Choice of the Dragon

I love adventure! When I was younger I used to enjoy those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' game books. I still do, and in adulthood I've started to use them as stories to read to the kids so that they can enjoy them too. Choice of the Dragon replicates the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' format on an Android device (and via their website and on iPhone). Choice of the Dragon won't wow you with graphics or sound effects. If you're the type of gamer that demands a fire button then this is not for you. Instead, you'll be reading fragments of a story and choosing courses of action from among several choices. Generally my experience with these games on a computer has been poor... either the game is too short or the story too boring. Choice of the Dragon is not. The writing is well done. And the programming is even smart enough to save my adventure after every selection! [In technospeak that means I can kill the process, relaunch the app, and it restores the game from the point at which I left.]

I've included one of the two Market screenshots without scaling it down in size so you can get a basic idea of not only what it looks like, but how it reads. Now, the next thing I liked about this is that the game took me through a sort of character generation first, but instead of letting me choose stats it asked me to answer questions about the kind of dragon I wanted to be. Once you complete that the game is played in chapters and is quite engrossing.

The game is free and is fully ad supported so far. In fact they have three others that are also also free (search for 'choice of') whereas iPhone owners are being asked to pay for the most recent release. That's a first... usually it's "stick it to the Android owners". I wouldn't have any animosity for that if it weren't the norm. I do suspect that these could become pay, however, or, at least, future ones will be paid apps based on reading the author's blog (some interesting stuff over there and my sympathies to Dan and my appreciation for his sharing of information). 5/5 stars for a game that's not for everybody, but does exactly what it tries to VERY well!