Cthulhu Saves the World has 3 post-game modes that are unlocked when you beat the game.

Score Attack is the same as it was in Breath of Death VII – i.e. random encounters turned off and you gain points for beating bosses at lower levels.

Highlander – Cthulhu is the only character useable in battle. XP gain rate is increased.

and finally…drum roll…

Cthulhu’s Angels – The details are a secret for now, but I will say that it is going to require substantially more work on my part to add than the other 2 modes.

The title says it all. A new preview for Cthulhu Saves the World is now up on the Game Informer website. Check it out here.

Acupwnture is the latest falling block game to hit XBox Live Indie Games. Match up colors to form squares which then explode after a few turns and increase your score. I liked how you could reset the explosion timers by expanding the squares and the overall Asian theme is nice, but if you’ve played one falling block with color game, you’ve played them all and this doesn’t really do enough to distinguish itself from the competition. So in conclusion, pretty fun, extremely hard, and not a bad use of 80 MS points if you want another puzzle game, but far from an essential purchase.

Next up, we have two tower defense games, Towers and Impact of Towers. How’s that for confusing? Towers is an excellent tower defense game that gets everything right. Good interface, easy controls, pleasing visual and audio, and well balanced gameplay all result in an excellent example of the genre. It has a nice balance of simplicity and complexity that I especially liked. It doesn’t do anything especially unique (except maybe the multiple endings), but despite that, I’d say it’s the second best tower defense game currently available on the XBox 360 at the moment (the best tower defense game being Defense Grid).

Impact of Towers on the other hand is less good. It’s not necessarily a bad game, and it does have a decent arsenal of towers, 1-time use items, and levels to play around with, but the controls aren’t the best, the gameplay isn’t as balanced, and the presentation is poor. Oh and it costs 240 MS points, whereas Towers is only 80 MS points. In a genre as crowded as the Tower Defense genre, skipping Impact of Towers is an easy choice.

Now as some people may know, I’m a huge fan of Pac-Man: Championship Edition. Not only that, but last I checked, I had the highest recorded score for the game in the world (just under a million) which I set about a year ago. So it is with great excitement that I heard the news today that Namco is released a sequel to Pac-Man: Championship Edition to XBLA and the PSN this Fall. Now chances are this is just going to be the iPhone version (which adds a bunch of extra modes & levels to the XBLA version) with a little polish here and an extra there, but since I don’t own an iPhone and would rather play this sort of thing with a regular controller and not a touch pad, I’m thrilled nevertheless.

Oh and here are the videos of my high score. Sorry about the poor picture quality – not the best camera, plus I had so much adrenaline pumping after the game that I was having major problems keeping my hand steady.

Zeboyd Games (Breath of Death VII: The Beginning) is proud to announce their upcoming RPG, Cthulhu Saves the World for the XBox 360.

Cthulhu was all set to plunge the world into insanity and destruction when a band of heroes cursed him and sealed away his powers. The only way for him to break the curse is to become a true hero. Save the world to destroy it!

Features:

An epic journey of redemption and insanity!

Classic 8/16-bit style combined with the best of modern gameplay design.

720p! Parallax scrolling! Backgrounds!

Use magic and skills to inflict insanity upon your opponents! Insane enemies are more dangerous but also more vulnerable!

More accessible than ever before! Save wherever you like! Collect 1Ups to retry failed battles!

7 playable characters – Umi the beautiful heroine with an unhealthy obsession with the ocean, Sharpe the sentient floating sword, October the cute necromancer, Paws the alien cat, Dacre a senile old man, Ember the dark dragon, and of course, Cthulhu from the classic horror of H.P. Lovecraft!

A 6-10 hour main quest with multiple difficulties and post-game modes like Score Attack and Highlander to increase replayability!

All of the great features players know and love from Breath of Death VII: The Beginning have returned – fast-paced gameplay, combo system, random encounter limits, unite techniques, branching LV-Ups, and more!

Cthulhu Saves the World is currently scheduled for an October 2010 release on Xbox Live Indie Games. It will cost 240 MS points ($3 USD).

Battle Music
Victory Music

For more information on Cthulhu Saves the World and Zeboyd Games, please visit http://zeboyd.com
For press inquiries, please contact Robert Boyd at rdespair@gmail.com

Progress on our upcoming RPG is coming along nicely. If all goes well, we’ll be making an official announcement in a couple of days.

Just saw the trailer for Radiangames Crossfire and all I can say is wow. As a Space Invaders fan, this looks so cool.

Their last game – Radiangames JoyJoy – was extremely well done so I have high hopes for this.

Free Stuff Page – Currently there are two goodies – the complete story text for Epiphany in Spaaace! & the source code for Molly the Were-Zompire. Enjoy a fun sci-fi parody and build your own interactive novel! You can get them here.

We have rough draft sprites done for all of the main characters and Bill is currently working on polishing them up and adding the animation (main character is already done & he’s working on the rest today). I’d post them, but that would give way too much information about the game that we don’t want to reveal just yet (soon!)

We have about 7 songs so far, some of which are still works-in-progress. I’d say the battle theme and the rural town theme are both done or really close to done (and they both rock, especially the new regular battle theme).

I just finished coding the new map animation system. 4 frames of animation for characters moving around, up from the 2 frame system we used in Breath of Death VII. Oh and characters animate faster if they’re running. And map and characters can animate at different speeds as well. Oh and people can stand still.

We have all of the major gameplay & plot elements finalized (a few had to be changed several times before we found something that we really loved). I also have basic character gameplay outlines done for all of the main characters. I’m going to work on some of the specific LV-Up/Equipment/Ability information soon.

Oh and today, we decided that we’re going to try out a sort of Phantasy Star IV style interface for combat with your party members showing up on screen.

We’re not going to officially announce our game for a few weeks now (need to ready some media to go with the announcement first), but here are some clues that could help you figure out just what our next game is all about.

1 – The main character was originally going to share a weapon with a certain famous vampire slayer, but in the end, we switched back to swords since it’s like a law to have a sword-wielding main character in RPGs.

2 – At one point, we were going to have 3 main stats to track in combat – HP, MP, and a third stat, but we got rid of the third stat since we felt it made things overly complicated and we could do what we wanted just being clever with regular abilities and passive effects. I suppose we could get rid of another stat as well, but it would have to be MP since HP is essential.

3 – Our next game is not Breath of Death VIII, but there’s a really vague clue there if you do a bit of word association.

4 – You can make a comedy out of just about anything if you try hard enough and aren’t a stickler for accuracy.

5 – If you made an acronym out of the title, it would be CSTW.

6 – Oh and since I’m a nice guy, I’ll give you one of the words in the title. The.

Good luck guessing! (My lips are sealed!)