do "fair."

The story begins when you're abducted from a jetliner by alien creatures who want to cage you intheir galactic zoo, but for some reason you're allowed to freely roam the halls of their dongship, the Rakma. Take the wrong path, and you might be sent to "SOMA," a sort of solitary confinement that murders you via prolonged depression.

Bantam Books
Even Major Tom thanks the stars he isn't you.

Or get split in half by a transdimensional portal ...

Bantam Books
It's like we suspected all along: running sucks.

While the "right" paths allow you to do things like hijack the ship and accidentally crash it into Nebraska, taking those alien bastards straight to Hell with you.

Bantam Books
"The aliens posthumously brand you a terrorist and install invasive body scanners in
all their spaceports to prevent this tragedy from occurring again.
THE END."

You can even escape to be reunited with your parents on Earth, and most of us thought that was the best ending. But all through the book, you're told about a planet called Ultima that's supposed to be some sort of paradise, yet no matter what choices you make, or how many times you cheat back to your finger-place, you just can't get there. That's because, as we mentioned before, Inside UFO 54-40 doesn't play fair. Ultima is in the book, on page 101, but the author included no choice whatsoever that tells you to turn to that page. The only way to find Ultima is to randomly flip through all the pages of the book, otherwise known as breaking the one and only rule of Choose Your Own Adventure.

Bantam Books
"So it's like using Apple Maps to go anywhere, then."

So there you go, kids: If you want to truly win in life, you have to ignore all the rules and cheat your way to victory. Then attribute your success to a higher power! Seems to work for the Patriots.