Gameplay

The game design in Cthulhu is clearly geared towards quick and simple enjoyment instead of the more complicated, time consuming setups of a classic RPG like Final Fantasy III (or VI, for purists). For example, you can autosave at any time there isn’t a cinematic or battle, meaning you never have to worry about losing too much progress. Other convenient design choices include an option to teleport back to discovered towns to recover, refilled hit points at the end of every battle, only one weapon and armor slot per character to manage, and a single “potion” item that resurrects, heals, and cures status effects. Cthulhu also has an “Insanity Mode” status effect available to the player that is generally useful, though it’s specific effect differs with individual enemy types. Finally, there is a limit on the encounters you randomly face in any area you enter.

This last feature is a bit problematic. While I enjoyed not facing perpetual battles wherever I went, it was difficult for an OCD personality like me to roam dungeons normally like I would in other classic RPGs. Instead, I usually found myself using the “fight battle” menu command Zeboyd included to bring the battle counter to zero manually, so I could explore the dungeon unobstructed. It could be said that this battle limit is a benefit, since you choose between grinding kills and then exploring, or going the traditional route. Perhaps someone else will enjoy it more, but I always felt a nagging need to just get to zero.

I chose the grind because many treasure chest items are a necessity for survival. The dungeons are often large and chaotic in layout, with looping paths leaving you wandering for minutes at a time to get to the chests. Add constant battles interrupting your sense of position in a dungeon, and it’s more frustrating than working to that zero count.

Another occasionally frustrating feature of the game is that, while health recovers after every battle, magic points don’t. These can only be regenerated at inns and save points, sometimes necessitating a teleport to a town mid-dungeon run. I could go on about other perplexing features, but you get the idea. Zeboyd did well with many of their features (and well overall), but it’s clear they still have much to learn.

Presentation

Cthulhu Saves the World is a fun spin on H.P. Lovecraft’s giant, evil god-like creature Cthulhu, who wakes up at the start of the game and attempts to destroy the world (which is his goal in the stories, too). He is stopped by some heroes at the beginning, however, and has a curse placed on him in which he must become a “true hero” in order to get his brutal power back…so he can finally destroy the world. It’s a spin on a tried-and-true trope, and a very effective one. It’s downright fun to play a creature of pure evil attempting brave acts of righteousness, hating every minute of it.

Cthulhu takes a 16-bit era approach to its storytelling, menus, etc. The battle screens are sparse, with only status frames, the sprites of the enemies, and a background displayed. There are almost no spell effect animations. Story scenes take place via pixelated illustrations with text at the bottom. The game’s snarky—albeit lighthearted—humor creates a fun mix of nostalgia and chuckles. The writing is shallow and functional with the exception of the humorous bits, and I think this works well for what Zeboyd Games is aiming for. Little touches, like funny flavor text for each enemy, keep things fresh.

Graphics

There isn’t much to say here, honestly. It’s 16-bit in presentation, with sprites that more resemble the games on the Sega Genesis than the SNES. The visuals are simple, crisp, and endearing, if quite bland in the dungeon portions.

Sound

The music is surprisingly good, to the point where I just wanted to stop and listen at times. It’s usually upbeat and dramatic in a good way. I thought it was closer in quality to something like an early Squaresoft soundtrack than the forgettable music of most other RPGs. I really hope that someone with a heavy metal guitar setup at OC Remix decides to remix some of these tunes.

Replay Value

There are extra modes, which I have not played at length for this review. However, since they only add to the value of the game, I see nothing to worry about. “Cthulhu’s Angels” mode gives you an all-female party for the entire game, as well as a different (and seemingly hilarious) story. “Highlander” mode has only one character fighting at a time, with an enormous boost in XP as compensation. Score attack mode seems to score you on how quickly you kill the bosses you face, though I haven’t experienced how this works. Overkill mode launches you to level 40 after the first fight you encounter. There are also extras like a bestiary upon completion of the game, and bromides, which are character illustrations you unlock through Cthulhu’s Angels mode.

Overall

It’s a short game, with lots of convenient mechanics and systems in place that make it more fun than hassle. The same can’t be said for many other 16-bit RPGs. It’s obvious that Zeboyd Games put a lot of love into this title because the amount of H.P. Lovecraft references, nods to classic gaming tropes, and general humor make this game shine despite all the gripes I mentioned above.

It may not seem like it, but I truly enjoyed this game, and at an absolute freakin’ steal of around 3 dollars on Steam, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Posted on Ekanayake's Twiiter account on Dec. 1

On Thursday, Uber Entertainment director/producer Chandana Ekanayake posted a surprising image on Twitter from an event that he claims was worn by a Valve employee. The image clearly shows a t-shirt with the Half-Life lambada logo and the number three, followed by “Half-Life 3″ underneath.

“All I’m saying is I saw this at a local game developer event worn by a Valve employee,” said Ekanayake in his post.

Uber Entertainment is well known for Monday Night Combat, a popular game both on PC and consoles, so there’s a little boost of validity in his statement, but it’s also possible the shirt is nothing more than mock up. Even if this was a Valve employee, it says nothing towards any kind of game imagery, release date, or if anyone (by anyone, of course, I mean Mr. Newell himself) has even began any type of game development. Half-Life 3 or Episode 3, if you still want to believe that will ever come out, will probably happen someday, but only the minds at Valve know when.

Still, one can only hope…

Mass flooding throughout the nation of Thailand has created a shortage of internal hard drives with no clear sign of when production will catch up to demand.

The result over the past month has been price increases of all hard drives from manufactures like Samsung, Western Digital, Hitachi, and Seagate. Western Digital stated in a press release last month that facilities had become submerged after flood defenses failed, halting production immediately. While plants exist in other countries, neither Western Digital nor any other manufacturer could speculate on when the facilities would reopen.

This may also affect the beginning of fourth quarter sales figures as consumers are less likely to spend so much on smaller capacities. To get an idea of what it’s like, you need only to visit web sites like Newegg and TigerDirect to understand that a 80GB costs $30 more than what 1TB of storage did only three months ago.

It was uncertain whether or not the flooding would affect production of hard drives when the disaster began. After March’s tsunami in Japan, many electronics manufacturers like Sony said that plants producing electronic media may affect quantities or prices. After a few months of speculation, the aftermath economically was miniscule at best.

External hard drives have not received too much of a price increase and solid state drives are suddenly becoming more appealing. However, changes in demand could mean that prices may go up at any time.

We’ll keep you posted on any updates of the situation. Until then, you may want to consider cloud backup if your internal drive is failing.

UPDATE (12/2/2011): Western Digital released a statement Thursday updating the status of their production and the outlook looks promising. John Coyne, president and chief executive officer, said that production had restarted on November 30 at their plant in Bang Pa-in, with the Navanakorn plant expected to be free of flood water within ten days.

“The passion, perseverance, ingenuity and execution exhibited by the WD team has been extraordinary and enabled us to make substantial progress in partially restoring our operations in Thailand, well in advance of our earliest expectations when the floods hit,” said Coyne.

Though financial damage for the current fiscal quarter may not look good for investors, consumers will be smiling soon as prices will likely drop within the next month or two. Seagate has not yet posted any status on their plant conditions, but stated recently their hard drive quantities are still very limited and may not get better for some time.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Now as far as story line is concerned, fans of the first two games will not be dissapointed. We have character interactions, conspiracies, hidden information, and some decent voice acting to go along with it, minus the Keanu Reeves-ish soundsing main character (who also looks remarkably like him as well). The gameplay is also very familiar to the first two games in that many approaches can be taken to solve the same problem. You can go in guns blazing and hope to survive; you can throw out augmentations like a madman and hurl heavy objects at your enemies; you can opt for the more tactful Splinter Cell approach and stealth your way around, killing (or incapacitating) your foes and earning bonus “mercy” points… you get the idea. Even the mini-games associated with hacking and the sort are entertaining, and at times, quite challenging if you are going for all of the bonus XP and credit nodes.

With all of this positive banter it would be almost a crime for something to be terribly wrong with the game at this point, but unfortunately there is. No it’s not a lack of “sandbox” play (although there are limited numbers of side-quests) or inherent bugs/glitches, instead there is a MAJOR pitfall that occurred during development. For whatever reason, EIDOS (and Square-Enix considering they tagged along for this game) decided that of all the things to outsource for development in the game, the would choose the boss fights. That’s right, just the boss fights. Not only that, but they outsourced them to a company which even proclaims that they know little to nothing of the series, but are “shooter” fans. I can only assume they haven’t played a shooter in 15 years because the boss fights tend to play out like something out of Doom 2, Quake, or Hexen. Let’s take the first boss fight for example. In my case, I was opting for the stealthy route, so other than tranq. guns, stun guns, and some EMP grenades, the only true weapon I had was the sniper rifle I got for pre-ordering and my trusty 9mm. I walk into a room that resembles the shoot-out scene room from the first Matrix movie (filled with columns for cover), a cutscene plays, and I’m at the boss. The boss is armed with a chaingun (Doom-ish) as well as an unlimited supply of grenades. There’s no real cover other than the columns and assorted crates around, and the boss always knows where you are unless you can incapacitate him long enough to slip away. The room however is not large at all, so there are no “alternative” strategies. There’s no chance of sneaking off and popping out to snipe. There’s no opportunity to find cover and hide while you recover, there’s just the warehouse and a few crates and columns. A standard old-school shooter boss fight. Keep in mind that the boss will kill you if he can get a 2-3 bead on you. Oh, and if you make the mistake of getting too close, he picks you up by the throat and falcon punches 50% of your health away. That is unless you’re below 50% health, then he instantly kills you. The second you do some damage, he has a seizure and hurls grenades everywhere, which can be a problem considering the room is small to begin with, but leaving cover means he’ll know where you are and ruin your chance for a followup attack.

Speaking of attacks, lets look into those. First off, it is physically impossible to subdue him with your pistol. Secondly, due to the lack of real cover and sniping positions, even if you can get a good head shot on him with the sniper rifle, 3+ hits still doesn’t kill him. So unless you picked up your Doom-rocket-launcher from the other room, you have to play a frustrating game of huck-a-barrel. You run and hide taking hits, find a exploding or poison barrel, pick it up, wait, and then throw it at him and hope you don’t miss. You can’t run while carrying the barrel and you can’t hide with it either, so you have to be pretty crafty. Once you nail him with your barrel-o-fun, you have to hide/run frantically while he hurls 5-10 grenades every which way while yelling at you. Still alive? Good! Now you can do the same stupid procedure all over again about 5-7 times. Keeping in mind this is on the medium difficulty. Listen, if you haven’t played Deus Ex, and you don’t have a clue about the series, you probably shouldn’t be working on its development. It would be like Nintendo outsourcing certain levels of Mario to Team Sonic. What works for Sonic doesn’t work for our favorite plumber. If I wanted to fight a ridiculous boss in a big square empty room who is equipped with a gun 10-times better than any of mine, I’d dig out by 3.5″ floppy of DOOM and install the game. However, to end this review, do not for a minute think that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a bad game. It is in fact, a wonderful game, with good storylines, good gameplay, and overall is a good sequel. However, the boss fights are something to prepare yourself for. Preferably with liquor because you might break a few mice or keyboards unless you’re slightly sedated. With that, I’ll leave you with an interview of the outsourced developer:

Outsourced

So… it’s almost four years later…how does it stack up? Well, favorably in many areas considering what it is, which is to say a rooftop parkour simulator whose appeal is as much about the concept as about the actual gameplay. The controls are tight, though the jumps where you will have to spin 180 degrees in midair were really frustrating on a keyboard. I should also note that some of the paths forward were frustratingly unclear—I had to Youtube one jump on the last level, or I’d still be playing that damn spot right now. The visuals, even on my crappy lil’ laptop, were quite breathtaking, and the characters in the game are mo-capped extremely well. The voice work…not so much. It was appealing at first, but ME’s voice work runs into the same problem most other games do: those speaking say their lines unnecessarily fast, breaking the immersion.

Speaking of immersion, the early levels will suck you in completely if you don’t end up failing too horribly (like me!). You WILL die quite a bit in this game, and if it’s at points like where you retry jumps 20 or more times (like me!), then the sense of flight and urgency that propels the game drops to nothing. Because this is a game with intense situations in first person mode, AND you don’t have any guns even though the enemies do (you can steal theirs until they run empty, though), certain deaths will leave you startled and on edge continually. I think I may have actually invented a few new swear words playing this game.

I remember one particular scene where I finished hopping between moving subway train roofs while dodging signs that could maim me very badly, only to finally, FINALLY survive and get to the next area…which was a tunnel where a third subway train plowed into me headlong and out of nowhere, screaming its’ horn in my ear all the while. I was not prepared, and I lost a good pair of boxer shorts that night. When you are immersed in the game as I was, it’s as if you really are the one hit by the A train. This is both a triumph on the part of the developers, and a warning of sorts. Should you fall too many times in first person perspective from skyscrapers, or get hit by too many trains you didn’t see, or get shot in the face too many times by cops hidden around a corner, you may end up with a heart attack: your uneventful life flashing before you as you quickly contemplate the possibility of an afterlife, and where the hell that Cheetos stain on the rug came from. Like me! (not really)
There are a few zones that are very frustrating in particular, and your deaths aren’t always about a lack of skill. Whether the constant influx of bullets from police officers actually hit you or not is left largely up to random chance, and so I’ve had times where I was killed by three hits in quick succession while running away, only because the computer got lucky. Every other time, I was hit once, maybe twice, and it was clear to me that that section of the level wasn’t designed to be a fatal crossing point. You should also note that three pops is all it takes within the span of about 15 seconds to kill you, and the later enemies have semi-automatic weapons, so death can be both sudden and infuriating.

Overall, I would give the game a solid 7, both for daring and intelligent design, as well as precise artistic direction and some truly wonderful sound design. The theme song, “Still Alive” by Lisa Miskovsky, is very catchy in particular. The cutscenes between levels are similar to flash cartoons, and therefore glaringly ill-fitting, but the story is shallow enough (in an acceptable way) that it doesn’t matter too much. The soundtrack is atmospheric techno, but it drives the tense moments instead of distracting from them when they arrive. The game is also short, and so worth the reduced Steam price I paid and then some, but certainly not worth the original $60 or so that was asked. Perils of the industry’s current M.O.

So, if you see it on Steam, in a store, or otherwise available, give it a try. You may be surprised. Just remember: It’s not for the faint of heart, or those with heart conditions in general.