Given that it's free, "I wasted My Money" might seem strange, but at 150 gigabytes of bandwidth, for $100, this cost me 0.1 cents, and that was a waste of 0.1 cents. It was 1,577kB if you want to double check my math.
I read A Stainless Steel Rat is Born and The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge when I was a kid, in reverse order. I loved them. While I was just downloading the other books from The Underdogs for archiving purposes, I opened this one up right away. I thought it would be awesome to read a Chose Your Own Adventure type book written by the author of an actual book.
It started out alright, you're a recruit for the Stainless Steel Rat's agency, you get thrown into the adventure and have him talking to you through your head. The problem is there's no clear visual way to tell when he's talking to you and you're reading a description. That's just lazy writing, I guess Harrison figured he could cash in on the craze without putting in much effort.
The only randomiser is flipping a coin, and that doesn't seem to make much of a difference. That's actually a big problem with this book, your choices don't make a difference. The fact that it has only one ending (which, by the way, I didn't reach as I gave up on the book) illustrates this nicely, but still there could be some different consequences.
There were some funny moments in the book, some interesting jokes, but in the end it just didn't make a difference what you chose. This wasn't bothering me much until I got halfway into the adventure (maybe it was more than halfway, I'm not completely sure), as it was reasonably funny and there was some variety. The point where I gave up though was where the choices were basically chosing do you go left or right? If you get all the right choices you get through quickly, if you make the wrong ones you're in an endless loop until you stumbel on the right one. That's no fun, it's okay to have that occasionally dispersed throughout the book and you have some interesting, but irrelevant flavour text afterwards. It's a huge pain if you get 20 or 30 of them in a row. I just closed the PDF and stopped reading at that point. The book wasn't good enough to justify wading through it to get something interesting and it was just hugely frustrating.
While it had some of Harry Harrison's wit (from what I remember reading his books over 10 years ago), it wasn't anything better than any other CYOA books I have read. His humour is all that gets the style up from a 1 to a 2. Ultimately in the end, there's nothing to this book that makes it worth reading even if you have unlimited bandwidth that you're not paying for. It's a waste of time to read, and probably an additional waste of time for me to write this review.
Just don't bother with it, give a shot at one of the other ones on Underdogs. I don't see how anything else could be much worse.
