http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/adv.html

"Did I recommend Pool of Radiance last month? Yes"

The only way you can recommend this game is to do it without playing it. Which he probably did. I want to see this review.

Note that the above (obnoxious) post was not written by the usual "Davey" (me). This is troubling.

Cry me a river.

Cry me a river.

Hey Faux Davey,
Context my friend! Context!

In the previous column, the one the month before the one you linked, I semi-recommended the game based on roughly 30 minutes of playing it. I was up front that it was a first impressions peice and that column was mainly about how great the early Gold Box games were. Honestly the only reason I did that was because it's a monthly RPG column and the editor asked me to weigh in on the game if possible. You win some, you lose some.

Here's my actualy "spent 30 hours in hell playing that fricking game" review:

http://www.techtv.com/extendedplay/reviews/story/0,23008,3352194,00.html

-Andrew

You will not not feel so bad about it Andrew. My brother says that many games are good in the demo scene but when he gets the game for me it is not so good! He was not even telling me about Max Payne because I know about the game already from Finland and everyone knows that was the best one. If you like Dunegons and Dragons it is not shame for you! I am many of the games after all.

Greetz

I got stuck on that first line in Bub's column about Halloween ambling *and* lurching. I'm trying to imagine how that would look.

-Tom

It'd look like me after my third Bushmills of the evening. Or so I'm told.

Heh, that line is actually from one of Lovecraft's letters to Robert Bloch, as are a few of the lines in that column actually.

"Creatures amble and lurch from our minds to the page."

The one I didn't use was "ye livliest awfulness," which is a line I love, but really couldn't figure out how to use anywhere. I'm thinking Lovecraft couldn't find a way to use it outside of correspondence as well.

Feel free to move on to line two Tom, if you dare...
-Andrew

Cribbing from Lovecraft is fine. Just as long as you weren't cribbing from Wolpaw.

-Tom

Touche!

But ho! I recall something in one of Clark
Ashton Smith's Cthulu Mythos tales, "Treader
of the Dust":

"The pipy arms, ending in bony claws, were
outburst askew as if ankylosed in the posture
of an eternal dreadful groping..."

If that ain't "withered girly arms", what is?

Nyarlathotep will rain a storm of blood upon
the phrase thieves! But first he has to pick the
kids up from soccer, and go to Safeway for
Lucky Charms and frozen peas, because it's
'Double Coupon" week.

Okay, you're really reaching with that one. Using your girly arms.

Ya know, pound for pound, I think Sparky packs the most entertainment into his posts...all 40 columns of 'em.

Fun thing about that column there is that they have the DAoC and System Shock 2 pictures mixed up. Under a picture of a troll standing in a village in Midgard is the caption: "Shodan: a great RPG villain hiding in something more like a shooter.". I sat here confused for a bit before finally reading down and seeing the caption "A flawless launch" under the Shodan picture.

Yeah, I reported that to GD immediately, so did more than a few readers over the past month, but they didn't do anything about it. Bah.

-Andrew

It's not your fault, Bub. You can't be blamed when a site publishes your article and veritably screwes the pooch on a couple of screenshots. Best you can do is report it and pray they care.

Could be worse: it could have been IGN where you would have seen phrases like "Best RPG ever!!!" spliced into your commentary.

"Cribbing from Lovecraft is fine. Just as long as you weren't cribbing from Wolpaw."

Here's some Lovecraft:

"The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation."

So, uh, no. It's not. ;-)

Brett

Yeah, that's why I stuck to "ambling and lurching"... I swear, I tried to get "cyclopean" in there somewhere. That quote is from At The Mountains of Madness, isn't it Brett?

-Andrew

"Okay, you're really reaching with that one.
Using your girly arms. "

Well, since I am a girl, I use my girly arms for
lots of things. You know, like twirling a fire
baton, or doing an interpretive dance to one of
Jon Anderson's solo albums, or cracking a
barstool over someone's head like Patrick
Swayze in "Road House", or hitting "Return" so
every line wraps at 40 columns...

Undeterioratively Yours,
Sparky

---

Quote:

Okay, you're really reaching with that one. Using your girly arms.

---

Yeah, I took the example from King's "On Writing" book, though. Which I think you plugged a while back on another board. It's actually a good read, albeit a really short one. Picked it up used a couple weeks ago.

Hard to believe that anyone can get through a Lovecraft story. Man, that stuff is awful. Though I sure didn't think that when I was 14.

Brett

I disagree with the idea that Lovecraft is awful.

Dense, yes. Great writing? No. But I still find it as readable as I did when I was 14. Nobody, not even his many imitators, hits horror in quite the same way, and quite as well, as he does. Something about all those awkward words and phrases really appeals to me, and makes me find the passages like the one you quoted above very amusing. Maybe it's that I find his stories transcend the way they're written?

Yeah, On Writing is a surprisingly good book on the subject. A bit too much biography though, but, like everything King writes, it's brisk. I really found his work ethic fascinating though.

-Andrew

I agree with Bub-- Lovecraft was da Bomb! Artistic in his own convuluted, dank way, I remember thinking this guy was definitely the harbinger of all things macabre.

Raphael

"Something about all those awkward words and phrases really appeals to me,"

I'll let Chick take it from here... Sorry, I couldn't resist. ;-)

Anyway, I want to like Lovecraft again, but I just can't do it. I've tried to re-read stuff over the past five or six years and always given up or simply fallen asleep no more than a dozen pages in. It's either laughable or dull or both.
I have fond memories of Charles Dexter Ward in particular, plus short stories like The Festival, but I can't go home again.

I can, however, read the other people who riff on the Cthulhu mythos. Ramsey Campbell's Cold Print is a great collection of Lovecraftian stuff, and Notebook Found in a Deserted House by Robert Bloch is probably the best mythos story by anyone, including Lovecraft.

BTW, anyone ever read The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson? Really strange book that was a big influence on Lovecraft. Came out in 1908. Sort of a blend of that unknown kadath dream stuff and the standard Cthulhu stories. Surreal in spots, traditional horror in others. There's a cheap paperback out that's pretty easy to find. Think Vertigo did a graphic novel adaptation a couple of years back. Definitely worth reading if you're seriously into Lovecraft.

Brett

I like Lovecraft too, despite his racist subtext.

Yeah, there's that, too. The biography by L. Sprague de Camp gets into that in a bit of detail. Lovecraft had the standard British imperial belief (he was a huge anglophile) in the inferiority of anyone non-white. Comes out pretty strongly in some of his letters.

Brett

Sadly, he was a man of his time, and in many ways not a very sophisticated one. He was especially suspicious of racial mixing and that really comes through in his stories. Besides, the man pretty much lived his entire life by writing, editing, living with his aged aunts, and writing letters in lieu of actual human outside world contact and travel.

People have levied the same accusations at Tolkien, with some success (Mordor's human support are all dark and swarthy and come from the South of Middle Earth - and I'm not talking about orcs here), but again, that was a different time.

-Andrew

Lovecraft's pretty blatant about it in his letters, though. Not exactly subtle regarding his feelings. And while he was a man of his times regarding race, he was about 175 years past his prime regarding his obsession with Britain. Not a big fan of republicanism, despite his origins, ol' Howie.

Brett

"Dense, yes. Great writing? No."

I'd disagree with that: I like his writing just fine. Even King, in his chapter on Not Using Too Many Adverbs and Adjectives, admits that Lovecraft makes it work. It's not the sort of style that I'd recommend in general, and it certainly flies in the face of modern fiction sensibilities, which typically advocate heavy dialog and an extremely brisk pace. But it does create that Byzantine, dusty literate feel that makes Lovecraft's stories so unique.

Personally, I think he was the best horror writer of the twentieth century. Some of his work was better than Poe's.

There--I said it. Flame on... =)

No flame from me Ben, that's what I was getting at. He's an overly verbose writer, but the effect is mesmerizing (provided you don't fall asleep - nods to Brett) and he is the best horror storyteller, perhaps ever, in my opinion.

The worst thing about Lovecraft is the horrible string of imitators (with a few exceptions - like Bloch) that tried to write as he did, only did so clumsily. King has even written a few Lovecraftian stories, like the short story Jerusalem's Lot for example, but he couldn't match it (King's strength is characterization anyway).

So far as efficient writing goes, HP is horrible. But he's sort of the exception to the rule, I think. "The Stranger", "The Dunwich Horror", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "Charles Dexter Ward", and "The Shadow out of Innsmouth" are my favorite horror stories ever written.

-Andrew

Anyone here a fan of Philip K Dick? He definitely rivals Lovecraft, IMHO.

Raphael

I've only read the story that became Blade Runner, the wonderfully titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? My memory of the story was that it was good, but, from that memory, I can't even imagine him being similar to Lovecraft Raph. In what way(s) do you mean?

-Andrew

Yeah, I don't get the comparison either. I liked Man in the High Castle -- well, to an extent. The setting was interesting, but the plot was all over the place and not fully developed. Dick's bizarro personal life was far more interesting than his fiction. Strange character who was convinced that he was having visions.

Brett

Dick and Lovecraft? Lovecraftian Dick?

Never read much LOVEcraft (he loves his craft heehaw!), but Philip K Dick is good... you have to remember though that hes a sloppy writer that didnt revise much. His middle novels like Palmer Eldritch and Ubik READ like an acid trip, paranoid. No other novels do this as well without trying to be hip and cool. Theres a certain aspect to Dick that doesnt want to be sci fi, but wants to be contemporary in his novels, all about dissilusioned out of reality joe shmoes. Anyway, hes pretty good! Man in High Castle was written almost wholly based on I Ching... can you believe that?

His last Valis trilogy is actually pretty sad. Its the closest to contemporary. And it kind of precedes novels like Mao II by Delillo about religious cults somewhat. Though Dick's novel is more personal and DeLillo's a little more a satire trying to be a family novel with a social context. Dicks novels are less social (which most sci fi is) and more personal. anyway...

"My memory of the story was that it was good, but, from that memory, I can't even imagine him being similar to Lovecraft Raph. In what way(s) do you mean? "

Similar to Lovecraft, Dick had a penchant for pulp fiction and churned out over 80 short stories, along with several novels. (Lovecraft was one of his literary influences). Dick's specialty, of course, was horror and obscure psychobabble, though he dabbled in other SF genres as well. His style possessed that similar Lovecraftian dark, forebodding atmosphere; but unlike Lovecraft, Dick had a better handle on characterization. Later in his career, PKD's writing style grew more fluid, and with greater purpose. What's interesting, at least for me, was that most of his POVs required some sort of reality check-- they were grossly delusional, forever lost in Dick's moribund worlds. According to biographers, Dick was himself a neurotic, which definitely spilled into his prose.

Raphael