Discuss the post Call of Cthulhu DCOTE (Xbox, PC) made within our Gaming forum; Post Snippet: Have you played this game?It has the best spooky atmosphere I have ever seen in ...
Have you played this game?It has the best spooky atmosphere I have ever seen in a horror survival game, and I have played Silent Hill.The screen doesn't have statistics aka bullets, weapons, health bar, score, which adds to immersion, there are chasing scenes and creepy characters.Also the vision of your character becomes distorted when he is at a great high and he looks down, and he has some kinda tunnel vision when under great stress and being afraid.He might go insane from the spooky or disturbing encounters which means that he starts hearing things and talking with himself...he might even kill himself if you wield a gun at this moment.Based (obiously) on Lovecraft's books.
Any fan here to talk with?
Let me just say that this game is utter crap. It had potential but the mechanics of the game were never fleshed out.
It is highly creepy and as a horror genre it is at the top of its class in that regard. The problem lies within this same element though. The more scared your character gets the more distorted the vision on the screen becomes. It gets worse and worse and is like looking at reflections of 1,000 different fun house mirrors all at once. Your character becomes scared for no reason though sometimes or is story based which sucks. The first real mission is to run away from the town's people attacking you and it took me over 3 hours just to get away from them. You have to push things in front of doors and windows, you have to lock doors behind you, and you have to keep replaying the stupid level just to figure out where you have to go. The moment the level starts your character becomes scared and your vision distorts very quickly and only stops when they can't follow you anymore. The frame rate of the game is off and so the bouncing vision of your character never matches up to your steps and the environment moving around you which can make you motion sick real quick. Add to this the screen distortion and you have a recipe for becoming sick real quick if you have the slightest trouble with motion sickness. There are some points in the game if you take a wrong turn your character will enter certain areas that automatically shoot his fear level all the way to max and gives you a game over for either committing suicide or just plain going insane. The game also functions off exact timing which is hard to get sometimes with the frame rate being off. You have to open a door and immediately shut and lock it. This can be tricky because the doors like to catch you in their path of closing and if you get stuck you are dead.
Story line is ok but not worth the trouble the game puts you through. The environmental graphics were great such as a very detailed human body with its organs removed and splayed open in gruesome detail, the organs in cases powering machines, ect. However this is hindered by the fact you can't really look at them because if you do your fear level starts to rise, causing screen distortion, and continues to rise until you retreat a certain distance away from the object.
Frankly the game has great aspects but the system of gameplay that makes the game ingenious is the fear level but that very system hinders the game to severely because the system is ultimately flawed. They really needed better engineering on that level of gameplay so that you could actually enjoy the game instead of having to run through it avoiding anything and everything that was cool just so you could keep your character sane. I would have been perfectly happy and thought the game lost nothing if the fear level was a bar that filled up instead of a distorted screen but still would have been aggravated by it for reasons stated.
This game was annouced to come out for Playstation 2 back in 1999 but was canceled before release.
Call of Cthulhu came out on Xbox in Oct 2005 and shortly thereafter for the PC in April 2006.
For the Xbox version it received a metacritic review of 77% based on 51 reviews. The PC version got 76% based on 17 reviews.
The PC link seems to have better full reviews if anyone want to read them. It has a mix of good and bad, love and hate, fans of the source material vs. general gamers. The xbox version is filled with to many fans of the books who are far to willing to look past a games flaws because they love the material so much (I know this from experience and am not being hypocritical since I wrote a great review of the Alias game which to most sucked but if you were a die hard, know every episode by heart, fan of the TV series you would love the game and I was one of the people who was willing to look past the flaws because I liked the series far to much)
The PC link seems to have better full reviews if anyone want to read them. It has a mix of good and bad, love and hate, fans of the source material vs. general gamers. The xbox version is filled with to many fans of the books who are far to willing to look past a games flaws because they love the material so much (I know this from experience and am not being hypocritical since I wrote a great review of the Alias game which to most sucked but if you were a die hard, know every episode by heart, fan of the TV series you would love the game and I was one of the people who was willing to look past the flaws because I liked the series far to much)
It seems like a lot of video games receive better reviews than they are worth. I personally wont even bother playing anything below a 70%. In my books i consider a 70% a 50%.
I know how fan boys spoil review scores. I have bought StarWars games in the past that had good reviews but turned out to be pure crap.
It seems like a lot of video games receive better reviews than they are worth. I personally wont even bother playing anything below a 70%. In my books i consider a 70% a 50%.
I know how fan boys spoil review scores. I have bought Star Wars games in the past that had good reviews but turned out to be pure crap.
*cough* The Force Unleashed *cough*
I know what you mean man. The new Prince of Persia is one of those games that got like 9/10 from the sites, but I found it to be repetitive, boring as hell, and kinda ridiculous with predictable dialog.
__________________ All right, look, there's only one "Return," okay, and it ain't "of the King," it's "of the Jedi." - Randal Graves, Clerks 2
"They misunderestimated me." - George W. Bush, Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
Hey the Force Unleashed was a decent game. I wouldn't say it was great but it wasn't bad. It was basically the next evolution of the Jedi Knight series. Now if only they would do another of that actual series with the ability to use force powers like you could in TFU and that would be a game worth owning.
The game series that I can't believe keeps getting huge ratings is Halo. The Halo series is good, the story, graphics, and gameplay are good, but the entire thing is becoming repetitive game after game. On top of that since the original Halo was released gamers hold it as the pantheon of FPSs and compare every first person shooter that has come out since to Halo and then claim it doesn't measure up. This gets on my nerves as the original Halo was great because it was the first to realize the potential of online multiplayer and had a decent single player to go with it but since then there are so many good shooters that far surpass Halo.
Let me just say that this game is utter crap. It had potential but the mechanics of the game were never fleshed out.
It is highly creepy and as a horror genre it is at the top of its class in that regard. The problem lies within this same element though. The more scared your character gets the more distorted the vision on the screen becomes. It gets worse and worse and is like looking at reflections of 1,000 different fun house mirrors all at once. Your character becomes scared for no reason though sometimes or is story based which sucks. The first real mission is to run away from the town's people attacking you and it took me over 3 hours just to get away from them. You have to push things in front of doors and windows, you have to lock doors behind you, and you have to keep replaying the stupid level just to figure out where you have to go. The moment the level starts your character becomes scared and your vision distorts very quickly and only stops when they can't follow you anymore. The frame rate of the game is off and so the bouncing vision of your character never matches up to your steps and the environment moving around you which can make you motion sick real quick. Add to this the screen distortion and you have a recipe for becoming sick real quick if you have the slightest trouble with motion sickness. There are some points in the game if you take a wrong turn your character will enter certain areas that automatically shoot his fear level all the way to max and gives you a game over for either committing suicide or just plain going insane. The game also functions off exact timing which is hard to get sometimes with the frame rate being off. You have to open a door and immediately shut and lock it. This can be tricky because the doors like to catch you in their path of closing and if you get stuck you are dead.
I don't agree with your points.I have never had any problem with the frame rate and your character is controled smoothly.The character doesn't become scared for no reason, only when he sees dead bodies, enemies, when being chased, seeing disturbing images and looking down from great highs.A scare bar would ruin the immersion.There is a reason for the ammo and statistics not apearing on screen.Suicide rarely happened to me (twice in 2 games) and dying because of low sanity, I have yet to see.I agree to you though, when you say that you've spent 3 hours trying to escape from the townsmen.There are many points in the game when you don't know what to do and a few when you have a high chance of dying, there is a cutscene, unskippable, between the last savepoint and the enemies/traps that get you almost every time.And the AI of the enemies is low, sometimes they stand there, waiting to be shot at, someother times you feel like going against Rambo and his cousins (how the hell could someone shoot me from this distance with a double-barred shotgun??!!!).I would give the game 8/10, because it succedes where it aims, and this is scarying the shiet out of you
I don't agree with your points.I have never had any problem with the frame rate and your character is controled smoothly.The character doesn't become scared for no reason, only when he sees dead bodies, enemies, when being chased, seeing disturbing images and looking down from great highs.A scare bar would ruin the immersion.There is a reason for the ammo and statistics not apearing on screen.Suicide rarely happened to me (twice in 2 games) and dying because of low sanity, I have yet to see. I would give the game 8/10, because it succedes where it aims, and this is scarying the shiet out of you
First of all the frame rate has to actually be noticed and if you are are not use to seeing high efficient frame rates it is doubtful you will notice it. Most serious gamers do notice the frame rate being off at that game. Also the frame rate becomes distorted the more scared you character becomes which makes the inaccuracy all the more noticeable. I can actually notice the frame rate is not synchronized on most of the projection type rides at major theme parks where everyone else doesn't notice it.
Secondly the being scared for no reason part that I said is exactly by the points you made. Dead bodies, your character is a cop (detective) for crying out loud, dead bodies is something he should be use to seeing not to mention are everywhere in the game. You shoot a guy and then go up and stare at his body for a little bit your character becomes scared, you walk in and see a guy dead in a bed and you become scared, so on and so on. Scary images are everywhere and your character can't look at any of it other wise you become fearful. As for actually dying if you take the time to actually play the game and look at stuff instead and explore fully then you will find it happens more often than if your goal is to beat the game. I play a game to win but my first single player play through is a time when I play a game from all aspects. I look at everything, I explore every corner, I try stuff the game says is impossible and make it work, basically by the time I am done with a game the I have left nothing untried or no stone unturned. The story sets up a detective caught up in the mystery and he can't really look at anything that would give him a sense of who these people are was always a story flaw to me. This is a case though of fan vs. gamer.
BTW if it's goal was to be scary it failed miserably. I wasn't scared at all and I have seen Zombie games that are scarier than this.
Call of Cthulhu DCOTE (Xbox, PC) 
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