Moonthly update- Octubre

Not a Dragon, exactly, but you might call him a...Wyrm?

Welcome to October, the Spookiest of Months!  

No, I have no plans to dress up and party hearty on Halloween.  But that may change between now and then.  I don't place a lot of stock in Holidays.  Call me Scrooge or Grinch if you like.  I think I just haven't developed traditions of my own as an adult.  Also I've never been all that into costumes. But I'm not completely without seasonal cheer.  I may just carve some pumpkins, which is always fun. 

Because it's October, I think I’ll dust off that Lovecraft Collection Jaconian picked up for me a couple years ago.  Have you ever read Lovecraft?  If you have any interest in American Gothic Horror, you pretty much have to read Lovecraft.  He’s like the awesome sequel to Edgar Allen Poe.  Seriously, he's like the Terminator 2 of American Horror.  Between Poe and Lovecraft, pretty much every Classic Element of American Gothic Horror is brought to life.  Seriously, he’s that good.  You’ll find it familiar.  It will comfort and terrify you.  At least that’s what it does for me.

I would also like to indulge in some horror games.  At least try, if not beat Amnesia: The Dark Decent.  Others I can revisit, such as Six Days a Sacrifice and Lone Survivor.   On the other hand, it also looks like this October is Dragon Month, given our two Dragon Themed posts so far in October, with more planned for the near future.  I've also got a Dragon Themed Magic deck in the works.. This previous month I have been playing Magic: The Gathering – buying lots of packs, building decks, sorting cards.  This marks one of many returns I've made to this game.  It seems like about every five years now. 

Also, I have continued playing Starseed Pilgrim.   I love this game, I've gushed about how much fun it is to figure out how to play it.  But now that I've figured it out and gotten through a lot of the game, I've discovered that it's frickin' hard!   I've confirmed that it has an end.   And I think I'm near it.  But geez louise, this game is tough!  I can only go further through tenacious obsession!  Painfully crawling my way up a hill.  Sysiphus, eat your heart out. 

 I’ve got a new job, with lots of down time, which has led me to write more posts.  Of course, I'm always nervous composing this stuff at work.  .... shiver!  There's a horror game for you, sit at a desk for eight hours, but you never know when boss man will suddenly appear and catch you surfing the web! Ahhh!

-D

First Impressions: Mansions of Madness (Board Game)

Conklederp and I received Mansions of Madness from Salty Liver and her newly acquired hubby for our own wedding, which will be taking place in less than two weeks.  Last night, we finally broke into this monster of a game.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to play this game in particular was because despite its size as a board game, it can be played with only two players without losing any of the attempts to create fear and dread.  The other reason I wanted to play Mansions of Madness was because it is based on various stories by H.P. Lovecraft and I have already covered my issues with playing games based on Lovecraft with groups of people unfamiliar Lovecraftian mythos.  So far, knowledge of Lovecrafts stories do not seem to be dependent on having fun with this game.

That being said, Mansions of Madness is an overwhelming game.  Just look at everything that is included with this beast as mere word could not do it justice:

Picture courtesy of: http://www.beastsofwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Mansions-of-Madness-1.jpg

The board is made up of double sided heavy-duty cardboard with wonderfully detailed rooms with hallway sized rectangular pieces, large room square pieces (hallway x 2) and one large main hall/front yard piece (hallway x 3).  There are I don't know how many permutations that could be created with these pieces.

Anyway, we are here to briefly talk about the hour long play session that Conklederp had last night.  We did not finish either, but came very close.

I played as The Keeper (the DM in D&D terms) while Conklederp played as the one Investigator (PC in D&D).  Being out first time playing, there were quite a few moments when I had to look at the rules to know what to do with certain cards (if an artifact could be kept after being used or had to be discarded), if the Investigator could search a room when a monster was either in the same room or space or if unlocking a puzzle/lock counts as an action the same way searching a room counts as an action (it does not if the Investigator succeeds in unlocking the puzzle/lock).  

Again, "overwhelming" comes to mind.  It would be like starting a game of Dungeons & Dragons for the first time and anyone who knows what that is like can understand the feeling of performance anxiety, even if it is with someone who is patient and understanding.  Conklederp and I were patient with each other as we asked questions about what to do or clarifying information on cards.  Still, I felt we both had a lot of fun.

Playing as The Keeper, I have to have bits of information kept secret from the Investigators, know which cards I have and when I can play them (cards kept secret) all the while holding down a poker face so I do not give away the fact that I could cripple an Investigator with the drop of a card.  I didn't.  Some cards are event specific while others are dependent on the Investigator being in a specific room or a room with a specific feature (An altar, ventilation grate, hiding spot).  It is a lot of information to take in and keep track of all the while maintaining a sense of fear for the player and role playing the story and keeping the events interesting for the player.

I love it!

Like I said, Conklederp and I played for about an hour, maybe an hour and-a-half with rule clarification happening, but not including the time it took to set up the board, place the room cards in their specific locations, and gather which specific cards I needed for the story that I was telling.  Set-up took about 30 minutes.  Overall, the game is supposed to take about two to three hours from start to finish and I can confirm that with at least two people, this prediction is pretty accurate, although I can understand this being a turnoff for a good segment of the board game playing population.

An hour in, and I have control of only four monsters.  Plenty to drive Conklederp's character insane!

Before we started playing, I also quickly created a playlist of instrumental background music that I set to shuffle.  This list included music from Bram Stoker's Dracula by Wojceich Kilar, Castlevania 64 by Masahiko Kimura, Motoaki Furukawa and Mariko Egawa, Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Mikko Tarmia and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem by Steve Henifin.  At times the music seemed to mirror the actions in the game, but I never noticed that the music was out of place, but then I was also paying attention to the music when it changed while I cannot say the same for Conklederp.

There is a lot that I have yet to cover such as horror checks, trauma cards, combat, how the choices The Keeper makes during setup affects and changes the story and how events unfold during play, and how the game is won.  I will say that while it is The Keeper's objective to prevent the Investigators from achieving their objective (which is revealed to them through the course of the game/story), if an Investigator dies, that is not the end of the game, but the player can bring in a new character (one that has not yet been killed) up until the final act in the game.  I love that this is a game designed around everyone having fun but still knowing that in the end, someone will have to come out victorious.

I am looking forward to concluding this one (of many) possible storylines with Conklederp and more so to playing with our friends next weekend.  The one downside is that the game is designed for 2-5 players and apparently can be very cluttered and may not be playable if more than four Investigators are playing as the Investigators end up just stacking up in rooms without being able to either do much "investigating" or they spread out too much, uncovering information that would have been uncovered a turn or two later, progressing the story at a slower, more manageable pace.

The point is, there is a lot to this game and I cannot wait to delve deeper into its tentically depths.  Perhaps after we are finished, Conklederp will do a write up about her experience as an Investigator playing Mansions of Madness for the first time.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Something It Appears Has Changed

First Impressions: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has a sordid history with me, which is why I didn't jump on the bandwagon back in 2006 when the game first came out.  Prior to 2006, I had heard nothing about The Elder Scrolls series on any platform, most likely due to the fact that I wasn't a big PC gamer until recently and I didn't own a 360 or PS3.  

The symbol for the school of Conjuration.

I recall seeing the boxes in Target and upon first inspection, I thought that I had stumbled across a video game series based around H.P. Lovecraft's Cthuhlu mythos.  The cues for me were the similarity between the "Elder Gods" and the "Elder Scrolls," as well as "Oblivion" being a frequent theme of sorts in Lovecraft's writings about the various.  Even the logo I thought was an artistic relic based around the image of Cthulhu.  Granted the symbol looks a bit more like fangs, but now that you have Lovecraft in your mind, seeing what I had thought might become a bit more clear.  So at this point, I figured I would get around to playing this Oblivion game.

The house I live in during 2006, we had a housemate whom we will simply call OnlineGamblerGuyWhoLivesInAMercedes, or Axe for short talked a bit about the game then showed myself and Chreekat what the game was like.  He described it as a kind of fun fantasy game played in first person and I immediatly thought of the Neo Geo game, Crossed Swords.  Axe said that by the end of the game it had gotten repetitious and that you can simply jump while moving and you raise in experience levels.  He said that it while it was a decent game, just that by the end, it got pretty boring.

This was my first impression of not only Oblivion, but of this apparent Elder Scrolls series.  It was not a favorable impression.

Ring in 2012.   Skyrim had been out a year by the time I bought the game and delved deep into it's depths (not nearly as much as Conklederp has mind you).  Thus my impression of The Elder Scrolls forever changed and for the better at that.  In March of 2013 I began playing Morrowind (Chapter III) and this January (just over a month ago), I began playing Oblivion.  

My feelings about this game continue to be conflicted.  I understand the immense leap from Morrowind to Obilivion, the changes in gameplay mechanics (the ones I know about anyway), the graphical improvements over the four years between the two games.  However, in the back of my mind are those first feelings of negativity because of the review of a housemate and finding out that the conjuration sigil had nothing to do with anything related to H.P. Lovecraft.

One other sad thing, for me at least, is that I'm not a fan of the intro song, which is just a fanfaric and slightly sped up version of "Nerevar Rising" from Morrowind.  Yes, I know it was used again in "Dragonborn" from Skyrim, but there it's done with a choir and all bombastic, which I tend to like.  Basically the song, "Reign of the Septims" using the "Nerevar Rising" theme, plays it too fast for what the song is doing.  I don't know if that really makes much sense, but that's how I feel.  The rest of the music in the world I do enjoy as it is very Jeremy Soule and fitting for Cyrodiil.

Presently, I am 14 hours into the game, which isn't far by Elder Scroll standards and for those of you who know, I just joined The Blades at Cloud Ruler Temple and that is where I have left the game since the middle of January.  Rather than be all rhetorical, I have not stopped playing, but felt that I could now diverge from the main storyline to do any half dozen of those side quests that always populate these open world games.

There are certain things that I do like so far in Obilivion such as the lushness of the land.  I mean, just look at all these lupins (??)

and I just escaped (was allowed to escape) from prison!  I like the facial feature-thing mechanic that I will/might get to in a later post.  I like building my character and having them focus their abilities along certain paths.  And as is the case with any game, there are certain aspects that I'm not too fond of such as the menu system, the pudginess of faces due to the facial feature-thing mechanic, the ability to fast travel to locations you have not yet gone to but know of their existence and how small Cyrodiil feels, but maybe this last part is normal having come from such a vast expanse in Vvardenfell.

I will come back to Obilivion very soon, I think I just needed some time to figure out my current feelings for the game and how they conflict with how I first felt about the game.  Well, that's about my quota for the month for talking about feelings.  


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Shall Return From Out Of The Fire
P.S.  Have a good (snowy?) weekend all.

First Impressions: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC)

Whoops.  I guess I should have saved my previous post looking back at 2013 for my actual last post in 2013.  I just miscalculated and didn't look at a calendar to confirm my horrible counting skills.  Brain farts aside, let's do another First Impression since Steam's Winter Sale Extravaganza is coming to an end in a few days and a "few" games were purchased.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a game developed by Headfirst Productions and released by Bethesda Softworks, yes, that Bethesda Softworks.  The game was released on PC and Xbox back in 2006 after being in development for close to four years, so it kind of looks like a PC game from an evolving era.

Now, I'm a sucker for a psychological horror game (a la Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem) based on some of the works by H.P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu (hereby referred to simply as Cthulhu) promises not to disappoint.  Even the opening "Warning" promises the game to play against you:

Now, for me, Cthulhu has some mighty big shoes to fill since for me Eternal Darkness did so much right and with the perfect amount of difficulty while still maintaining a consistent level of "fun."  Presently, after two hours, the only "sanity effects" that I have witnessed have been a shaking of the screen while staring at corpses for too long.  That's a good start to things.  I don't want blood dripping down the screen and my character screaming 15 minutes into the game as there's nowhere to go from there.  You have to start out slow, building the tension.

The Wikipedia article for Cthulhu will tell you that the game has been known to bug out.  Some glitches causing the game to stop working all together or in my case, causing the game to freeze for a second, usually when I click on something in order to examine some abysmal horror, or you know, a first aid kit.  One bug that I have experienced that consistently freezes the game is after you reach Innsmouth and you're ducking around behind buildings, you enter a room and spot a corpse hanging from the ceiling.  The camera zooms in on this body and upon returning to your normal field of vision, the game is stuck.  I can still tilt my view left and right, but moving does not happen.  This happened twice.  I have yet to try and enter said building without looking at the hung corpse.  Luckily though there is a  save spot just outside the door so I do not have to go too far to find a work around.

Once reaching Innsmouth, I became a little conflicted as to the story in the game and potential/intended surprises.  I have read The Shadow Over Innsmouth and I have recognized certain things that are important points in Lovecraft's story.  These are touches to characters and the environment that I wonder if someone not familiar with the story would notice or see as important.  Presently, it genuinely feels like a video game adaptation of the story, which I am not complaining about, but because of how faithful certain details are, I do wonder if there will still be an element of surprise in the story.

One thing that I have noticed is in the writing of journals and diaries from NPCs and the main character.

Now, maybe I'm just being overly anal, but the above passage does not sound as if it were written by a young man in 1922.  The writing sounds very contemporary, which kind of takes me out of the 1922 New England setting.  Maybe it's just because Conklederp and I are reading ghost stories published around the same time.

Another aspect to the game that I am excited about is healing.  The inventory screen shows not only what is in your inventory, but also the health status of Mr. Jack Walters.  

When you bring the cursor over your body, a screen comes up giving you the ability to "repair" different areas of your body with stitches, bandages, splints.  I am kind of excited to see the character with a splinted leg, bandages around his arms and maybe some sutures on/around the facial region.  I am, however, not excited to be in that situation with creatures potentially chasing after me.

So yes, two hours in and despite the occasional bug/glitch, I am enjoying what I have been playing.  Now to see if I can make it through despite the often commented on difficulty of the game itself.  Here's to hoping.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Let His Soul Forever Burn

As a parting gift (of sorts), here are two more screen shots that I did not find a place for in the body of the article.

Jack Walters at his desk, looking over documents before leaving for Innsmouth in 1922.

The cheery hotel lobby in Innsmouth.

So happy new year everyone, and thanks for everything.

Full Review: Penumbra: Black Plague

This review of Frictional Games' 2008 release, Penumbra Black Plague might be a little shorter than my previous review for the first game in the series (Penumbra: Overture), but that is because I am omitting the "gameplay" section as the game operates on the same HPL Engine that Overture ran on, so all the mechanics are identical.  I will add though that there was a tutorial of sorts and leave it to Frictional Games to have a tutorial that managed to give me chills.

STORY

The game takes place shortly after the end of Overture.  You wake up to find yourself locked in a room and you have to escape, and to figure out what's going on and if you father (aptly named Howard) is still alive, whom you previously had thought was dead.  Like most sequels, all the gear and notes that you had accumulated from the first game are gone, possibly explained that whomever knocked you out had taken them, so I'm okay with that.

Once out of the room, the remainder of the story is more straight forward than the first game, although you are still attempting to locate your father.  In Overture, you're wandering through many layers of caves while in Black Plague, you find yourself in another section of the same complex, but predominantly in and around research labs and offices.  The setting change was a bit drastic and took me a little while to get used to, but I ultimately preferred this location to the caves.  

Early on in the game, you start hearing a "voice" inside your head who talks to you in consistently demeaning way, frequently calling you "monkey."  Now, the voice that was chosen I had a little bit of an issue with as it was a pseud0-stereotypical New Jersey accent.  Seeing as how the game was made by Swedes, I don't know if this type of accent is unnerving or has some other kind of connotation, but I just found it amusing and not disarming at all.

Like many of Lovecraft's stories, the story takes a hard right turn in the third act, revealing the backstory of the main antagonist.  It's honestly not really my pint of stout, but I do appreciate that this element works for the story that was written and I feel that if H.P. Lovecraft were to write for a video game company, this is probably what he would come up with as well.  Ultimately, it makes sense, and I'm okay with that.

GAMEPLAY

I lied, I am going to go into gameplay a little bit as there were some elements that were new for this game.  Hallucinations played a big part in this game.  During the first part of the game, you find yourself in a series of hallways, forced to complete different puzzles to exit said hallway to find yourself in yet another hallway.

For a research lab's hallway, I don't think this is very sterile.

There's another time in the game when you find yourself running away from something in an area that you've previously spent at least an hour in, so you know the general layout.  During this escape you're trying to make, you find that the layout is changing, hallways are momentarily becoming dead-ends, once open doors cannot be opened or have disappeared all together and all the while someone/thing is laughing at you.  Oh, and your vision is slightly blurry and shaky, so there's that to deal with as well.

SOUND & MUSIC

There was no real noticeable difference between the quality of the music/sound in Black Plague and Overture.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I felt that Black Plague was a very good follow up to Overture.  The game was a little short (I finished it in just over nine hours), but honestly, any longer and it might have felt like I was playing the same set of hallway, room, puzzle, monster, puzzle, hallway, monster, puzzle, room.  And being able to maintain a constant level of fear and paranoia for that long is highly commendable.  In the end, I didn't feel like I struggled as much with Black Plague, but that could have also been due to the fact that the spiders and wolves from Overture had been taken out and replaced with one particular type of monster/creature that was even more terrifying.

I will add that I had to look on gamefaqs for a couple of the final puzzles in the game, but as it turned out, I had either forgotten about something a few rooms back or just didn't notice that switch on the wall that blended in with the drab concrete/bricks.  The last puzzle in the game though I don't think I would have figured out on my own, which is kind of sad, but I guess my brain just didn't work in the way that the Tuurngait wanted it to.

Now it's onto the final installment, Penumbra: Requiem.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Ambient Silence

In His House in R'lyeh, Dead Cthulhu Wonders If You've Read His Memoirs?

I love H.P. Lovecraft's stories.

I haven't read them all and while I don't, in fact, love them all, I love a lot of what he has written.  Despite the fact that he is somewhat racist and anti-semitic in some of his tales, as a whole, he was a writer of some fantastic weird fiction.

That being said, I think it's very safe to say that Lovecraft is a good description of a cult author, in I feel that a lot more people know about Lovecraft than have actually read his works.  Admittingly, I hadn't read anything by him until I was introduced to him back in late 2003 (the same year I started reading Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams).  I also to not claim to be an expert on anything Elder God or Old Ones related, just want to put that out there before I started gushing over various tomes of Lovecraftian lore.

The "industry" also has quite the love affair with H.P. Lovecraft.  Everything from in-game references (Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Cthulhu Saves the World, Alone in the Dark), movies (In the Mouth of Madness, Prometheus), to board games (Arkham Horror, Munchkin: Cthulhu, Mansions of Madness).  I feel like saying that Lovecraft's lore, specifically the lore dealing with Cthulhu is a multi-million dollar-a-year industry, but that just might be me talking out of my ass.

There's so much good stuff out there that I would love to get my hands on (refrained from saying "tentacles"), all of it requiring money for one, that I have to keep reminding myself that I don't know a whole lot of people (especially people who live near me) that would have as much fun as I would spending an evening playing a game based on stories by Lovecraft.  A few weeks back, one of my friends Cletus posted on facebook about a Cthulhu game on kickstarter called Cthulhu Wars that looked pretty amazing, not including all of the add ons and "reach goals."  After looking over the kickstarter page, I had to force myself to leave the page and "forget" about it for the three days it had remaining in fear that I would plunk down $139 for a game that I probably wouldn't play too often because the people I do play games with haven't read much of any Lovecraft and would probably rather play Cards Against Humanity or Munchkin.  Don't get me wrong, I love CAH and Munchkin, but it wouldn't be as much fun playing a Cthulhu game with people who don't get the references.  Kind of like listening to a "Weird Al" polka and not recognizing any of the songs: it's still fun, but not as much fun as if you knew the songs to begin with.

I'm not sure where to go with the rest of this article, if it really needs to go anywhere else.  Maybe it's finished?  And so it shall be.

Happy Monday all!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Playing Games on the Pavement