I'm too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts

Is Deus Ex: Human Revolution on your new games radar yet?  If it isn’t, then let me do you a favor and give you a heads up about it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a first person role playing game being developed by Eidos Montreal for the Xbox 360, PC, and Playstation 3.  Human Revolution is a prequel to the popular PC game Deus Ex and the less popular Deus Ex: Invisible War.  Set in a cyberpunk future and featuring a globe hopping campaign, Deus Ex looks to be what  Alpha Protocol should have been.  Like Alpha Protocol this game promises options. Specifically, Deus Ex is promising that any Mahatma Gandhis out there can get through the game with a minimum of violence using stealth, social skills, and hacking.

Beyond all the boring talking, sneaking, and keyboard twiddling Deus Ex is a first person shooter.  It is promising a wide range of weapons and weapon upgrades.  Of course, upgrading weapons is nothing new but it looks like Eidos is making an effort to make the upgrades more interesting than hum drum damage and accuracy boosts.  The only upgrade that has been specifically mentioned is an upgrade that transforms a boring dumb fire rocket launcher into a heat seeking missile firing murder machine.  But the weapons are not the biggest draw for Deus Ex.  If you just want a bunch of weapons and AI targets the newest Call of Honor Zone game will scratch that itch.  The story Deus Ex promises to tell is the reason to check it out.

The story is promising to be a complex epic that involves evil mega corporations, conspiracies, and everything else you would expect from a cyberpunk world.  It centers around Alex Jensen, Mr. Too Sexy For His Shirt up there, and the nifty new mechanical arms he is kitted out with after an epic beat down. Big Sexy’s involuntary upgrade to stainless steel dick beaters adds a side story that focuses on trans humanist ideals and ethics.  This plays out in a sepia toned, near future dystopia in which Jensen is some kind of cross between Solid Snake and Dick Tracy that works for a, presumably evil, mega corporation that makes vibrating prosthetic hands for the ladies.  Well, presumably they make more than prosthetics with naughty features but a cyberpunk conspiracy story about the near future porn industry is something that I find oddly appealing.

Time to wrap this up before I get into theories about how porn will drive the cyberpunk technology of tomorrow.  Deus Ex: Human revolution looks like a promising first person shooter that will mix stealth, action, and smooth talking into an epic story that actually attempts to tackle trans humanist issues and ethics.  It does not have a release date beyond some time in 2011 but the news makes it sound like it will be out this summer.  If it waits too long to be released it will be up against the powerhouse noob stompin’ duo of Gears of War 3 and Mass Effect 3 that is slated to come out just in time for Christmas.

Cthulhu saves the World is a soothing, lighthearted indie balm for the grim, gritty melodrama that the triple A studios pump out. Unlike Gears of War or Mass Effect this game can’t take itself seriously.  Cthulhu and the Narrator break the fourth wall to talk to the player and argue with each other. The cast of characters include tongue-in-cheek parodies of staple RPG characters and off-the-wall originals.  Nothing about this game is serious in the slightest, and it all adds up to one of the funniest games on the Xbox Live Arcade.  Cthulhu cranks up the funny with some of the wittiest dialogue available in any game.  To compliment the brilliant humor Cthulhu also delivers a deep old school RPG experience that is so good that it would put some Super Nintendo games to shame.  And it might just have the best soundtrack of any indie game on the XBLA.  Except for, maybe, I Made a Game with Zombies in it, which has an epic soundtrack.

Cthulhu Saves the World’s core game play is very solid because it scrubs all of the boring grind out of the old school RPGs genre while delivering a deep RPG experience.  Cthulhu uses a few nifty game mechanics to avoid the grind endemic to the old school RPG genre and to make the combat more complex.  The most important game mechanic that keeps Cthulhu moving quickly is that characters level up quickly and easily.  The ease of leveling is balanced by their being a limited number of random encounters in each area, so the player is discouraged from breaking the game by grinding himself retarded.  The limited amount of random encounters also helps the game move along at a quick pace because if the player gets lost in a dungeon the random encounters will stop so you could find your way to the end.  Cthulhu beats the grind in random encounters by using two game mechanics to encourage the player to end fights as quickly as possible.  The two game mechanics act as a carrot and a stick.  The game breaks out the stick by making all the bad guys 10% stronger every turn.  Cthulhu complements the stick by offering a carrot for ending fights quickly. After each fight Cthulhu and his crew recovers some Magic Points.  The game dangles a carrot in front of the player by decreasing the ammount of magic points that are recovered for every turn that goes by. This encourages the player to nuke the holy hell out of the mooks and, ideally, end each random encounter in one turn.  Figuring out how to end each random mook stomp in one turn is a fun minigame it its own right.  As much fun as it is to giggle stomp random mooks, Cthulhu does not encouraged the player to spend all their time terrorizing them.

Cthulhu Saves the World music video.

Cthulhu Saves the World delivers six solid hours of entertainment for only three bucks.  Even if you do not like old school RPGs the humor in Cthulhu is so good that you should give it a try.  The demo is free and it will give you a solid idea what the rest of the game will be like.  A game like Cthulhu shows that three guys with a good idea for a game can make something that is as much fun as a triple A title and delivers a lot of play time for your buck.  Cthulhu even manages something that the triple A titles rarely try for, comedy.  A wise man once said that comedy was harder to pull off than drama, but Cthulhu shows what a well done comedy game can be.  Cthulhu Saves the World is a great game to download if you have a slow, boring Sunday afternoon with nothing going on.  Just download Cthulhu and let the good times roll.  The power of the Internet compels you.

That video should have answered most of the questions about how Monday Night Combat will play.  The only big questions left are when will Monday Night Combat be released and how much is it going to cost?  The release date has not been officially announced but rumor has it that Monday Night Combat will be out within a few months.  The cost has not been officially announced, to my knowledge, but it is rumored that Monday Night Combat will cost $15.  With those questions answered there is one burning question that is up to you to answer.  Do you think you can get $15 worth of fun out of Monday Night Combat?

As you can see, there are still some features that weren’t included, such as the ability to search for new movies to add to your queue.  Personally, I would also like the option to be able to watch the movie in full screen and get out of that little theater layout.  I’m assuming that all party members also have to be Netflix subscribers with the Netflix application installed on their Xbox 360.

Just recently Microsoft announced this will be rolling out to the public August 11th with a limited public release starting this week to those who signed up for it through the Microsoft Connect site.