Daily Star Has Silly Headline, Game Famous for Not Working Doesn't Work, Bears Shit in Woods

So as it happens, a game legendary for not working turned out not to work, hence my little hiatus combined with a few other things, but the first part of my written commentary of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth should be up by tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m going to take advantage of this space and get on my soapbox to go on a little rant about how the Royal wedding is being reported in our press. Before I start, I’m going to declare my bias: I’m pretty big on the whole Republicanism thing. Monarchy does not sit well with me in the modern day and it’s not just a left-wing thing, to me a monarchy is inherently opposed to the values of equality of opportunity and democracy.

That said, I don’t have much ill-feeling towards the Royal family itself. Ultimately; the Royal Wedding is just two slightly boring twenty-somethings getting married. What frustrated me about the Royal Wedding was the way a tabloid reported it. The Daily Star today proclaimed that the Royal Wedding is something that should make you “PROUD TO BE BRITISH.”

Why should this make me PROUD TO BE BRITISH? As opposed to monarchy as I am as a principle, I’d still consider myself patriotic; I’m PROUD TO BE BRITISH when I think what we’ve accomplished as a nation and a people but I don’t see how what is effectively a celebrity wedding is any kind grand accomplishment that should make me feel any more patriotic.

This, however, SHOULD make you proud to be British.

I’d like to re-iterate I don’t have a problem with the wedding, I’m not nearly mean enough to be negative towards two strangers getting married and I think it was a pretty clever marketing move to get Britain into the minds of the world before the Olympics while also being a convenient political smokescreen during a time of cuts and austerity. The more I think about the way this wedding was timed, the more begrudgingly respectful of the government’s political manoeuvring; a fairy story union between the middle classes and the establishment.

I also realize that being critical of the Daily Star for having inane, misleading or just plain stupid headlines is like being critical of bees for stinging people or being critical of Southerners for being effeminate. They can’t help it; it’s just what they do.

The Star apparently thinks it's 1915.

 But really, I can’t be the only person who thinks that suggesting the Royal Wedding being an event that should make you PROUD TO BE BRITISH is silly.

Manc Street Preachers

That pun in the title is so awful a piece of my soul died as I typed it. 

Circumstance driven by mail-related tomfoolery meant that I had to my hometown in southeast Manchester, which meant leaving my gaming PC behind (on which Call of Cthulhu is installed) meaning that I had to delay my little project on hold for the weekend, so I thought I’d use this blog entry to get on my soapbox about something very wrong in the Democratic People’s Republic of Manchester.

In spite of me implying that a large part of Greater Manchester is a haunted backwater in my last post, it’s probably my favourite place in the world. It’s probably just excessive hometown pride, nostalgia for my childhood or fear and hatred of our evil Southern oppressors (in their grand London townhouses, furnished with diamond sofas and fuelled by orphan slave labour gathered in comically oversized nets from the streets of Hackney) but I can’t think of many other places that I have that much fondness for. 

The bumbling face of terror

 

But one thing that I cannot tolerate about Manchester, and every other big city, is the prevalence of obnoxious street preachers. I don’t feel particularly strongly about religion, I personally believe that it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the divine but that’s just me, it’s not my place to judge on matters of faith. What I do feel strongly about is public nuisance; every other day some church or fellowship or whatever feels the need to stand in the middle of Manchester’s Market Street, impeding pedestrians while screaming hostile personal abuse about how everyone listening is objectively and factually wrong and immoral in the way they live their lives. 

I will never understand the mindset that leads somebody to that course of action. You don’t win supporters, friends and converts by hurling blind, insulting and loud assumptions at the very people you are trying to convert; all that does is make your worldview and faith look mental, there’s a reason why advertisements on TV don’t start with “Hey dickhead, your friends hate you and your wife is actively plotting your murder. You should buy our products because it’s not like you have anything better to do.” 

The patron saint of crazy street preachers

 

I’m aware the extremists are in the minority but it’s sad to me that we live in a society wherein harebrained attempts at attention by these lunatics has driven civilized and reasonable debates and discussions about  where we stand in the cosmos away.

Lonely Planet: Innsmouth

Running my little horror diary on videogame that’s not only obscure but also legendary for it’s bull-headed refusal to function properly may sound like eldritch-driven madness, and it probably is, but there are two relatively sane reasons behind my decision to pick Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

Firstly, its notorious instability was something , to a degree, appealed to me. Sometimes a piece of art or media that is a disjointed mess ends up that way through trying to implement unique ideas in new ways. Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and IO Interactive’s 2007 shooting game Kane And Lynch: Dead Men leap to mind as being recent examples of half-mad and poorly executed but conceptually interesting and intriguing works of fiction that were far more interesting for me to experience than the functional-yet-dull bog standard that makes up the majority of consumer entertainment.

Pictured: the functional-yet-dull bog standard

Secondly, in spite of it having Call of Cthulhu in the title, Dark Corners of the Earth is based on one of my favourite Lovecraft stories The Shadow over Innsmouth. The Shadow over Innsmouth tells the tale of a young man becoming stranded in a dishevelled backwater harbour town (pun not intended, unless it’s funny, in which case it is was absolutely intended) named Innsmouth, which held a tragic past and an otherworldly secret involving hidden cults and fish-people. If Dark Corners can immerse the player in Innsmouth’s horrifying secrets, then I’m 100% on board (harbour-related pun not intended, unless it’s funny, in which case it was completely intentional.) 

Phil Mitchell is once again employed to boost the sales of Lovecraft-related fiction

Although a game taking place in a otherworldly town with dark secrets could make me feel a little homesick for my hometown of Stockport.  

Dark Corners

The horror genre is perhaps the broadest genre of fiction around, with the many subgenres and approaches that are frequently separated by huge stylistic gulfs linked only by the overarching objective of leaving the viewer/reader/player/listener with bad dreams and/or brown trousers. Taking the broadness of the genre into account, I find it difficult to name my favourite horror artist because it’s difficult to compare the many styles of those who I think excel within the genre.

But if anyone stands out clearly to me as a master of horror, it would be Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Seen here looking eerily similar to Reggie Kray

Lovecraft wasn’t the originator of his particular field of horror¸ taking cues from many authors before him and hefty inspiration from myth and legend from around the world. What Lovecraft did do though, much like Tolkien would do with the fantasy genre, was take those concepts and merge them together into an intriguing and rich fictional universe to tell enduring stories in that later authors could, and would, work from.

Lovecraft’s signature style of writing about beings, forces and places existing so close to us, yet that are so far beyond human understanding that to try to comprehend them in anything approaching their true forms would drive men mad plays so well on our primal fears about our place in the world, both as individuals and as a whole, that it resonates with almost any audience. The terror came not from our heroes being menaced by ghouls or madmen but from the idea that they shared a world with eldritch beings so ancient and powerful that humanity is as insignificant to them as mayflies are to us.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft’s works have been reduced to something of cult phenomena amongst the geekier elements of society and his wide influence on mass media goes unknown by a depressingly large proportion of the entertainment-consuming public. The unenlightened amongst you may be aware of the two most popular things attributed to H.P Lovecraft: the 1985 film Re-Animator, an adaptation of his short story Herbert West- Reanimator (serialized between 1921 and 1922), that would introduce the ancient and powerful eldritch being known as Jeffery Combs into the world

To behold Jeffery Combs in his true form is to behold terrors from beyond space and time

and the terrifying, squid-headed dragon creature known as Cthulhu.

 Cthulhu, in spite of the fact that he was a relatively minor character in the Lovecraft universe (only appearing directly in the short story The Call of Cthulhu), would go on to become the poster-child of the entire Lovecraft universe to the extent that Lovecraft’s fictional universe would come to be called the “Cthulhu Mythos”.  Cthulhu is a cultural meme in his own right (helped by an incredibly convoluted situation regarding the copyright on Lovecraft’s works), appearing on t-shirts, in comics and even in a family friendly parody of classic swords n’ sorcery videogames wherein he takes up a sword and shield and saves a princess.

 It’s like Conan The Barbarian, if Arnold was more normal looking

Speaking of Cthulhu and Videogames, we finally come to the purpose of this post and to a degree, this blog. My love for both the Cthulhu Mythos and videogames has driven me to want to share my experiences playing the 2006 Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth PC game, for the first time, with anyone willing to listen to an enthusiast playing  something infamous for being conceptually brilliant but technically flawed. 

Phil Mitchell's cameo on the cover did not improve sales as predicted.