Into the hornet’s nest

Have you ever had a rude awakening when you’ve gone out to your shed, or garage, or heck, even just in your backyard, and you discover hornets building a nest, and suddenly your day’s ruined? Like, maybe you wanted to just do some relaxing gardening, or fire up the grill; maybe you had a trip planned out to an old family cabin in the woods to just get away and unwind, and between when you made the plans and now, there’s this swarm of angry, unreasoning bastards who’ve just set up shop, and now you’ve got that to worry about? Yeah, that’s how my impending trip to the Twin Cities area is feeling right about now. Which brings us to today’s word.

agonistic, adj. – aggressive, combative

Learned from: Chaos Zero Nightmare (PC, mobile)

Developed by Super Creative

Published by Smilegate Entertainment (2025)

But hey, things could be worse. Humanity could have been chased away from Earth by eldritch horrors, the very fabric of the universe could be unraveling, and our best hope to fight back could be a bevy of attractive anime girls. Huh, I guess there is an upside to the world of Chaos Zero Nightmare.

Yeah, it’s one of those games, but honestly, CZN is one of the best of its type I’ve played, because it does so much to distinguish itself from other gacha games whose selling point is sexy waifus. (Side note: I got a red squiggle under the word “gacha,” but not “waifus.” We really do live in weird times.)

If I had to describe CZN, I’d have to call it a free-to-play cross between Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon, with a sci-fi twist. That is to say, you could save yourself $25 on Slay the Spire, and get what I would argue is actually a better experience for free. Sure, if you really want a character, you can spend money to have better odds of getting them during their banner (a limited time event where you’re more likely/eventually guaranteed to end up with them), but you can grind in-game resources up to a point, and often get them that way.

Like Narja, the current banner combatant, who’s a failed experiment trying to replicate the abilities of a protos (no, not those Protoss from Starcraft; the short version is, they’re humanoid weapons that only one government controls, and others out there in space want a fighting chance without having to cave to the whims of another political entity). In the story, you rescue Narja, but if you want her (or her partner, Gaya), to actually fight alongside you, then you need to engage with the gacha system.

Oh yeah, the word. Once you recruit Narja, you can play through some of her memories, where the lab that made her puts her into training fights against simulated monsters in virtual environments. Despite not being real, the scientists tried their best to emulate the agonistic instincts of the various chaos creatures. Initially I thought this was just a misspelling of “antagonistic,” since gacha games sometimes have small errors in translation, but nope.

Anyway, stay safe out there, folks. Especially if you live in the US, like me. Shit’s getting crazier out there every day. I hope to be back home in about a week, relatively safe and sound out in the middle of nowhere. Until then, take care of yourselves, your friends, and your neighbors.

Narja’s the one in the upper right, for those who were curious.

Shrug it off

Happy New Year, everyone! I know 2025 wasn’t…great, for a lot of reasons. And I know that the whole concept of a new year being some momentous turning point is largely manufactured with nothing to really back it up, but the only way to really go is forward. So, if 2025 has left you damaged, try your best to keep pushing on, and leave as much of that unpleasantness behind you as you can, even if it’s only a little. Which brings us to the first word of the year.

ablative, adj. – relating to the loss or removal of something, often via surgery, melting, or evaporation

Learned from: Cyber-Cop (known as Corporation outside the US) (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Atari ST, PC)

Developed by Core Design, Synthetic Dimensions

Published by Core Design, Virgin Games (1990 – Amiga, Atari ST; 1991 – PC; 1992 – Genesis)

Cyber-Cop was a wildly complex and ambitious game for a system like the Genesis. Not the only first-person shooter on the console, it was definitely the least-approachable. The story of a corporation developing a genetic supersoldier that went rogue, and the government contracting a shadowy spy organization to break in and get evidence (covertly, so as not to chase the corporation out of the country and hurt the economy), is pretty straightforward. If a bit depressingly representative of dystopian capitalism. It’s the execution where things get wonky.

As you’ll see in the screenshot below, there are multiple regions on your character’s body where you can sustain damage. Each of those areas could have various pieces of armor or gear attached to them (from visors, to cybernetic implants, to ablative armor that shears off as it takes damage). And you had to make sure you healed damage to flesh with med-kits (but not too many, because you could develop a dependency, from what I remember–which was baffling at the time, since I’d never seen side-effects to healing before), and damage to cybernetics or equipment with different repair kits. I think the game had an encumbrance stat, so you couldn’t carry too much at once. Oh, and you also had stamina that you had to manage by sleeping or taking stimulants; similarly, you had to keep the batteries on your various gear charged. And…

Really, that’s just the stuff related to gear. The environment (while made mostly of the same gray walls), was pretty interactable, with control panels to use and/or hack, environmental hazards to account for, enemies with different tactics to take down or avoid, and puzzles to solve (including one that involved shifting your view of a hologram so you could see all of a door code, which I always thought was pretty damn cool).

Cyber-Cop was really more System Shock than Doom, rewarding slower, more methodical exploration (despite your stamina and energy constantly draining). But I only ever rented this, and when I had a real-life, 3-day time limit, that sort of approach really wasn’t in the cards. I’d probably enjoy it more now, but at the time, I never really got very far.

What? No, not *Robocop*; I distinctly said *Cyber-Cop*, a completely original and legally distinct intellectual property!

Jackpot

Well, we’re coming up on the end of 2025, and what an ending it’s proving to be, on my end. My wife and I got back home yesterday, threading the needle between closures of the Mackinac Bridge: one due to an, er…incident that thankfully was resolved safely, and the other due to weather. The weather-related incident is ongoing; it rolled in a few hours after we got home, and dumped over two feet of snow in less than 24 hours, with high winds making for some pretty high drifts. As a result, neither of us had to go back to work today, since pretty much the entire city is shut down. All in all, I think we really lucked out. Which brings us to today’s word.

croupier, noun – a person who runs a gambling table

Learned from: Dispatch (PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5)

Developed by AdHoc Studio

Published by AdHoc Studio (2025)

Dispatch is a title that grabbed my attention as soon as I saw the first trailer. Written by some of the talent from the old Telltale Studios (of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us fame), Dispatch casts you as an Iron Man-equivalent character who loses his suit during a fight with his nemesis. Unlike Tony Stark, however, your guy isn’t rich, so he can’t just rebuild and start over. Dejected, and suddenly directionless, he gets recruited into a program for rehabilitating supervillains, acting as their dispatcher for jobs. The logic being, even if he doesn’t have the suit, he still has the tactical mind of a hero, and can still do some good.

What follows is something of an office comedy with metahumans, as you try to find a new purpose in life, and form relationships (both good and bad) with this band of misfits. One of them is a winged assassin named Coupé, which I understand is French for “to cut.” But there’s a scene where the team is all talking at one point about doing something after work, and someone (maybe Punch Up, the 3-foot-tall circus strongman with the strong Irish accent), says Coupé wouldn’t have much fun since she’d have to be manning the roulette table or something. Punch Up does not speak French. Though, as mix-ups go, even knowing what a croupier is (as Coupé herself angrily points out), is still kind of impressive.

Dispatch tells a great story, full of quirky humor, difficult choices, and oddball characters who end up strangely endearing by the end.

Even Coupé is less stoic and humorless than she seems at first. It isn’t all about the stabbing with her.

Well, what did you expect?

It’s a very busy time of year at my job, and the main thing getting me through it is the fact that we finally rid ourselves of the most toxic member of the staff. Over the past year and a half, this guy–let’s call him Chungus, because seriously fuck this guy–has stuck around despite making the lives of everyone else in the office miserable. No indoor voice, no sense of boundaries, no concept of what’s appropriate for a work conversation. He probably only lasted that long because he’s related to someone on the board. Yay, nepotism (not today’s word).

And lest you think I’m being too harsh toward someone whose worst crime is having a voice like if Rocky Balboa was a frat boy, and a laugh like Woody Woodpecker with a traumatic brain injury, there’s also the fact that Chungus was caught driving drunk with a loaded gun in his car, which he may or may not have had a license for. But even that wasn’t what finally rid us of him–no, that happened after Chungus got drunk again and started harassing one of our female coworkers outside of work, and she filed a police report. At which point, I really have to ask, just what did you think was going to happen, you stupid prick? And that brings us to today’s word.

query, verb – to ask a question (also noun – a question, itself)

Learned from: Space Rogue (Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC, FM Towns, Macintosh, PC-9801)

Developed by Origin Systems

Published by Origin Systems (1989)

Most people, if they’re familiar with Origin at all, probably know them as the developers of the Ultima games, but they did have other credits to their name. The Wing Commander series (which I’ve sadly never played), is probably the best-known of their other projects, but they had the odd standalone title here and there, too. Space Rogue is one of those, and for being a one-off project, it was surprisingly ambitious.

You start as a crew member aboard a ship that was sent to investigate a distress beacon (if memory serves). While you’re out on a spacewalk to investigate the small, derelict vessel, aliens attack and destroy the ship you flew in on, leaving you alone and in command of the abandoned ship you were sent to find. From there, you can…well, kinda do whatever. Try to discover why your other ship was attacked; become a pirate; learn the economies of various star systems and try to become rich as a merchant; help a robot find love; wile away your time on the game-within-a-game you can play on various space stations; just explore the galaxy, wherever the wormhole network happens to take you; etc. and so on. Space Rogue was an early example of what we think of today as an open-world sandbox; there’s no right way to play, and the story is largely optional if you want it to be. Exhausted everything to do in one star system? Pilot your way through a wormhole, and query your computer for points of interest where you end up–there’s always something new at each destination.

Speaking of the star systems, kudos to the development team for trying to account for actual physics and space hazards. Wormholes aside, planets would move in their orbits as you plotted courses to them; velocity was constant unless you fired your thrusters; inertia in dogfights felt believable; radiation and space debris were real concerns; you could crash if you tried to land too fast at a space station–this was impressive stuff for a game with 4-color CGA graphics that came on a couple of floppy disks.

The free-form open universe felt a little too open to my 7-year-old self, and I don’t think I ever beat this game, insofar as there was a way to “beat” a sandbox, sci-fi space adventure. But it was certainly different from anything I’d played at the time, and it left an impression on me, even all these years later.

*Look* at this guy, like he’s getting ready to drop Aldeberan’s hottest album of 1989.

Phrasing

Sometimes, you run into a game with a title that just doesn’t quite make sense. A lot of these are foreign games using English words, and maybe something got lost in translation. See: Infinite Undiscovery, Under Night In-Birth, or Chaos Zero Nightmare for a more recent example. But every so often you’ll get one from a Western developer where they clearly didn’t think things through. Such is the case with Tritryst, which is probably the least-sexy game you could imagine with a title that essentially could be read as meaning “menage a trois.” Which brings us to today’s word.

tryst, noun – a romantic encounter

Learned from: Tritryst (PC, Mac)

Developed by Cinematronics, LLC

Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Inc. (1995)

Tritryst was a match-3 puzzle game. But despite the obtusely spicy title, you’re not matching up naughty bits or anything. Heck, it doesn’t even feature the fast-paced action of Columns, or even have a timer like Bejeweled, that might provide some excitement. Tritryst gives you a series of static, grid-based boards in various layouts, and gives you all the time you need to place pieces composed of three randomized colors so that you can match three in a line until you run out of room. You can rotate each piece in 90-degree increments, but that’s about it–I don’t even think they came in different shapes; I’m pretty sure they’re all straight lines.

You could almost classify Tritryst as a cozy game, since I suppose there is a certain calming appeal one could find in mulling over where to place each piece at their own pace. But honestly, I just remember it being kind of dull. I only ever played the demo, because even back then, I couldn’t see it being worth paying for. Good for winding down before going to bed at night, maybe, but nothing I could see most people playing for extended periods. And that title just had me perplexed, once I looked up what “tryst” actually meant.

Have I mentioned how much I miss the box art for old games though? Because, *man* I miss this kind of insanity!

Catching flak

I don’t normally give the word of the day away in the title of the post, but most of this story is going to be so convoluted, I thought at least some part of it should be straightforward.

So, Thanksgiving is a few days past at this point, and my cat has barely eaten since then. Like, she saw us preparing all these different and extravagant types of food in large quantities, looked at the food she had been eating–quite contentedly I might add–for awhile up until that point, and decided, “No. I also want something new and different. This plain old food simply will not do, human.”

At least, that’s the conclusion we eventually reached. Initially, we were worried that she was sick, or had swallowed something that was causing a blockage, or that she was depressed or something. But she would still eat treats–she caught and ate a spider, for that matter. And she’s eaten bits of the new food we’ve picked up for her. She was just throwing flak at us for having the audacity to celebrate a food-centric holiday without cutting her in on the deal. Which brings us to today’s word.

flak, noun – anti-aircraft fire, (or in the example above: harsh criticism)

Learned from: Mission X (Intellivision)

Developed by Data East

Published by Mattel Electronics (1983)

Mission X is a vertical-scrolling shooter, in the same style as the much better-known Xevious. And while its graphics are nowhere near as good, it actually brought a lot more to the table. You still had forward-facing guns, and could drop bombs, but you could also change the altitude of your plane, to be more accurate with your bombs, or fly above enemy planes or flak. There was also a day/night cycle, where it was significantly harder to see your targets during night missions, as well as a pretty decent variety of things to shoot at and bomb. The only thing Xevious had over Mission X aside from graphical fidelity (and market saturation), was the thematics: fighting sci-fi space aliens, instead of Axis powers in World War II…unless you were me, growing up.

See, despite having the manual for this game, I never really saw it as a WWII shmup. And that’s because I always conflated Mission X with the 1987 movie Project X that they played weirdly often on weekends for awhile. It starred Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt, and it was about a secret Air Force project designed to teach chimpanzees how to fly fighter jets. And my five-year-old brain latched onto that concept for dear life whenever I played Mission X, because the idea that I was an escaped, experimental chimp who stole a bomber and was wreaking havoc across the countryside was automatically a better, more fun idea than whatever dusty old nonsense the game was trying to be about.

There’s our floofy little tyrant, who, despite going on a hunger strike, has plenty of energy to climb up the spare mattress we haven’t gotten rid of yet, so she can judge us from on high.

Old faithful

It’s been a busy few weeks, between traveling, seeing old friends, and being short-staffed at work in between all that. But it’s finally a weekend where I don’t have anything going on, and we finally had our first snowfall of the year, so I figured this was a good opportunity to get another entry out.

I say “finally” about our first snowfall in early November, because according to people who grew up where I currently live, there used to be snow on the ground before Halloween. Consistently. But better late, than never–I still like winter, despite all the shoveling I have to do as an adult. The colder temperatures just sit well with me. I mean heck, my wife and I had our honeymoon in Iceland, where temps in the 60s (Fahrenheit) are positively balmy. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.

geyser, noun – a hot spring which periodically boils over, sending a spray of water and steam into the air

Learned from: Space Quest (Apple IIGS, Mac, PC)

Developed by Sierra On-Line

Published by Sierra On-Line (1986)

The first game in a six-game series, Space Quest was sort of the adventure game version of Spaceballs: all ridiculous situations, jokes, and references to established sci-fi franchises. Star Wars was the main inspiration, but there’s some Star Trek, Dune, and other things sprinkled in there. You play as Roger Wilco, a space janitor who ends up embroiled in a nefarious plot that threatens the galaxy, and only he can foil the villain’s plans and save the day.

After escaping the exploding space station where he, until just recently, worked, Roger crash lands on a desert planet, and must survive the sweltering heat, deadly wildlife, a speeder bike action sequence, and unscrupulous used droid salesmen to get back to space and foil an evil alien plot. One sequence on the planet has you making your way through a cave system with a geyser that you need to plug up with a rock, so the pressure will open a secret door. Adventure game logic is really odd sometimes.

Fun fact about the word, “geyser,” though: It’s actually named after a region (and a town) in Iceland, famous for its various hot springs, mud pots, and yes, geysers. The most famous one (called Geysir–not sure why the spelling changed in English), is now largely inactive. Strokkur is the most vigorous geyser in the area, going off every couple minutes, and it is pretty spectacular.

Fun fact about Geysir, Iceland: Everywhere we went in Iceland, was multi-lingual. Street signs, restaurant menus, signs on businesses; all of them were in at least two languages. Sometimes more. In fact, during our time there, there was only one sign we ever saw that defied this rule; the sign was at Geysir, and it was written only in English. Basically, “Despite appearances, this water is incredibly hot. If you touch it, you WILL get burned. The nearest hospital is over 50km away.”

I have a photo of it somewhere, but it’s on an old laptop I haven’t used in awhile. But yeah, if you ever wonder what the rest of the world really thinks about the United States, this thinly veiled jab toward famously monolingual Americans pretty well sums it up.

Also not my photo. The laptop my Iceland photos are on is old enough that it’s not compatible with Windows 11, so it’s sat untouched for some time.

Who are you, again?

I recently attended a presentation by author, Sue Harrison, where she talked about her journey to becoming a writer. She genuinely seems like a delightful person, and her personal story was an uplifting one. But when she mentioned that she has difficulty remembering faces–to the extent that the first draft of one of her books had virtually no facial descriptions of the characters–I realized I knew the technical term for that. Which brings us to today’s word.

prosopagnosia, noun – face blindness

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (Playstation 4, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 3, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is, as the title might suggest, a roguelike platformer. The gimmick in this one is that when your character dies, he or she is replaced by an heir you select from a few possible options. Some of the options are pretty straightforward, like the character’s class, but the cool part is that each one has a selection from a vast variety of traits they can be born with. From the innocuous (being bald), to the mildly inconvenient (colorblindness), to things like prosopagnosia, which made it so you couldn’t see any of the traits of the next generation. Not horrible, compared to something like schizophrenia (which I think showed enemies and platforms that aren’t there, while sometimes not showing ones that are), but it meant you’d have no idea what to expect on the next run.

And really, that’s what kept Rogue Legacy fun. The actual platforming and combat isn’t bad, but without the quirky results of genetic chance, the repetitive runs probably would have gotten boring before the end. It’s still a fun little game, easily worth the $15 it’ll set you back on most platforms.

Go, my balding, vampiric dwarf with ADHD! You are the hero we deserve!

Can a metaphor be a single word?

A rhetorical question, really; the answer is yes, but it’s generally harder to accomplish. Today’s word feels like an apt descriptor of…well, a lot of what’s going on lately, if you stretch it a little.

purulent, adj. – filled with, or oozing pus

Learned from: Cronos: The New Dawn (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Bloober Team

Published by Bloober Team (2025)

People sometimes ask me why I like horror games. “What do you find so appealing about being scared?” “Do you like watching terrible things happen to people?” Etc. and so on. Being scared can be thrilling, but I’d argue it’s the perseverance over terrible situations that’s more of a draw than witnessing them on their own. But the real answer is, in horror games (the good ones at least, that give you some agency aside from running and hiding), you can face the awful things in the world and beat them to death with a two-by-four. It’s a nice contrast to real life, where it feels like all we can do is watch powerlessly as everything just gets progressively worse. And if you have any doubts about the world ending, just look at the fact that Silksong finally came out, and we got a Silent Hill sequel that isn’t absolute dog water. We just need Valve to shadow drop Half-Life 3, and the final seal will be broken.

But today, I’m not here to talk about any of those games. Cronos: The New Dawn is a really weird, and surprisingly excellent psychological/body horror game from a studio I’d nearly given up on after the clunky and disappointing Layers of Fear, and the pretty-but-shallow The Medium. You play as a Traveler from some point in the future, diving backwards through time to…acquire certain individuals present during the outbreak of a horrible mutagenic plague that destroyed the world for…uh…reasons. I don’t want to spoil anything, because experiencing this bizarre, unsettling mindfuck of a story firsthand is actually a big part of the fun. It shouldn’t come as any surprise though, that this plague is of the icky, goopy, body-deforming variety, with early medical reports tactfully describing the horrors unfolding with terms like “purulent lesions.”

I know that Silksong stole pretty much all the thunder in the gaming scene as of the time of this writing, but there are other games that have come out recently which also deserve attention if the reviews are any indication. Looking forward to trying out Hell is Us and Silent Hill f after I finish Cronos. I’ll get to Silksong eventually, so long as the “highly unusual” meeting of hundreds of generals in Virginia next week doesn’t in fact usher in World War III….

I’d almost prefer an anomalous, reality-warping plague, personally.

My favorite time of year

Earlier today, my wife and I headed out to her folks’ place to spend part of the afternoon helping her father harvest grapes, which we will later also help him crush to turn into wine. Somewhere, there’s a photo of me grinning like a maniac, with my arms stained red damn near up to my elbows, like I just murdered somebody. Good times.

Anyway, for me, this is the official start of autumn: being out there with a cool breeze blowing over us, and a beautiful view of the changing colors of the trees on the far bank of the river, foraging through dense vines and leaves, looking for clusters of grapes hidden just out of sight. Again, good times. And that brings us to today’s word.

foliage, noun – plant leaves

Learned from: Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Apple II, Mac, PC)

Developed by Sierra On-Line

Published by Sierra On-Line (1987)

I have very fond memories of the Space Quest games, despite having only played the first two of them (3 and onward never came to the Apple IIGS). Comedies seemed a lot more popular when I was a kid, growing up watching movies like Naked Gun, and Police Academy. And some games got in on the action, too, particularly adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, which was a spoof of pirate stories, and Space Quest, which was a spoof primarily of Star Wars, but sci-fi in general. Sort of like a Temu version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: not bad necessarily, but certainly not as polished as the name brand. I used to play these a lot with my father, laughing at the ridiculous situations Roger Wilco, janitor turned reluctant hero, would get into, and puzzling over how to get out of them.

As the title of the second game suggests, Sludge Vohaul, the series’ villain, is out for revenge against Roger for foiling his plans in the first game. He has goons kidnap you in the opening of the game, and instead of killing you, he has them take you to a remote location so you can be forced to watch the downfall of galactic society at the hands of the genetically-modified insurance salesmen he’s developed. Or something along those lines; it’s been decades since I played it.

Anyway, something goes wrong with the hovercraft the goons were transporting you on, and it crashes into the dense forest of an alien world. As you look around, the narrator comments on the lush foliage–foliage you need to hide within at least once to keep from being found by Vohaul’s reinforcements, as you try to find a way off-planet to foil his latest insane scheme.

It’s an incredibly goofy game, filled with the sort of absolute moon logic that was common to adventure games of the era (e.g., I think you have to discover and mail in an order form for some kind of space-Tazmanian devil thing at one point, to solve a certain puzzle, while making sure the creature doesn’t catch and kill you in the process). But that was part of the fun. And the days of sitting around that 8-inch screen with my dad, tossing ideas back and forth about “well, what if we tried this?” are memories I will forever cherish.