Other monsters were created specifically for the game, including undead legionnaires, ravens, undead barbarians, beast lords, rabid hounds, wild boars, and the army of the Fates, including sentries, guardians, juggernauts, and high priests.
For example: the 11-strong team of detectives charged with identifying murderers in ancient Rome; the 11-strong vice squad of women established by the Spartan state to keep a lid on Dionysiac orgies; or the 11-monstrous giant-beasts who assisted Tiamat, lord of chaos in his doomed battle against the pantheon of Babylon led by the king of the gods, Marduk.
By clicking in the right shoulder button, players can assume the form of a Vampire Lord, a feral beast of the night that's both tougher and more deadly than their human form.
And the scenery (by Anna Louizos), which in this version includes a "Beauty and the Beast -like forest through which walks a "Lord of the Rings"-style giant tree creature who appears in the very first scene.
In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni once showed up at a theater for a screening of "The Last King of Scotland," a movie about the maniacal Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who murdered hundreds of thousands in the 1970s and proclaimed himself "Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas".
(Think of the boys' chant in Lord of the Flies: "Kill the beast. Cut his throat. Spill his blood").
By early Wednesday afternoon, the Daily Beast editor and columnist Daniel Gross tweeted, "Oh my lord, the #askjpm session.
Shakespeare associates the word with intemperance — "Oh, monstrous beast, how like a swine he lyes," a lord says of the sodden tinker Christopher Sly — while, in Walter Scott's "Kenilworth," a character boasts, "He that does me not reason is a swine of Sussex, and I'll make him kneel to the pledge, if I should cut his hams, and smoke them for bacon".
It's a strange beast: half hip-hop beat in the style of trap lord Baauer, half desert faery folk song.
A dire threat, indeed, given that the Kraken is a fabled sea beast deriving not from Greek mythology but from Nordic sagas; but, hey, if you're lord of the underworld, why not shop around?
