Day 15 - Cthulhu Saves the World and Quake III: Team Arena

Cthulhu Saves the World

I was looking forward to trying this game enough that I tagged it as one of my 10 "preferred" games, which doubles my target play time. Hopefully at the end of the challenge I'll be able to compare the games I tagged as preferred to those I beat / played a lot to see how accurate my guesses were.

CStW is an old-school style JRPG that looks like it could have been built using RPG Maker. Gameplay is your standard-fare SNES era JRPG, but with a sense of humor and doesn't-take-itself-seriously style of writing that sets it apart. The story starts out with Cthulhu losing his powers. He quickly discovers that his powers will return if he becomes a "True Hero", so there begins the slightly misguided quest to save the world.

As I mentioned, this game doesn't take itself seriously at all. All the monster descriptions are puns, Cthulhu frequently interacts with the narrator, your first party-member is a young woman who develops an instant crush on Cthulhu. I found the humor amusing enough, it's not too low-brow to be unenjoyable, but at the same time it's not terribly funny. There's very little over-arching storyline, mostly just an excuse to move forward on the linear path.

The game does a few unique things that I've never encountered in a JRPG before. The random encounters, for instance, have a cap based on the dungeon. Once the cap is reached, no more enemies will be encountered, but if you still want to fight you can always select "fight" from the menu. HP is regenerated to full after each fight, but MP is only returned a small amount, based on how quickly you complete the fight. This ensures that each fight is challenging, but that you have a pacing mechanism. The leveling system is cool, each time a character levels you're presented with two options on how to grow them. These could be different stat options, or opposing spells, or sometimes the single-target vs. multi-target spells, with each having different uses.

I played on Normal and still found the beginning very challenging. Having only two characters lead to one of them dying quickly VERY often. By the time I got my third character, though, things were getting quite easy, and the fourth just removed any need for strategy whatsoever. For those looking for a challenge, though, there are four different levels to play with.

I definitely enjoyed my time play CStW, but I don't know if I'll go back and finish it. I spent over 2 hours already, and completed 3 chapters. While I appreciated a lot of the unique gameplay, I'm not a huge fan of JRPGs nor was I crazy about their sense of humor.

QUAKE III: Team Arena

So soon after Quake 2, I get to try the third of the series. I have not played Q3 nearly as much as the second installment. Most of my memories of Q3 were playing on the Dreamcast, splitscreen, with my DC mouse. What little I played on the PC was more mod-based, such as Rocket Arena 3. Still, I booted up Team Arena and messed around with it for 44 minutes.


This installment adds color, which is nice, but not much else. Gone is the single-player campaign, as pointless as that was, but it made my experience less fun. I tried a deathmatch against the hardest level AI but got school 10 to 1, so I quickly moved down to "bring it on", which is about the middle difficulty, I believe. I played a few tournament modes, which are one on one deathmatches, and a CTF match. None were particularly entertaining with AI allies and opponents.

Team Arena messes a bit with base Q3 by adding new modes, power-ups and weapons. None of them really are needed, or work great, so I'm really not a huge fan of the tweaks. I'd play base game over this anyday, although I still prefer a modded Q2.

I'm sure there was a time in my life where this game was fun, but I've moved on, and there's little nostalgia leftover. I will not be coming back to this title.

Notes

I went back to Quake 2 a little, and progressed some. Unfortunately the game started getting quite difficult, and I was running low on health (no silly auto-regen mechanic here, just an equally rediculous mechanic where med kits can fix bullet holes and make you good as new). Unfortunately the campaign prevents you from changing the difficulty mid-run, so I'm not sure if I'll try to break that, press on or just give up.

The RNG failed me a bit as the upcoming games list features no fewer than three X-COM games.  Interceptor is unique enough, but TftD and Apocalypse are a little too close to each other that I'd rather not play both in one week. I'll probably skip one and save it for later.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 015