"Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth" Catch All

Atomicvideohead wrote:

I rather enjoy the verbose anglophile writing of lovecraft. Words like Eldrtich, and cycloptian don't get enough use. Fire fox doesn't even recognize them as words.

Probably because it's spelled "Cyclopean".

Has anyone figured out how the crazy system works? It is a meter that goes up and down, or does it slowly increase the whole game? Can I bring it back down?

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Atomicvideohead wrote:

I rather enjoy the verbose anglophile writing of lovecraft. Words like Eldrtich, and cycloptian don't get enough use. Fire fox doesn't even recognize them as words.

Probably because it's spelled "Cyclopean". :D

and eldritch - not to pile on

Yeah, Lovecraft never met an adjective he didn't like and tended to lean a bit heavily on the "if I told you what I saw it would drive you mad!" ending, but when his stories worked they worked. There's a lot of crap in his writings but there are some genuine diamonds in there too.

I've got just about every Lovecraft game released (even stinkers like Daughter of Serpents (aka The Scroll)) but not this one; when it came out my system didn't meet anything near the needed requirements and I haven't seen it since I upgraded to a new machine last year. I've finally gotten used to Steam but don't know much about Direct2Drive. Can I expect to have any problems using it or should I continue to look for a boxed copy somewhere?

tanstaafl wrote:

Yeah, Lovecraft never met an adjective he didn't like and tended to lean a bit heavily on the "if I told you what I saw it would drive you mad!" ending, but when his stories worked they worked. There's a lot of crap in his writings but there are some genuine diamonds in there too.

I've got just about every Lovecraft game released (even stinkers like Daughter of Serpents (aka The Scroll)) but not this one; when it came out my system didn't meet anything near the needed requirements and I haven't seen it since I upgraded to a new machine last year. I've finally gotten used to Steam but don't know much about Direct2Drive. Can I expect to have any problems using it or should I continue to look for a boxed copy somewhere?

I got a boxed copy online for about 20 dollars. D2D is pretty safe, I'd recommend it.

I played this game when it first came out and loved it... and for the last year and a half every time I went to the local gaming store I would see the same used copy up on the shelf for $15- I always meant to get it but there was always something else newer and shinier that demanded my money. The day after Rebel FM announced Dark Corners of the Earth as their backlog game I decided to head over and finally pick up the game... only to discover it gone. I had last seen it there only the week before. Oh, the cruel irony.

Yeah, that's the thing about Lovecraft - if you want to emulate his style, you're never going to have anyone read your stuff. His was a singular talent, a night-flowering bloom with a vaguely sinister underlying scent of decadent decay veiled by a voluptous appearance, but one does well not to immerse into a like bower, lest his writings all unbeknowst become overwhelmed by the tangled jungle growth of adjectival plantings.

Well played, Robear.

tanstaafl wrote:

I've got just about every Lovecraft game released ...

Did you play this one? Prisoner of Ice. That was my second experience with a Lovecraft game, after Alone in the Dark (the only good one).

Though not related to the game, in a Lovecraft thread I would be remiss not to mention the amazing Lovecraft-inspired indie rock band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. I've been a big fan since the late nineties and have enjoyed seeing them start to get more recognition in the videogame world with recent appearances in Penny Arcade Episode 2 and whatever number the current Rock Band is.

LobsterMobster wrote:

The other thing I don't like about Lovecraft is when he describes something as, "so horrible I went insane and if I described it accurately so would you!" Cop out.

A lot of readers have a problem with with Lovecraft for this very reason. As for me, I look at it as one of his strenghts. It's kind of like watching a horror flick that always keeps the monster in the shadows until the big reveal at the end. In the end, no matter how much latex or cgi you throw on something, you really can't change the fact that it's just a guy in a rubber suit. The best Lovecraft story ending is the finale of "At The Mountains of Madness." Directors would discribe it as a reaction shot. The audience doesn't see the monster. What we see is another character's reaction to seeing the monster which sends your imagination into overdrive.

Indignant wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

The other thing I don't like about Lovecraft is when he describes something as, "so horrible I went insane and if I described it accurately so would you!" Cop out.

A lot of readers have a problem with with Lovecraft for this very reason. As for me, I look at it as one of his strenghts. It's kind of like watching a horror flick that always keeps the monster in the shadows until the big reveal at the end. In the end, no matter how much latex or cgi you throw on something, you really can't change the fact that it's just a guy in a rubber suit. The best Lovecraft story ending is the finale of "At The Mountains of Madness." Directors would discribe it as a reaction shot. The audience doesn't see the monster. What we see is another character's reaction to seeing the monster which sends your imagination into overdrive.

Agreed. The ideas he's trying to convey need to exploit the reader's imagination for the full effect, and just wouldn't function as well as it does if he went into depth on each hoary ancient evil... which is why so many of the movies styled after his works are so horrendously bad. They take a sense of personal horror and turn it into tentacled splatter porn.

So I was trying to get to the sewers level, but I was expecting the name of the level to change from attack of the fishmen to "sewers", but it didn't. So I made it all the way to jailbreak. I can't make it past 4 feet without dying but the game so far has rocked. I really want a gun though.

For those of you who love Lovecraft, I have to recommend Michael Cisco. While he began his writing career writing Lovecraft pastiche, he has since developed his own voice and prose style, and he is a bona fide master wordsmith. Even Thomas Ligotti, the modern day king of weird fiction (often called the next in line to Poe and Lovecraft) admires Cisco.

His novella The Divinity Student, is probably the best thing I've ever read.

For a more cinematic and readily available comparison, imagine reading something written by an amalgamation of David Lynch and Takashii Miike filtered through the aesthetics of Vampire Hunter D with a healthy dose of ornate prose and a dense structure marked with brevity, all wrapped up in a story that is insightful, entertaining, haunting, and undeniably memorable.

Anyhow, I've always wanted to play this Cthulhu game - it's so hard to find on the XBOX, so good thing it is available as a digital dl (as all games should be!). Too bad it's still $30 though! I'll wait for $20.

I saw a playthrough of this game recently, it looked like a lovable mess of a game that didn't got the support it deserved. Plenty of bugs and some design decisions I thought poor, but seemed enjoyable nonetheless.

I was quite excited to find out the Rebel FM guys were doing Call of Cthulhu as I just finished reading all of Lovecraft: Tales, a compilation of his work by The Library of America. So far the game is very close to the source material, even in regards to some of HPL's more controversial racial remarks which I expected to have been omitted.

I've run into some nasty bugs that I've managed to work around, so I'll post them here in case someone else also encounters them.

In the first chapter, when climbing down the ladder in the cult house I would get a nasty video error as soon as I get to the bottom of the ladder. I did some searching online and found out that if you jump off the ladder instead of climbing all the way down you avoid the glitch. Worked for me.

When riding the bus into Innsmouth I would get the same glitch at the very end of the bus ride. Instead of letting it play out I skipped the cutscene and bypassed the glitch.

I'm on Vista 64, running in XP SP2 compatibility mode.

Running Man wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

I've got just about every Lovecraft game released ...

Did you play this one? Prisoner of Ice. That was my second experience with a Lovecraft game, after Alone in the Dark (the only good one).

In no particular order, the ones I can think of off the top of my head...
The Lurking Horror, Alone in the Dark, Daughter of Serpents, Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice, Necronomicon and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened... Plus the IF game Anchorhead.

I've sure I've got a few more that I just can't think of at the moment.

Well, I've made it to the first save in the sewers. Love the atmosphere and sound effects.

I made it to the marsh refinery, its just past this weeks checkpoint, so I'm going to take a break for a couple of days.

Escape from Innsmouth was absolutely awesome, getting a gun changed things so much. I was really getting frustrated with sneaking around so getting to shoot sh*t finally felt pretty rewarding. The second I saw that crowbar I got all warm and tingly inside, and all the half-life nostalgia flowed out of me as I beat the living sh*t out of anything moved until I got a gun. It was interesting how they gave you all the guns at once for the most part, and force you to fight in a lot of cases. The gun play is surprisingly good once you remember you can hold right click to aim. I actually made it quite far in the marsh refinery level, which is very very reminiscent of half-life 1 for me, with a teeny bit more stealth. The only thing that irks me is enemy respawns, since ammo is so limited. There's a few places in the game so far, one before retrieving the flower brooch, that require you to push forward no matter what, and just kill as you go, because enemies will respawn infinitely and you'll just lose ammo. It's hard to tell when that is and isn't the case until it's too late usually. By too late I mean you've wasted enough ammo deserving of a save reload.

I also don't know how far everyone is, but there's a really sick boss fight as well. I think it took heavy heavy inspiration from the first boss in half life 1, to bring up that connection again. The boss with the 3 heads and the claws that was in the whole, just from how it looked and acted to how killing it worked like a puzzle. I'm almost glad they took my guns away for that, because if they hadn't I'm sure I would have shot at it endlessly until all my ammo was gone thinking I was shooting at the wrong spot. I also have to admit I was genuinely terrified while fighting that thing. There's a few segments where you just have to make a break for it and hope to not get impaled, what got me even more was getting hit a few times because it just adds tension when you barely make it through alive. Also the window scene in the office, totally a half life moment, so it was easy to see coming. Don't get me wrong though, I think the fight was a lot more fun (Even though it had an 8 year time difference between the 2), and I was terrified and excited to play it. Still loving this game, although I miss my guns.

Lastly, J Edgar Hoover's appearance was priceless, and how this was just another one of his raids from those days. It's cool how they tied it in like that.

What a coincidence! I just reinstalled this game the other night. I bought this game at launch, way back when. I still have my old save games. I forget why I stopped playing the game. It was probably due to a new pc build and then a shiny new pc game install.

Even though I have my original save game files, I am restarting from the beginning.

Goonch wrote:

What a coincidence! I just reinstalled this game the other night. I bought this game at launch, way back when. I still have my old save games. I forget why I stopped playing the game. It was probably due to a new pc build and then a shiny new pc game install.

Even though I have my original save game files, I am restarting from the beginning.

I just beat it today. I managed to hit every known error and bug in the game and a few more my version decided to make up to "enhance" my experience. I honestly never want to think about this game ever again.