the pointless weblog

Invasion of the Ormazoids was a choose your own adventure book starring Doctor Who. It was written by Philip Martin, illustrated by Gail Bennett, and published by Severn House in 1986.

In this book you get to help Doctor Who fight some monstrous pretend Davros and his army of genetically engineered abominations on a planet at the edge of the universe. The whole thing is completely incomprehensible in every way. I think it might be the worst book I’ve ever read.

I’ve read the sentence that starts “The question is” about a hundred times in an attempt to understand it, but I cannot. It is just too much.

The book also messes up the conceit that the character you’re playing is actually you by repeatedly including “you” in the illustrations. Luckily it appears that you’re just David Tennant.

There were at least five more books in this series, but I don’t know if I dare seek them out.

This pack of Top Trumps were released in 1992 by Waddingtons. There are 30 cards in the set.

This pack was part of the same series as the Aliens and Space Monsters set. There was also a third set in the series, Goblins and Faeriefolk, which is probably the best of the lot, due to having a witch in it. 

I think the best card in this set is probably Barad the incredibly smug Minotaur.

Also in this pack (and in most of the other packs from the early 90s), there is a card that’s just an advert for subbuteo.

There’s also a card that allows you to claim a free pack if you have enough of them, but I don’t think we ever did. Or, at least, if we did we never sent them off.

Also I’ve only just noticed that by the 90s they weren’t even Top Trumps anymore but Super Top Trumps.

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons was written by Terrance Dicks and published by Target Books in 1975. It was based on a Doctor Who TV serial written by Robert Holmes. The book contains 6 full-page illustrations by Alan Willow, who presumably also did the cover illustrations, although it doesn’t actually say.

I’ve never seen the TV version of this story, but as it contains an evil circus, The Master, malevolent murderous plastic dolls,  a gigantic crab/spider/octopus beast, telephone wires of death and plastic daffodils that are programmed to kill each and every one of us, I expect it is the scariest thing ever broadcast on TV.

Despite all that, the most shocking moment comes on page 55.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term “garaged” before, and it’s making me shudder mildly with revulsion.

The illustrations that pop-up throughout the book are uniformly excellent. I would usually worry slightly about them spoilers, but the blurb does enough of that already.

Spacecraft Top Trumps were another Waddingtons pack from the late 70s or early 80s. There were 32 cards in the set.

This was another of our favourite packs of top trumps. It’s a fairly incongruous collection of real world spaceships, famous UFO photos, excellent science fiction illustrations, and solen photos of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica spaceships renamed and reappropriated.

The Centaurus spaceship was drawn by Chris Foss. I’ve seen a different coloured version of that image used on a book cover before. I don’t know who any of the other illustrators are, though.

This is a fairly pointless post, even by my standards, but I found an old Crossbows and Catapults instruction booklet the other day, and the front cover is really wonderful.

The rest of the instruction booklet is just diagrams and rules, and I cannot be bothered to scan it all in.