Adventures in Drunk Gaming: Cthulhu Saves the World

There aren’t enough games that feature Cthulhu or the other works of H.P. Lovecraft, the spindly, racist nerd that introduced the world to cosmic horror.

There also aren’t enough games that feature Cthulhu reluctantly stepping up to save the world as opposed to destroying it, like a tentacled John McClane facing down a German Alan Rickman. This is so he can then destroy said world, because fuck German Alan Rickman. That bastard killed Dumbledore.

Thankfully, the world now has Cthulhu Saves the World.

If it’s not obvious by now, I’m writing this while consuming just enough Jack Daniels to be Charming. This is also how I played the game Cthulhu Saves the World for my new column Adventures in Drunk Gaming that I will probably never revisit because while writing this sentence I leveled up to Angry Drunk and FUCK THE NEW TEEN WOLF, FUCK IT RIGHT IN IT’S FAT NECK!!!!

But I digress. Cthulhu Saves the World was developed for the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace by Zeboyd games, a small developer that has so far specialized in old school RPGs that fill nerds with nostalgic juices. These juices are potent and if harvested correctly, can be used to make Marmite.

The game sells for less than $5 when you convert it from Xbox Live Fun Money, which isn’t too bad for a game that actually feels more polished than something like Final Fantasy XIII.

The game opens up with Cthulhu doing stuff. Then he for some reason decides to become a hero so he can get back his powers and destroy the world. A girl also becomes his groupie along the way. He might have tricked the bad guy by taping a gun to his back at one point, but I think that’s Die Hard again.

Anyway, the game plays like absolutely any old school RPG ever made. What sets it apart is that you can actually drive enemies insane for different strategic effects. This can also backfire as some enemies become stupidly more powerful while insane.

The dialogue is also legitimately funny, not just drunk “laugh at everything” funny. Cthulhu is a fish out of water that desperately wants to eviscerate everyone around him, but he can’t because of a curse that is never explained. Comedy!

Cthulhu Saves the World is pretty great considering the price and that three people made it. As a drunk man that’s currently regretting a lot of life decisions, I give it a B out of 10.

Sucker Punch: Geeksploitation at it’s Finest

Imagine if Zack Snyder came into your house one day and took an anime DVD, a comic book and a Battletoads cartridge and put it in a blender. He would take this fine paste of extreme nerdery and spread it onto a scarf, which would be wrapped around his right fist.

He would then read aloud “A Scanner Darkly,” and just as you are about to ask him what the hell is going on, he cold-cocks you across the room.

This is the experience you get from Sucker Punch. It is, with so many grating imperfections, ridiculously exhilarating.

Emily Browning’s Baby Doll, a girl who initially looks so fragile she would shatter in half if a butterfly bumped into her, is sent to an insane asylum for accidentally killing her sister.

Shortly after she arrives the asylum shifts to a Moulin Rouge-esq brothel where the girls dance to entice clientele. Here Baby Doll learns that she can slip into a realm of action video game insanity by dancing and is instructed by the appropriately named Wise Man (Scott Glenn) to collect a number of objects that would allow her to escape.

The biggest strength here is that the script doesn’t do the tired dance of asking the audience to constantly question what is real or what is just Baby Doll’s psychosis, ala Shutter Island.

It’s all real for her, so it’s good enough for the audience.

It also helps that the transitions into the different realities are handled so well. Snyder manages to create a unique atmosphere and aesthetic for each of them. The fact that he can take us to them on a whim without any it of feeling jarring is commendable.

It’s when we get to the third stage, the one initiated by Baby Doll’s dancing, where Snyder’s forte is put to it’s limit.

The action is loud, full of detailed CGI and most importantly, smooth as butter. Lesser folks such as Michael Bay fill their action with nauseating amounts of camera shake and lens flare, but this is to hide the simple fact that they have no idea how to make things flow.

In Sucker Punch the fights are swimming in flow with no sense of self-restraint. There are Gatling gun touting samurai giants, steam punk WWII Nazi zombies, power armor straight out of “Starship Troopers” and even a Tolkien-esque dragon.

It’s like instead of an outline for the story, Snyder wrote a list of things from nerd entertainment he wanted in an action movie and worked up from there.

With all this visual insanity you would hope that the acting is just as sublime, but this is where the movie nearly kills itself.

To be fair Browning is competent and Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea has a few moments where she isn’t completely terrible.

Oscar Isaac’s turn as Blue Jones is pitch perfect even, with him giving the movie a villain to hate and sympathize with.

But everyone else, especially the group of girls that follow Baby Doll into the insanity world, might as well just be looking into the camera and repeating “I’m acting.”

Cornish has no subtlety with the bulk of her performance, giving over emphasis to what should be tender moments.

It’s also unfortunate that Jena Malone’s Rocket is a central character as she exemplifies how some of these girls should kill more robots and never talk.

The actors aren’t really helped by the dialogue though, with some lines drenched in cheese.

Thankfully Sucker Punch is just barely able to redeem itself with a genuinely surprising and entertaining overall story.

An argument could be made that there are some profound messages here, but I don’t think Zack Snyder ever really intended to have any kind of deeper meaning to the script.

He just wanted to make a movie with everything he loves and geeks out to, like Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez.

That’s what makes Sucker Punch worth taking the plunge; it’s a film made by a big nerd that looks amazing. It has some serious problems, but thankfully it has enough to overcome the major stumbles.

Geek Cutlure, Extra Culture: Response to 3DS.

Recently Nintendo announced the followup to the mega-selling DS, the 3D capable 3DS. It will be released sometime between April 2010 and March 2011, it will be able to display 3D graphics without the need of glasses and it will probably have the capabilities of an underpowered Gamecube.
This news actually annoys me a bit. Why? Because if you recently bought a DSi or a DS XL, you now have roughly a year to enjoy your handheld before it’s officially old technology.
I realize this is how Nintendo does things. They release a lousy handheld and then screw over the early adopters with a better model not too long after release, and repeat the process until it’s time to release a new handheld and start all over again.
Hell, in an a way, that’s just how technology works. The first iPhone was a bit of laggy joke compared to the 3G, and that’s now showing it’s age next to the 3GS.
But regardless of that, it still feels too soon for a new DS, even when you consider that it was released in 2004.
The DSi and it’s online store has just recently managed to produce some great content. Give it another 2-3 years, and it could grow into something great, maybe even finally delivering the downloadable Gameboy and Advance games often rumored about.
This isn’t even mentioning the DSi exclusive games we have heard about. What have we seen so far, one game? A little more time would give developers an opportunity to really experiment with those two cameras, Nintendo.
There’s also the fact that this really doesn’t make much sense from a business standpoint when you consider the DSi XL. The newer handheld is only a year away. Couple that with the fact that, according to Kotaku, you will not be able to transfer DSi Ware games, do you really think anyone will seriously put down money on the XL when they could just wait for the newer model?
You could argue that casual gamers who don’t this kind of news probably would. Which is a fair point. But don’t you think those casual users would be pissed to find out that they need to buy a new system just to enjoy some Avatar like effects?
Nintendo isn’t exactly hurting for money at the moment. They could probably push back the new DS and give their hardware some more time to mature, and keep this nerd from nuking his savings account for a little while longer.

Game of the year

Here's something called Progress Wars. Some people claim it to be a "parody" of facebook games like Mafia War or Farmville.

I say that it is the true face of gaming god, much like how you look at a a magic eye picture and see nothing, but then boom, tree made of penises.

And much like a tree of penises, this game is free to play for a few minutes until the novelty wears thin.

http://progresswars.com/

Making the Most Dangerous Game

The Multimedia Club is attempting to make a first-person shooter video game inspired by Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” using the Unreal engine.

The club has a semester to complete the game with a handful of students using an engine that gives professional game studios trouble.

Multimedia Club President Yale Buckner realizes the challenges at hand but thinks he has just the team to pull it all together.

“It’s that kind of environment that you dream about getting,” said Buckner. “These are people who are actually thirsty to get out into the working world and make something happen.”

The Multimedia Club is developing the currently unnamed game with help from the Fame Club, Programming Club and Dub Club.

Players of the game take on the role of a man who has been marooned on a rainforest island and must fight for survival while being hunted by another character.

Buckner says that they wanted the game to have a more restrained, story-driven style than action games such as Gears of War, which features excess violence and chainsaw bayonet guns.

“If you put chainsaws on guns that shoot chainsaws and bears holding guns that shoot chainsaws, then it becomes a game about bears shooting guns with chainsaws,” said Buckner.

One problem they faced early on even helped to cement their style.

A “boss” character hunts players in the game, but due to technical restraints, according to Level Design Manager Trevor Rice, they could not actually show this character directly.

“So we got really creative," said Rice. "Instead of showing him, we’re trying to design the game around his presence."

This lends the environment a sense of tension, as players hear the boss coming for them or see his shadow.

Buckner, who also acts as the project manager, says they also wanted to try and emulate working conditions at a real game development studio.

This means that the team has already put in 30 man-hours into the project, which is currently 25 percent done according to Buckner.

According to 3-D Manager Joey Cannorata, it can take an entire semester just to render one section of a level.

At the end of the day, though, he says it’s worth it.

“It’s really satisfying,” said Cannorata.

Geek Culture: Understanding MAG

Typically, this column doesn’t run reviews. Mostly because they feel like a cop out and it isn’t too interesting to write or read about how awesome “Kitten Puncher V: The Musical” is.

But games like “MAG” are different. This is a game that I have played for well over 20 hours, and yet I don’t understand. Mostly because, much like “Donnie Darko,” it’s hard to tell what’s intentionally stupid or accidentally stupid.

“MAG” is a multiplayer online shooter for the PS3 that will instantly feel familiar to anyone who’s played “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” one or two, with players earning experience points with kills and unlocking abilities or equipment with each level.

What sets “MAG” apart is the fact that you can play with 256 players online, which is insane when you realize that there are enough players on your team alone to start a conga line around the earth three times over.

You’ll immediately jump into the game after meticulously creating a soldier that ends up looking like every other square jawed grunt on your team, at which point you will run five feet and get shot by someone you had no chance of seeing.

If you’re like me, this will happen eight times. Occasionally while waiting to spawn the countdown clock will start at twenty, wind down, and then start all over again.

At one point I died and spent the last 10 minutes of the game staring at the clock, wondering what I was supposed to do in video game limbo.

Actually, scratch limbo. If there is a better idea for gamer hell than having a player stare at a clock while waiting to get back into a game after dieing embarrassingly for all eternity, then I’ve never heard it.

Even weirder once was when the clock got to zero and a message popped up telling me that “Aryan_Prince” killed me, with the clock then starting up again.

Apparently Aryan_Prince is so amazing that he killed me and the game didn’t even have enough time to respond. I felt strangely honored.

Other weird problems include dieing and then still being able to walk around the battlefield, finding your body in a strange pose after respawning and even occasionally the PS3 growing a leg and kicking you in the bean bag. I might have made that last one up.

Recently, however, a patch was released that fixed most of these problems. In their place the game now freezes a lot.

I don’t know how to describe how it feels to have a game freeze when you were 10 seconds away from winning a match and leveling up.

Let’s say you sit down to work on a paper for a class. It’s a midterm paper, and you made yourself a cup of coffee before you began.

You eventually make your to the end of it. It’s a great paper. You’re about to hit save and score an easy A when….

Your friend sticks his penis in your coffee.

That’s what it feels like MAG. That’s what it feels like.

Dr. StrangeBuzz or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Inanity.

Social networking. The more of it you do, the less real socializing you get done.
Recently two major developments have happened in the world of Twitter-Facing, with Facebook yet again redesigning their site main site and Google almost simultaneously launching Buzz.
Facebook, much like every website that wants to keep a steady traffic count, updates their site design every now and then.
What I find interesting is that every time they do it you hear users complain about how they “ruined” it, and they usually keep using Facebook anyway until the next update. When they complain again.
Websites constantly tweaking the layout of their pages is a good thing. It’s how they evolve to become more streamlined and more elegantly display content. So just keep that in mind the next time you make your status “lol Facebook sux now!” after it takes you five seconds longer then usual to find the Farmville tab.
More interesting is Buzz, which Google launched to try and further their goal of completely controlling how we communicate on the internet.
Buzz is pretty simple, you just set up a profile with a picture and then post something like a status update, and then people can comment on that. It’s essentially a more streamlined version of a Facebook wall.
Buzz is nothing special really, just a slightly cleaner social site for you to worry about updating.
So why am I writing a GC about it then? Simple. If you’re reading this you have nerd like properties. Your body is most likely rich in Nerdium, and therefore have a decent understanding of the internet.
This is where I show you to use those powers for evil. First thing you do is Buzz something like “Who likes ice cream?” People you follow, still not fully understanding this new service, respond with comments like “I love it!” or “Can’t get enough of it!”
You then go to your original post and hit the edit button, replacing “ice cream” with “rape.”
I have given you this gift. Now go use it.
Dr. StrangeBuzz or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Inanity.