Okay, so there’s lots of controversy (or perhaps there was lots of controversy) about the “No Russian” terrorist level of Modern Warfare 2. Some say it’s the most shocking thing games have ever done, others say it’s no big deal. I played through the whole game before writing this, and let me say I’m glad I did, because it completely changed my stance on the thing.

Because “No Russian” actually makes MORE sense out of context.

In case you don’t know, this level is early on in the game, where you play as a CIA infiltrator in a Russian terrorist cell, and you need to at the very least witness (and at the very most participate in) a group of terrorists shooting up an airport full of innocent people. Oh yeah, spoilers.

If you play just the one or two missions leading up to this one, No Russian is shocking, but effective. The great graphics and excellent sound design that I mentioned in the last post about this game heightens the effect to a pretty damn visceral level. It should have more credibility than something like the Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, or Postal games, because the game makes no qualms about the fact that it’s putting you near bad people and that it will take part of your character’s soul, and it is ostensibly something that is being done for the greater good, whether you believe that’s okay or not.

The most shocking part, for me, was the ending, where the terrorist leader is about to make his triumphant escape and he spins around and unexpectedly shoots you, the player character, and leaves you bleeding to death at the scene. The level is called “No Russian” because they hide their nationality to frame the Americans for this attack. This single event drives the rest of the game, plus it makes the player character’s initial quest completely futile. What a great way to set up one of the game’s villains and kick off the story.

The rest of the game is damn goofy by comparison though.

Just a few levels later, you run through a bombed out Washington DC, complete with busted up White House and the Washington Monument missing large chunks. It becomes so ridiculous that it completely undermines the earlier terrorist level, making you feel like it was indeed just for shock value.

The game is short, and because of that, it feels like it’s stretching believability even more, with all the set pieces so close together. There is another double cross later in the game that more or less repeats the first one, and makes little to no sense by comparison.

“No Russian” should be a topic of discussion, but it shouldn’t be banned or anything of the sort. The game has no concept of how to handle it, but it does show us that games could be intellectually challenging if they knew how to handle themselves. Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare 2 is still worth playing though, just for the quick ride that it is.

But just expect a ride.

—

Loving the Craft : A short HP Lovecraft Review – “The Music Of Erich Zann”. FUCK YES this story rules. It’s very short, so I don’t want to spoil it much at all. The lightning fast plot pitch is this: a student goes to a weird apartment building, and his upstairs neighbor plays the strangest music that sounds like it’s almost not of this earth. This tale doesn’t fit into any set of stories, in fact, it can be read completely separately from all of Lovecraft’s other works, and that is one of its strengths. It’s one of my favorite stories of his, and I recommend it to all. Enjoy!

I have a weakness for strategy games that involve bustling little communities. Stronghold has always been a favorite of mine, because you can watch one little piece of grain go through its entire production cycle from seed to flour to bread to some ungrateful peasant’s stomach. All the while, you can see the hunters with their little dogs, the jester entertaining the troops, and the priest blessing people.

Anno 1404 (known as Dawn of Discovery here in North America) has the requisite amount of bustle for me. You run a series of islands and port towns that you must grow and keep satisfied. You can almost never get everything to fulfill everyone’s needs on one island, so you must colonize several and set up elaborate trade routes with ships to make sure your production never fails.

This is really hard to grasp at first, but it is ultimately very satisfying. You can micromanage to the extreme if you want to, individually performing each and every shipping run manually, or you can set up routes that your ships will run once you’ve laid out the parameters. I do a mix of both, because I’m cool like that.

There’s a campaign mode, which is surprisingly slowly paced for the most part. It’s only 8 missions, but each one will take around 3 or 4 hours to complete. The game has other continuous play modes, where you can treat it like a sim game, as well as a few scenario modes that have different goals for the player to accomplish. This is exactly what I want in a strategy game. A building campaign mode, with self contained levels that slowly teach, with the option to play endlessly afterwards.

I found the first couple campaign levels to be really fun, but towards the end it started to bug me. The naval battles are quite simple and easy to manage, but the interface for moving around your ground forces is both initially hard to grasp and incredibly clunky. There are problems with objectives throughout the campaign as well, where the game gives you objectives, but doesn’t tell you how to achieve them, or refuses to give you objectives until you do something that isn’t clear, leading you to just blindly develop your city as you await direction.

There are also a few objectives that require skills that will outright bother some gamers. In one level you need to find spies in your city within a time limit, or else they will sabotage some part of your empire. You do this by zooming in and clicking on little spy guys in your bustling metropolis. I found it gimmicky and stupid, but others will find that level of “twitch gaming” completely unwelcome in their sophisticated city building game.

I enjoyed Dawn of Discovery quite a bit though. I recommend it to fans of the Tropico and Stronghold games particularly. Check it out if you wanna build a series of cities and trade routes, but you think Settlers of Catan is overrated.

—

Loving the Craft – A brief HP Lovecraft review: “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. I’m going to go back and cover the Randolph Carter stories leading up to “The Silver Key”, since I felt bad about starting with that one out of sequence. This is a quick little story that Lovecraft wrote quite early in his career. It feels like an early story, too. It’s simpler than most of his other work, with a kind of abrupt but unsurprising ending. You can see the foundations of his writing style here though, so I recommend it to fans.

The stars fell. It was dark. It didn’t seem like so. It could’ve been worse. The watchman didn’t follow what I saying. In fact, I think he looked perturbed. There was a myth that I used to hear, that when the stars fell you’ve got to take cover. You don’t just run. It’s useless. You have to really hide. There was a myth in those days that the stars weren’t stars. THEY WERE THERE FOR A REASON. Something like they’re little devils and demons or something. And they were fixed right up there because there was no place on earth for them. It’s God’s way of protecting His people, they said. You had to disappear. They could smell you a mile off. They would, I heard, take you. It wasn’t like those alien movies. They don’t experiment on you. They don’t extract stuff nor inject into you. They… I dunno, I heard they take something. Something that would make you less free. Something that would take your freedom; your voice; your sight; your senses. They wouldn’t cripple you. They said it’d be too unsightly. They liked you feeling it slow. That’s what I heard.

The stars fell. As I was saying. It was dark. It didn’t seem like so. I heard it could’ve been worse. I wasn’t there. The watchman told me. He made me feel perturbed. There was a myth I used to hear years ago. I heard it when i was young. My parents used to tell me their grandparents told them.

They said it happened once in their time. There weren’t stitches. But there were scalpel marks. They traced their contours like a map. And then left a puncture somewhere.

Well I’ve yet to top my (unimpressive) Robotron score from a while back, so I need an ongoing feature to keep me coming back to the mineshaft. In addition to the normal posts, I will be spending a paragraph or two at the bottom to explore an H.P. Lovecraft story, since I think in general he is a writer that is known of, but not known well enough outside of a few key stories.

Some of the stories might warrant a whole post, though I’m sure I can capture how I felt about one of his short stories in a little blurb at the end of a post, taking the place of the Robotron Diaries (unless I top my score). We’ll be kicking this off in style, with a story that helped renew my interest in this author : “The Silver Key.”

This story is the third in the series of Randolph Carter stories. It’s not completely necessary to read the other two first, but if you wanna be hardcore about it, go for it and read “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “The Unnamable” first. True Lovecraft fans will point out that in terms of chronology there’s really another one you should read first, “The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath”, but i’ve found that reading them in the written order to be more enjoyable than the chronological order. Plus, these first three stories are much more manageable in size and complexity for those who want to start reading a bit of Lovecraft and don’t want to plunge into Unknown Kadath just yet.

Randolph Carter is one of Lovecraft’s few repeating characters. By this story, he is an old man who has “lost the key to the gate of dreams”. Like several of Lovecraft’s stories, it begins with almost an essay that sets up the mind of the main character before leading in to the story itself. Carter makes several attempts to understand the meaning of the world around him, but finds himself unsatisfied, so he must find a way to retreat back into his dreams from childhood.

The story is both very different from Lovecraft’s other works and very typical for him. It very carefully walks the line between the total cosmic and ghoulish hopelessness of his stories and a kind of childlike belief in the sheer power of dreams and fantasy. It’s almost like Peter Pan with a fog machine… I love it.

Supposedly when this story was published, it wasn’t a big hit. It doesn’t have any monsters or Elder Gods or cults, so maybe that’s why. I can see how it could be less memorable and perhaps less shocking than some other Lovecraft tales. Still, this story is incredible, especially when read in the context of the previous Randolph Carter stories.

I won’t completely spoil the ending, but it is neither completely uplifting nor a total downer, but it does set up a sequel of sorts. I haven’t had time for it yet, but I’m really excited to read it and feature it soon!

from here.

If Obama can bring people together to talk over beers, then why can’t fictional semi-religious horror icons like Cthulhu and Jesus do the same?

Finally! A Lovecraftian beastiary — for kids!

Hello fellow bloggers, I am writing to introduce you to my new blog where I will publish a variety of different things. The biggest and most important updates will be my original poems and short stories I hope you will all be able to comment on and give me some constructive criticism for.

My next update will probably be around tomorrow, I will try to get all of my poems up and give you guys a sneak peak of my first short story…a very Lovecraftian tale called “Terror in A New England Town”.

Enjoy!

Since Halloween is fast approaching, I thought I’d get us into the mood with a spooky post.

I am a huge fan of the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft. If you’ve never read him before, and appreciate cosmic nihilism, macabre occultist rites, as well as long-winded and archaic diction, you just gotta check him out. I recommend the Library of America’s H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, because it’s hardcover, very extensive with almost 900 onion-skin pages, and has one of those built-in ribbon bookmarks. Perfect for curling up by the fire with a cup of tea and contemplating one’s insignificance in a vast and hostile universe.

And if you’re like me and also love perverse and disgusting horror films, you will fall in love with director Stuart Gordon’s adaptations of HP Lovecraft, in particular Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), and Castle Freak (1995). All three of them feature Jeffrey Combs, one of those amazing underrated working-class actors who exclusively does B-movies and television and frequents the horror and science fiction convention circuit with his Sharpie marker. He’s actually been in eight Lovecraft adaptations, including ones not by Gordon. Anyway, these three films actually share a lot of actors in common, which is fun. I guess Gordon likes to work with his favourites.

Stuart Gordon is an old hippie turned master of the cinematically nefarious. Here’s his bio lifted directly from Wikipedia:

Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin and soon after formed Screw Theater. In March 1968 Gordon’s Screw Theater produced The Game Show at the UW Memorial Union. The goal of the production was to get the audience to leave. To that end the heat was turned to 90, ushers chained the doors behind the audience, the show’s start time delayed and the content of The Game Show made as inane as possible. The audience finally demanded to leave one hour and fifty minutes into the two hour production. In the fall of 1968, he produced a version of Peter Pan that got him and his future wife arrested for obscenity. The story made national headlines until the charges were dropped in November 1968.

After the University of Wisconsin demanded future theatrical productions by Screw Theater be overseen by a University Professor, Gordon cut his University ties to form Broom Street Theater. Its first production, the new translation of the risque Lysistrata, premiered in May 1969. Gordon is married to Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, whom he frequently casts in his movies. Together in 1970, they founded the Chicago Organic Theater Company, for which Gordon also served as artistic director. With the company, he did several plays, such as Warp!, Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Bleacher Bums, ER, Bloody Bess. Warp! was later adapted into a comic book by First Comics. He is also the proud father of three daughters- Suzanna, Jillian, and Margaret.

And here are some goolish trailers for your enjoyment!

First, a hideous pseudo-Frankenstienian tale of science gone wrong:

Secondly, another tale of science gone wrong. I love the insane fluorescent pink and purple color palette of this movie. So 1986!

And last but not least, a classic macabre tale of a gruesome subhuman creature stalking people in a castle:

So much gruesome dismemberment, so many great memories. Dismembories?

xo a

Halloween fun time:

Excellent gallery of Alexander Alexeiff’s aquatint illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” via A Journey Round My Skull (what a fantastic site).

Alexeieff’s moody tints and stark designs beautifully match Poe’s gloomy tale. (We just love the lyrical and melancholy opening paragraph–all those thudding ds, low, somber o’s, and lilting ls). His rendering of Usher’s maniac composition is particularly ethereal:

For more Halloween fun, check out this gallery of HP Lovecraft covers via Fantasy Ink. Spooky (and, alternately goofy) designs. We like this jam:

If you like your pictures moving and with sound yet still highly-stylized, check out Jim Henson’s “The Monster Maker,” from Henson’s short-lived but well-beloved series The Jim Henson Hour.

As much as I love H.P. Lovecraft’s work, I’m always suspicious of re-imaginings of his life.  That’s not to say it couldn’t be good, and Ron Howard, while not the greatest director on the planet has clearly shown he knows what he’s doing with drama.  The question is can he handle the man and the mythos with a level of integrity and fun that they deserve.  I don’t know.  But he plans on it anyways, from Coming Soon:

Taking a break from his political films (Frost/Nixon) and Dan Brown adaptations, director Ron Howard is set to tackle The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft, based on the Image Comics title, for Universal and Imagine.

It’s a departure, for sure. And the Los Angeles Times sat down with Howard to talk about the project.

“It very cleverly uses H.P. Lovecraft in a fictional way, but there’s some loose biographical elements. But it certainly has the flavor and the tone of Lovecraft,” he says. “The character is a very young Lovecraft.” Mac Carter, the script’s co-writer, is adapting the property for film and Howard says he’s just waiting on a draft. “Look, it’s challenging, but if we get it right, it could be really original and psychologically interesting and scary in a great way. And it’s a graphic novel, this is new territory for me.”

Festivals, that’s who.  Elder Sign, specifically.  We are proud to announce the our film will appear in nine festivals this fall.  We don’t have time slots for all fests but we will update as information becomes available.  In the meantime, try and check out a festival and support you local genre films!

-  Fantastic Fest,  Friday, September 25, at 11:59 PM, and Wednesday, September 30, at  9:30 PM.  Both screenings are with Jake West’s “Doghouse”

-  ShockerFest International Film Festival, Saturday, September 26, at 12:30 PM

- The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con, October 2, 3, 4, 2009, Hollywood Theatre, Portland Oregon

- The Eerie Horror Fest, October 8 to 11

-  The International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, October 15 to 18

-  The Terror Film Festival, Friday, October 23, at 1:30 PM

-  The Sacramento Horror Film Festival, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25TH, at 3 PM

-  The Spooky Movie 2009, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25,  CINEMA ARTS THEATRE (FAIRFAX), 12:30 PM

-  The Horror UK 28 Hours Later Halloween Film Festival, Saturday, October 31, at 6:20 PM

There’s a whole new episode of THE BIG PAIR PODCAST now available for you fine folks to take a gander at.

http://bigpairpodcast.mypodcast.com/2009/09/The_BIG_Pair_Podcast_Ep_3_Nobody_Puts_Baby_In_The_Muller_Corner-240145.html

Click to jump to the podcast site

In this ep:

*An exclusive chat with Dr Who audio director/producer KATE THOMAS
*NEW Jingles!
*Some Tom Baker treats
*More comedy skits
*A rant about scifi literature & awards
*EXCLUSIVE first listen of HP Lovecraft short horror story
*More Real People
*More Cabinet of Curiosities
*LONGER running time!
*Part one of surreal audio reading “Roughcheese Came Riding”
*More more more, how do you like it?!

It’s getting longer too! Thanks to Agent manny’s intervention and a jam incident (don’t ask!) the episode is just shy of an hour long…so you get MORE for your MONEY (except you’ve not paid anything…so it’s an even BETTER deal!!)

Have a listen, send some thoughts, feedback, whatever…and please help spread the news and big up the subscriptions.

Next episode I hope to have more from the mighty Paul Kent, a special famous guest, and a whole load more toot…PLUS, chapter 2 of “THe Wonderful Wizard of Oz” read by the gorgeous Sarah Douglas.

Woot!

N

Cthulhu was a pansy.

That’s right, you heard me, Cthulhu was nothing but a damn pansy.  The dude was beaten by a power plant and, what, a boat?  What kind of Eldritch Abomination gets beaten by that?  Sure, I love to punch out every single one I see but I’d like for my unknowable, ultimately alien entities to go down with a serious fight.

Honestly, I’m not the biggest H.P. Lovecraft fan.  Sure, I respect the man’s work, as he was an excellent pulp writer, and I really don’t go in for horror, but his stuff never scared me.  Giant squid faced creatures with tentacle mind rape and soul eating sounds more like 100,000 XP and an afternoon in its dungeon (complete with trippy walls) than actual dread.

Lovecraft was scared of black people, parabolas and interracial marriage.  Sure, the concept of non-Euclidean geometry is kind of weird, since parts of it stretch out to infinity, but it’s not scary just crazy large.  And obviously, I’m not that scared of black people, or interracial marriage either.

Anyway, I guess I’m just tired of seeing ol’ tentacle head show up every time some DM or game designer thinks it would be cool to scare me.  Yes, I’m scared to go into the Dunwich Building in Fallout 3, but not because of the Lovecraft references or the trippy hallucination sequences.  No, I’m scared to go in there because that places has Glowing Ones and Feral Ghoul Reavers in the same fucking room.  Fuck that noise.  God damn Reavers are radioactive, get healed by the Glowing Ones, have more fucking life than damn near anything in the game, toss radiation grenades, do a fuckton of damage and can detect me even though I have 100 Sneak and am invisible.  I’m not going in there until I get the god damn Experimental MIRV.

Look, my long, rambling point is this: Cthulhu and his ilk are not scary, they’re boring and tired.  Unbeatable, inevitable monsters that can be beaten by power plants and boats are just dumb.  You wanna really freak me out?  Take a look at Half Life 2’s Ravenholm.  That shit is scary.  Even power armored badass Gordon Freeman has trouble going through there because who knows what shit is in there.  Few resources, fucking headcrabs popping out of no where, a Russian preacher who seems to come out of no where and zombies that fucking cry out “Help me” backwards is what fucking scares me.

I’d also like to point out that my favorite living author, Sir Terry, got the Achievement where you go through Ravenholm using only the gravity gun.  That’s something I haven’t been able to do, ever.

Sometimes I wish I was back in the 80’s when life seemed a little simpler and the horror movies were still fun! There’s just something special about a good 80’s monster movie. There sure are plenty of them too but there’s alot that fall between the cracks and remain forgotten by most. The Unnamable from 1988 is one of those cool ass monster movies of yore that I speak of! Sure it’s cheezy and there’s a bunch of dumb teens that their asses served to them by a wicked female monster! I must say though I think the creature effects are pretty awesome and monster is pretty frightening.

 Based on the HP Lovecraft story of the same name this cool little creature feature is a fun ride. So much so I have been searching for it on dvd for quite sometime on ebay. It seems it hasn’t been released here yet. It’s sequel however has and that is alot of fun as wel plus it also stars John Rhys-Davies.Plus the sequel starts right where the first one ends.  Anyway if you are looking for a good saturday night 80’s popcorn movie I definately recommend checking this out. It worth the search and definately worth getting the jiffy pop poppin’ on the stove!

“It does credit to the alertness of Ammi’s mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaming of the same impression for a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phospherescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn’t right – it was against Nature – and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, “It come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here…”
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space, Amazing Stories (September 1927)

]]> http://castingcallofcthulhu.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/necronomicon-spells-trouble/ Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:53:33 +0000 castingcallofcthulhu http://castingcallofcthulhu.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/necronomicon-spells-trouble/

Last week we finished shooting the third HPL inspired short in our unholy trinity.  A good time was has by all and the Necronomicon was refined and polished (the prop that is)  Let’s call it a dry run for its feature film debut.

The short should be finished in a couple of weeks and then it’s off to the internets.  And that’s it for our short films.  But as the days get shorter the films get longer as we begin production on our first feature Drawing Baphomet.

Keep on Ftaghn,

Joseph Nanni

Jim offers some friendly advice.

The big bad book changes hands.

Dan holds 'the book' heavy with forbidden knowledge.

]]> http://djcailler.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/what-makes-a-good-horror-movie-my-top-5/ Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:54:44 +0000 djcailler http://djcailler.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/what-makes-a-good-horror-movie-my-top-5/ http://lairdbarron.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/starred-review-for-lovecraft-unbound/ Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:52:21 +0000 Laird http://lairdbarron.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/starred-review-for-lovecraft-unbound/

PW gave Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound a starred review. From the review:

“The 16 new and four reprint stories…all capture what Dale Bailey praises as horror master H.P. Lovecraft’s gift for depicting the universe as “inconceivably more vast, strange, and terrifying than mere human beings can possibly imagine.” Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, in “The Crevasse,” evoke this alien sensibility through an Antarctic expedition’s glimpses of an astonishingly ancient prehuman civilization preserved in the polar ice. Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell” depicts a Lovecraft-type backwoods community in the grip of a profoundly creepy occult mythology.”  –PW

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