Ah, I was looking and I stumbled onto Tales of Cthulhu, which is freeware FPS stuff.  I don't know if it's any good.

http://www.yog-sothoth.com/threads/10458-I-have-made-a-series-of-cthulhu-video-games

I don't know anything about it but the yoggies seem to have a thread.  The download links on it are dead, though.  But it looked interesting.

I felt I should look, there doesn't appear to be a Nazi Lovecraft FPS game.  Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up.  Possibly I was thinking of Return to CW, but that has Nazis doing orthodox demon summoning.

It would have been dangerous for Stanfield to run around if the maze had "invisibly thin" walls; he might hit the side of an aperture.
Is there something in the story to indicate the mud isn't watery enough to lie flat?

I don't know about the mud....

But maybe the maze had no turns more than 90 degrees.

Or maybe there was invisible decorative molding.

Newton you mangnificent bastard, you read his book!

LOL! Now go smack a sick guy in the head, Newton!

Bob

See, I knew you would make fun!  You guys are awful!

You know, there are a few key drug references in his works, although I strongly doubt he actually used any recreational drugs.  I've never read that the took anything stronger than coffee.

I've often thought it was curious that a teetotaler ascribed so much power to entities that would fit nicely in a bad LSD experience.  Then again he probably didn't chant strange phrases from forbidden esoteric manuscripts either.

Actually if he ever drank coca cola as a boy, at the time he was probably exposed to coca plants extracts.  Soda fountains supplied patent medicines.  His trips to an ice cream parlor might have been feeding his unseen addiction.

Hello, I'm new here.

Hello back, me too.

-Probably the walls are a solid material considering they can be blasted to pieces and kept for chemical analysis.
 Also there's this from the Mamurth story: "For I knew now that it was solid matter I had run into, not force"

-I imagine the walls are also thin, maybe an inch or so. The protagonist's arm is checked when he tries to brush some
 flies off of the corpse.

-Trenches only spoil things if the maze-goer can see them. Assuming the walls are thin and the watery mud is sufficiently

translucent, any trenches might be hard to make out. Like standing in a field of crops and only being able to see the row
 you're looking down. Add to this a bulky face mask and a foggy engulfing mist and I'm willing to suspend some disbelief here.

That's very true, if there was something for chemical analysis, that goes strongly against force fields. 

I'm not sure I get why a wall would more likely be thin if his arm was stopped when he brushed away flies, though, I can't picture in my mind why that would be.  You know, I need to go find this story instead of commenting on it... most of my questions would probably be answered that way.

But the foggy atmosphere might cloud things up ahead of him, but if he can make out so much detail, like tentacles mocking him beyond the walls, I can't picture him not being able to make out lines right next to him, even if they were a quarter of an inch thick.  Maybe if they were invisibly thin?  Although, I would think even in that case any mud that wasn't absolutely flat would mound up against even a microscopically thin "wall", and pretty much be a give away.

I agree it's possible the natives were worshipping a Mythos-type entity associated with the crystals, although it's just as possible they revered them for some other reason, like nature worship or just traditional culture.  Since they aren't given a chance to explain their position at all, we can never know, so it's a superposition and both conjectures are valid.  The natives are an almost total black box.

-Just speculation, but maybe the Carter and Dubois masks could be a reference to Carter Woodson and William Du Bois,
men who concerned themselves with racial intolerance down here on Earth.

Oh, that never occurred to me.  Du Bois grew up just beyond the edge of Lovecraft country, somewhere west of Dunwich.  Both of them would have been prominent and familiar from the news.  Lovecraft would have heard of them.

But, Carter and Dubois were also very common names.  He might, for instance have been referring to the anthropologist Eugène Dubois and possibly taking a small jab at John Carter of Mars, a staple of pulps who conquered a different world, populated by natives just waiting to be conquered by a heroic former confederate soldier.  Both of them fit in with questions of post-colonial societies and the origins and meaning of humanity, and would have been just as familiar names to HPL.

Infantry Tactics by Rommel

The Witcher had at least one side quest in a swamp where people were calling up the "Deep Ones" and worshiping Dagon and Hydra.  There was other Lovecraftian referencing in that one.

Wasn't there an FPS where the whole thing was about Nazis summoning Mythos creatures a while back?

I know too there were some free to play mmo "turn based" web browser games that were either Lovecraft themed or outright based on the Mythos floating around.

I guess it depends on if the whole game is Lovecraft themed / inspired, or just small parts and throw away bits.  There are so many games that have sections that are clearly Lovecraftian or just in-jokes and mentions. 

By 'so many', I mean the list would be long and tiring to compile, so much so you might say "search for survival horror, and here are the games with NO references to the Mythos.", and it would be more efficient.

You know, people still make text based adventures today, just for fun.  I think more than a few of those are spook stories...  some of them have to be mythos based.

You know, technically, a BBS can be used to make a text based game, using the mechanical turk method.

In the Ziggzaggurath of Doggonet

"You are in a maze of twisty temple hallways, all alike.  You can smell unrefrigerated forgotten shrimp cocktails.  The horror is making you feel swoony. Your elder sine is non euclidean.  It is very dark. You will be swallowed by a Shoggoth."

>

There isn't enough info.

How would "HPL" react?  My reaction is "which HPL"?  Since we are doing a silver key on the fellow, is this the 12 year old HPL?  The HPL near his own demise?

It would also depend on how you introduced it to him, it's not too easy to explain the internet to someone who's never seen it.  Really hard.  Not to mention this is a guy who you would have to explain the Moon Landing to, never mind pr0n created on the wedding night of gay couples.

Let's face it, a large part of what is conjured up by the "internet" is actually what we, the people, have put up on the internets.

Since he came up in the thread, imagine a 9 year old Ray Bradbury, dropped today in the middle of one of the larger Best Buys with an explanation that this is the "future".  My guess, even though he was suspicious of TV / media as an adult, is "kid" Ray Bradbury would not stalk out with pursed lips muttering "No good will come of this, mark my words... ".  He would probably be jumping around doing Star Wars moves on the Xbox Kinnect demo and begging for an ipod touch.

HPL wrote about blessed islands of ignorance in vast gulfs of cosmic horror, but he didn't seem to follow that prescription in his waking life.  He embraced science, and I never heard of him exhibiting any luddite tendencies.  Even middle aged HPL would probably find the idea attractive.  He may have liked the idea of living in the enlightenment as a citizen in the British Colony of Rhode Island, but he didn't fear automobiles or radios.

At a guess for the tech of the internet, as opposed to the actual experience, I would say 1.  HPL would have a hard time understanding what the internet actually was and require a lot of very patient explanation, as even TVs were not common in his day 2.  He would have an even harder time understanding why Twitter is not dumb 3. he would definitely be curious, interested, and shocked by turns, and probably finally pleased with the idea, as it is a tool that allows you to project your personality through time and space at the speed of light. 

As for the social side ( pr0n, race mixing and race baiting, the Arab Spring ), we know he had some fairly conservative outlooks even for his own time.  I think he would have a hard time understanding "How did you get there from where we were?"  I think to explain the internet, you would have to explain almost all of the history in between to him, which would be the real trial.   

No one born in 1890 is even alive today in a rest home, and HPL was not your average person anyway.  He was, however, a curious guy who loved to learn about things and to speculate, so I'd say he'd be fascinated and non judgmental, and 122 years old.

OK, I have a solution for the lack of displacement of the Venusian mud, which I noticed as the big flaw back when I first read this story at age 12 or something. The protagonist is really still under the influence of the hypnoplant, and there are no walls at all.

See, that wouldn't work either... given the epilogue about blowing up the walls with dynamite.  Although it's interesting if you leave that part off, it could be he is still on a trip.  I doubt it would be a collective hallucination for so many, or that their blasting would work if they were imagining the walls.

I never really thought they were force fields before now, although, that works well.  As you dig down, the force field follows you down. 

I'm not sure even Lovecraft knew what they were as such, I always thought he left that as an open question.  Trans-dimensional incursions of non-euclidean objects?
I always just figured they were made of something with alien properties that aren't fully understood, something like the Colour Out of Space. I really have to find and read this story again. 

Maybe they were the toenail clippings of Yog Sothoth.

Clearly, they had some sort of substance, as explosives destroyed them, although I suppose at a stretch maybe the dynamite overloaded the force field generators.  Why not?

The horror of cosmic infinities.  Pheh. 

The madness of one's degenerate lineage of monstrosity turning you into what you hate.  Meh.

The sense of creepy elder secrets better left to the deeps of inhuman time, rotten stinking tomes of worm eaten ( or written ) blasphemies, sleeping malevolent gOdS of the Outer Spheres finally returning to mock humanity in orgiastic torment.  Insipid!  Mediocrities!

The only true Lovecraftian theme worth talking about is obvious.  It's influence is on today's culture looms over all others.  We must face the truth he taught us, his real legacy to our doomed race.

Translunar Armies of Cats!

They are real, I have seen them!

I've watched some of them, but they aren't for me.  I didn't really find them funny.  I haven't given up, but generally at most I get a smirk out of them once per episode.

I read that the light novels the anime is based on are clever and funny, and the anime doesn't capture the flavor well. 

I hope Yen Press or someone picks those up and puts them in English, I don't read Japanese and I'd at least like to give that a read so see if it's true.

It's been a long time since I read this story, so bear with me if it's just I was a juvenile reader at the time and I'm off base.  I don't have a copy handy, so I can't double check.  Possibly it's on the internet somewhere.  I believe there was a podcast dramatization...

But I thought the discussion sort of missed the point.  I don't know if the walls were supposed to be force fields, but they were supposed to be weird.  Everyone knows to solve a maze with walls that don't move, you just stay to the left or the right at each turn you come to.  It may not be the fastest way out, but it's absolutely sure to get you out of a static two dimensional maze that has an exit you can reach.  The thing with this maze that was creepy was that the entrance moved, and the invisible walls descended below the mud.  

In short it relocated it's entrance and shifted the exit around, so it was always just a few feet away.  When you try to dig under it, it follows down into the earth as far as you dig, or it's part of the earth to begin with.  It's not separate from the planet, it's part of the planet's rules you can't see.  

That's why it was so important that he went over pages and pages of turn by turn in the maze, you were supposed to realize what he would not: this maze is not normal, and is a sign that the situation on Venus is not what the main character assumes it is.  You were supposed to share in his frustration.

Also I thought it was sort of example of a monkey with it's hand stuck in the pot, sort of.  Am I wrong, or did the hero never think of putting down the crystal, or trying to communicate with the aliens, until it was far too late?

I also thought the main character's "feeling of oneness" as his brain shuts down is pretty in line with modern psychology as well about such states of mind.  It almost ties back to Lovecraft's semi-fascist beliefs, as the character only entertains such notions when he is weak and near death.  As such, mercy is for the weak, and feeling of universal transcendence are akin to hallucinations.  The epilogue being "the world doesn't work that way, for the aliens or us, conflict is inevitable", or well it's not definitive though, you could read it the other way, where it's classic Lovecraft "Sarnath" message, "you think you are winning but you are messing with something that you really don't understand".

I also thought it was interesting how the aliens and the landscape were all connected, with imagery of ant hill cities, and the character being herded to the maze by mind-altering plants, and finally trapped by his own mindset more than by the maze or the mud.  It all sort of like "A Passage to India" or "Heart of Darkness" done by Ray Bradbury.  But maybe I'm remembering it too fondly.

But it's all sort of thirty years gone by, am I just remembering more into it than there was?  Maybe I should even read it again, more closely, I might have been too close to a mirage plant on this one.