Welcome to 1UP FM’s Backlog — Rebel FM style. Backlog was one of the saddest things to leave behind, but we figure there’s no reason we can’t keep bringing you gaming’s foremost backwards-looking, forward-thinking, long-form discussion show.
So welcome to Rebel FM Game Club. Yes, the name isn’t quite as savvy, but we feel it communicates the concept more simply — a book club for gamers, where we spend four episodes playing through a game, incorporating questions and discussion points from our listeners along the way. We’ve previously Backlogged Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Indigo Prophecy, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Beyond Good & Evil, and Game Club will be covering all sorts of games — both new and old — going forward.
We’re kicking it off with Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which Anthony detailed how to acquire in a previous post. For this episode we (the ESG crew and Area5.tv‘s Ryan O’Donnell and Matt Chandronait) played up until the “sewers” section; for next week, we’ll be playing through the “escape from Innsmouth” portion. So have a listen, play along, don’t mind the rain in the background (it’s typhoon season in the Bay Area), and leave your thoughts and talking points in a comment below for us to discuss next week.
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Update: Ryan O’Donnell just determined that we seem to have recorded the entire show through the MacBook’s tiny internal speaker, since I apparently forgot to change the input to our sweet setup. Frankly, I’m just happy it’s listenable whatsoever. Hilarious! So…next week will be better 
In response to the acrophobia comment above:
There is a point during the sewer escape where you have to climb up this scaffolding above a grate covered with gore (the one with the tentacle that pulls the body down), if you stare down at the grate from the top for too long, you can black out and be forced to load a save game.
This happened to me on the PC version on my second play through when I was just screwing around.
It is possible to modify the game executable to force your sanity to max at all times… sure makes the hotel escape a more “tourist friendly” experience.
>The scene where you wake up in the asylum and are being tortured and interrogated by Hoover himself is brilliantly done.
What wasn’t so brilliantly done was when – immediately after electrocuting your junk – Hoover hands you a pistol and lets you run right behind him into the warehouse.
Did anyone else shoot him in the head at this point?
I thought they were hooking the electrodes or whatever up to your chest, not your balls. Can you really look down that far when they’re doing it and see?
It’s not true that cumulative sanity effects affect your ending. I did some GAMEFAQs wit this game trying to get the “Mythos” rating after my first playthrough.
First, of all, there’s just one ending. I bet you can all see it coming, too, really.
Second, to get the rating, it’s all about speed-running and using few saves. I gave up after a while since the FAQ doesn’t mention what you get for it.
Liking this section of that game a bit more than the previous one.
SPIOLERS
What i liked: In the second set of sewers (i think) you experience a bad sanity ‘episode’ where you are back in the asylum, reminded me a lot of fear. Soon after than I heard the little girl laughing as if she was playing just down the tunnel. I had to double take sometimes to make sure she wasn’t there.
GUNS! Finally. I would have been satisfied with the crowbar to be honest as at least that was an effective stealth weapon. I was getting a bit sick of avoiding everyone.
All the mythos stuff, like after giving the madman the rat and you get that document, I am enjoying all of that stuff.
I got a big jump when i first saw an actual ‘fishman’ (with the tommy gun) who go right in my face as i didn’t see him round the corner before. Even with 2004(?) graphics, they look freaky.
Right at the end during the cut scene when you are getting tortured. When the ‘Doctor’ turned on the machine when you couldn’t see him and he waited for a few moment before revealing what he was gonna go to you. I just watched ‘Audition’ (based on your what you guys said in the last podcast i thought id give it a rent) so i had that in the back of my mind during that scene.
What annoyed me: The truck sequence when you had to shoot from the back. Took me a few goes but I felt that a lot of me being able to make it without any major injuries was based on luck. The best tactic i could find was to duck and only shoot what was directly behind the truck. Even then sometimes a guy would appear and shoot at that very instance giving you no chance. I don’t feel this section was well made personally.
/SPOILERS
also do you guys think the box art of this game reminds you of stalker at all?
“I got a big jump when i first saw an actual ‘fishman’ (with the tommy gun) who go right in my face as i didn’t see him round the corner before. Even with 2004(?) graphics, they look freaky.”
Was this in the cannery? I screwed up my stealth at one point and ran around the corner right into a guy who had the “Innsmouth look” in spades. Made me jump pretty hard since I didn’t expect him to be there.
I had no problem with the truck chase, but my tactic was to crouch in the back and just run from side to side avoiding fire, and the only thing I shot was the truck you have to to keep going. Made it my first time
Just curious but am I the only one seeing many, many similarities between this game and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay?
What I love about these two games is that they put story first then have the gameplay evolve around it. This is makes for the best games, IMO, because it fully takes advantage of the immersion that video games can offer.
Most games put story first but don’t have the gameplay active (like Metal Gear Solid), while other games have the story 2nd; it exists only to serve the game mechanics that the developer creates (like Gears of War).
CoC and Riddick never have set rules in what the player will be doing next, because the only rulebook is wherever the story goes. When the chase scene happened, the developer could have expectedly (or lazily, I might add) cued up a cutscene to show you the action. Same could be said of the unbelievably bad ass “vehicle” (don’t want to ruin it for others) scene in Riddick’s final hours.
If storytelling in videogames is more about experiencing then telling, then CoC mostly nails it. As frustrating as the stealth and shooting can be both of these games, I have more incentive to finish the game then even Valve’s games (although to be fair, I do enjoy the PLAYING of those a lot more.)
Listening to this brings back a few pangs of regret, I feel this game was a wasted opportunity. The game mechanics were interesting, and they did a great job of capturing the atmosphere of brooding horror and strangeness. There’s some great voice acting too.
Where I think the game falls down is the plot and the writing. Lovecraft’s stories give you a sense of a normal world full of bustle and scholarly pursuits and quaint old towns with sunlight gleaming off the gambrel roofs, before his characters venture into the dark corners of the world which are full of bizarre, alien things and old, forgotten magic and unguessable science, and which hint at the true darkness surrounding that bright ordinary world on every quarter.
DCotE doesn’t get this, it just plunges you from darkness to darkness, you bounce from a sinister past to horrific sights in the cult’s basement to the brooding horror of Innsmouth to being tortured by the government to running through the tunnels beneath a warehouse fleeing from… Well, you’ll see.
The woman in the Innsmouth section had a lot of potential, but she – like everyone nice you meet – doesn’t last long enough to break up the overall bleakness. The little dead girl’s recurring appearances were supposed to be creepy and to inspire a sense of guilt and fear that one might be losing one’s mind, but for me they had the reverse effect – her appearances weren’t any weirder than the rest of what I was experiencing, and the fact that she was the one person in the game I both liked and had regular contact with made her a source of immense comfort. This would have been a great effect to exploit if it had been intentional, but I don’t think it was.
So the unremitting horror ultimately robs the game of the contrast that provides the source material with much of its power, and the lack of anyone to empathise with robbed me of the one thing that really matters in any form of storytelling: A reason to care.
Contrast with Left4Dead, which I’ve been playing recently – it lacks the story or the rarefied atmosphere of DCotE, being atmospheric but in a fairly cheesy zombie movie way – but it gives me ample reason to care. I love every one of the characters and want to see them get out alive. The fact that the game achieves this is made all the more impressive by the sparsity of the story, that most of the characterisation necessary to make me care about these people has to come from short, scripted comments the characters make during gameplay.
Finally, I don’t want to give away the ending of DCotE, but it was a big disappointment. The story itself is just what happens when you chew up a whole bunch of Lovecraft and regurgitate it in a sort of literary mush. They don’t really bring anything new to the table that you couldn’t get by reading Call of Cthulhu, Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Shadow Out of Time, and on top of that the final revelation – and the reason for the suicide scene at the beginning of the game – is ridiculous on several levels, including the level of having been stolen from Star Wars.
C’est la vie. I’d still like to see more games like this one.
yo guys, I cut all the old 1UP FM backlog segments into individual podcasts, but I’m having a hard time getting them up on bit torrent. Here is the link, but I think I did something wrong. any help would be greatly appreciated! http://www.mininova.org/tor/2303637
“Search the Area!”
“Spread out!”
“Search the Area!”
“Spread out!”
Repeat ad nauseam. Definitely a lot of NPC dialog issues on the technical side.
crashes every time i go to push the cupboard away from the safe in the jailhouse.
running vista in compatibility mode for xp as admin.
any ideas?
@ Miles
Im on vista 64 and running it in XP SP2 compatability mode. It crashed for me once at that exact spot, didnt crash the second time. I have no idea what i did differently the second time. I did get a BSoD for the first time in AGES playing this game tho.
thanks, i was already in compatibility mode and it still crashes every time
i even tried setting it to use only a single core like suggested on the Dcote forums but that didn’t fix anything either.
im stuck and running out of ideas
[...] you’re interested in hearing about Cthulhu, give the podcast a listen. To get the game, check your local game store or download it at [...]
Really loving this game so far, getting a fun feels like you really earned it. Even seeing that crowbar gave me a warm tingly feeling inside. It’s a very interesting choice giving you almost all of the weapons at once, it changes the feel of the game entirely. Instead of a mouse hiding in the shadows you evolve into a bird of prey, stalking your enemies. Both actions involve stealth, but the feel is entirely different.
I’m getting a glitch where dialogue gets cut out a lot, which is really disappointing because I feel like I’m missing a lot of the story, but I can still get a feel of what’s going on just by the atmosphere. A very well paced game so far, the developers are very skilled at switching up your environment or game play style from scene to scene, so you never feel like you’re doing the same thing. I was skeptical at first, but great choice guys!
gun* I really wish there was an edit button.
I’m surprised that nobody mentioned the excellent heartbeat effects through controller vibration. When losing sanity in-game, those vibration effects provide a visceral connection to the character, almost as if one is holding his heart in one’s hand as it pounds out the rhythm of his vanishing composure.
I picked this game up when it first came out, but got stuck on a game-ending-glitch and never went back to it. Thanks for inspiring me to dust it off – it’s great
.
The interrogation that follows Escape From Innsmouth is possibly the most badass thing I have seen in a video game–based on both its content and the strength of the cameo.
I kind of wish the health system was more clearly explained, as I didn’t really figure it out until a later on. That said, I appreciate it’s complexity, and I love the resource management it inspires.
>The interrogation that follows Escape From Innsmouth is possibly the most badass thing I have seen in a video game
Except that you just went down to Innsmouth on a case and found a serial killer, several deformed freaks, and a grisly murder. The FBI just rescued you from said freaks and saw them shooting at you.
So there’s no reason for you to prevaricate with the authorities at all, and there’s no reason for them to expect you to be difficult.
It’s all very macho, but like most macho things it’s pointless and inane.
@Hans
I didn’t know that the controller rumbled for your heartbeat in the console version, that’s pretty cool.
@Jer
The health system is explained in the manual. This is why I always read the manual before playing a game. There’s always SOMETHING that they don’t tell you in-game, or tell you way later in the game than I’d like.
I don’t have the inclination to read through every post, but in case anyone is having freezing problems playing on Xbox or Xbox 360 see the info below from Bethesda Support – it worked for me…
Q: Call of Cthulhu is locking up on me at some point in the game.
A: Random lockups usually occur from a corrupted save state. To correct this, try the following:
1. Try clearing your cache of the game. To clear your Xbox’s cache of the game, you need at least three other Xbox games. Place the first game in and let it load until it gets to the game’s main menu. Next, repeat this process with the other two games.
2. Delete any save files or games you no longer use from your Xbox hard drive.
If the game still locks at the same place, you will need to revert to an earlier save from a prior level.
I thought I’d better get my thoughts down before the recording, just in case there’s need for more fodder.
I’m personally enjoying the game a whole lot more post-Attack of the Fish Men. I’m enjoying the stealth elements even if the A.I. is on the light/dumb side. There are moments where I think, “I’m probably safe hear” only to be wrong because an enemy has spotted me from a half mile away. Then there are other moments where they spot me, but if I hide in a dark corner (of the Earth *HA!*), or run out a nearby door, they give up the search in about 10 seconds. It gets better after the player acquires weapons though (I especially like the revolver), as it’s always fun to get their attention, run out a door, then turn around and fire a couple of shots into their faces.
I’m also thoroughly impressed with the sound design in this game. The visuals can be pretty tame at times, but the sound effects really off set this and help ratchet up the tension. The chase scene with Rebecca, The Fishmen pounding on the church doors, and the muffled sound effects as you tight rope across the rafters of the bank are all very good. It also tends to hit pretty hard with those jolting “scare” moments too. The white flash that hits as you’re descending into the aisle, just before breaking Burnham from jail, hits the beat perfectly. Just as your character hits the ground there’s a big boom and flash of white light? Yeah, that one caused every orifice on my body to pulse open for about .275 seconds.
This game definitely gets better once you get a feel for its mechanics, pacing, and limitations.
I noticed playing on the xbox360 there is no background music anymore.When i played it before it did have background music. It might have changed when the new NXE interface came out.
On the PC i get music and full 1920x1080p graphics(looks amazingly good on HDTV)but no rumble..its a tough trade off the rumble effect of your heartbeat is so well done but I love the atmosphere the music adds.
Reguardless I’m loving playing this again. I miss these old school games. I really does remind me of pre Half life hero’s that actually talked.
I get a real Gabriel Knight,Tex Murphy vibe from Jack.
It has so much potential, if a sequel was made by a studio like Bethesda or 2k Boston, where some of the more tedious game conventions could be updated, teams that still have the ability to create great narratives with that creepy ambiance needed in a lovecraftian story.
Something inspired by the Dunwich Horror and At the mountains of Madness using the fallout3 engine..damn could be wicked.
When talking about how you guys felt uneasy about the little girl getting torn up in the beginning of the game when you let the monster out of the closet, it reminded me of how fucked up it was in the game ”Prey” when you are going through the beginning portions of that game and there is a little kid locked up in a room and they release some of the aliens into the room in front of you. The kid screams, runs around and gets torn up right in front of you. That was unsettling when it came to little kid characters in games getting hurt or killed. Nice job bringing the back log back guys! I actually ordered a used copy of this weeks ago and received it the week of this podcast. I made it to where I spent the night in the town. Keep up the stellar work.
I ran into a glitch at the end of the escape section. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do to get to Ruth and she fell and died. At this point, no matter what I would do, he would not let me leave and kept telling me he wouldn’t leave until I got Ruth. I’ll have to replay from a later save and pray this doesn’t happen again.
I was enjoying the game for the story and atmosphere (not the gameplay, though…) until my game inexplicibly crashed during the horrible vehicle section. It had been a while since I saved, since I’m clearly an idiot.
Oh well. Nuts to this game.
(Xbox version, if anyone is curious.)
Good luck at Sony, Nick!
@Marshmallow713
That part is confusing.
*Spoiler related to saving Ruth*
You’ve got to backtrack a bit, after the brief cutscene and when you’ve dispatched the attacking fishmen (or avoided them) you have to go back under the crates that you came in through and go up the nearby stairs and you can now open the door that was once locked. You go through a room or two and them come back to the large warehouse area, now level with Ruth you must make your way across the planks. You’ll automatically save Ruth when you get close to her, she’ll follow you out through a back window to the waiting truck.
*/spoiler*
I just completed the game, ran into a share of bugs and plenty of crashes (PC). I applied the player created patch, which helped make the last few chapters of the game more enjoyable for the fact that I was itching to blaze through them. The increased run-speed made the crashes more bearable. I wont mention the plot, an enjoyable game, for sure.
I don’t feel that the rest of the game shares the same mystique the early couple of chapters held. Maybe it’s just that when plot items are revealed in any mystery, a bit of the original excitement is lost. Reminds me of a show I’ve been watching… it’s on every Wednesday.
Is anyone else having this issue with the PC version?
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/2519/raincall.jpg
The ‘rain droplet’ effect is pretty worthless when it shows up as a bunch of grey polygons sliding down the screen.
Just got my copy of the game for PC. Got up to the fish guys, thought “screw this”, listened to the podcast and came back determined to get past it.
On my most successful attempt, I ended up falling from a ladder. Mostly, I would forget some action – like bolting the door in the third room – or have trouble getting into position to shut a door (several times I ended up on the wrong side… Fucking fish fucking fuckers.)
I’m now off to find a youtube video and a savegame so I can pretend I didn’t fall off a ladder.
Huh, I made it that time. Whaddayaknow.
[...] you’re interested in hearing about Cthulhu, give the podcast a listen. To get the game, check your local game store or download it at [...]
[...] you’re interested in hearing about Cthulhu, give the podcast a listen. To get the game, check your local game store or download it at [...]