Mark Crump: Man, I hope this doesn't disappoint. If Bethesda does it right, and gets the full essence of CoC down, this will be a great game. If they mail it in, and half-ass it, it'll be my coaster-of-the-year. My prediction, this game is either going to be great or awful; there will be no gray area.

Tim "Rabbit" Mithee: The Cthulu mythos is hard to ignore. Whether it's Lovecraft's stories or the RPG system you're talking about, it's a dark world. Madness at every corner, death wandering just out of sight, and things so twisted they'll snap your brain as they snap your spine. Who wouldn't want to play something like that? It'll be refreshing, honestly, to be able to approach an FPS that isn't about having the biggest clip in the room. Not that I mind heavy firepower... Dark Corners has been in development for ages now, and a lot of the details have already been released. It'll run with no HUD, the only reference to your health being, well, yourself. I'm still unsure how they'll handle the best things in the game possibly ending it as well (going insane is much the same as being killed), but I'll wait and see what gets done. Again, watching a game based on guns getting good support from the story and environment -- that whole mythos thing -- will be every bit as interesting as all-out firefights.

Gordy "XyzzySqrl" Wheeler: What makes me hopeful for Bethesda's survival horror title, Call of Cthuhlu: Dark Corners of the Earth, is that they seem intent on making it about more than just shooting at scaly-skinned villagers or punching it out with Great Old Ones, as other FPS titles might have you doing. They seem to want to craft a game that captures the spirit and atmosphere of the stories while building on them, making using your brain just as important as having a loaded pistol ready . They also seem intent on making you want to scream like a little girl, which I can rally behind. The most interesting thing to my mind isn't the fear effects, although going completely insane always gives me a warm feeling in the pit of my stomach, but what's been getting my attention is the detail in the screenshots and movies we've seen so far. As I've fairly recently moved to New England, I'm noticing that a lot of the details of the architecture in Call of Cthuhlu are very accurate to the kinds of buildings I see in the world around me daily. I can only predict what effect glancing towards a building shrouded in the fog of night (out in reality) and subconsciously realizing that it looks an awful lot like the building where I was attacked by forces Man Should Not Know last night (on the PC) will have on my day to day life. I can hardly wait to find out.

Thomas Wilde: I'm a big horror fan, and Cthulhu is a sort of effective shorthand for unknowable terrors from beyond. The idea of setting a first-person shooter in a universe where fighting's futile at best and irrelevant at worst is just crazy enough to work.