SOTA Toys has a line of Lovecraft themed figures in the process of coming out - the first of which is the limited edition black variant Cthulhu! Which Entertainment Earth just happens to have in stock! The piece is limited to 1,200 world wide so if your a Lovecraft fan and want your very own to scare away co-workers I suggest you order now…

Cthulhu fhtagn!

I had been trying over the last several days to get some play time with the PC version of ‘Dark Corners of the Earth’ and yesterday I finally managed squeeze in a bit of play.  I played to around 17% completion and thankfully have not had any issues with crashing so far.  Graphically the game looks very nice.  Play-wise, at first it felt a bit sluggish to me (the Xbox version felt a bit smoother) but, once I made it into Innsmouth it seemed to smooth out.  Overall it feels good to play and sucks you right in.  If you are into Lovecraft or just horror/action games in general this one should not be missed!

Related posts:

• My Brief History Of ‘Dark Corners of the Earth’
• First Impressions - Part One

For some reason I never posted Part Two… *shrug*

I was down in home town yesterday and through the wonders of Shoggoth Express the PC version of Dark Corners of the Earth waiting for me.  I’m still not sure how the Old Ones managed to send it to that address - they must have known I’d be there sooner or later.  I haven’t had a chance to play it yet but from browsing the forums I’m not getting my hopes up…  Check back tomorrow for some first impressions.

It’s all Mikey’s fault! Because of him - I can’t get this damn idea out of my head - unless - I chase it out - with a bullet.

The plan is to one day get together with some of his friends and play a pen and paper Cthulhu game. And someday it might happen. That reminded me of something that we had talked about long ago. The idea was to create a system so the game could take place over the i’net. Not much ever come of the idea…

I remembered that idea the other day and just haven’t been able to let it go. Maybe it’s because I’ve got a strong enough background now with PHP/MySQL that I could probably make it work. Cthulhu in a web based environment. Hmm. It might be fun…

Where to begin? OK. Databases. First database table would hold user data - e-mail addresses and stuff like that. The second database would hold character info - stats, levels, etc. The tables would be able to be referenced by a common user id number. Character generation would be a simple matter since once you’ve got your base stats it’s all simple math to figure everything else out. Mike (or Google for that matter) could give me all that info.

Look at that - a quick trip to Usenet get’s me ‘D20_WTC_88624_Call of Cthulhu - Official Character Sheet.pdf’ that should give me everything I need for the character table. I’ll have to ask Mike about the rest later.

The problem is where do I put people. NPC’s, players, horrors? I would need to build the code to make a ‘living/breathing’ town/city/country side. I need to start with a small location say ummm - a farmhouse. Then I can limit it to general places around the farmhouse. For instance: ‘the fields’, ‘the barn’, ‘the silo’, and the farm house itself. This could lead into at least one NPC - the farmer. Farmers have a pretty strict schedule don’t they? So, depending on time of day (based on real time * 10 or something like that) the farmer would be in different locations around the farm. That seems pretty broken down so it should be a nice start.

So, I guess I could whip up a couple of tables (user_accounts, characters, npc) and then move on to some basic location code from there.

Well, I’m going to make some ramen noodles…