A real gem

I realized a little while ago that the Nintendo Gamecube was released 25 years ago, today. It seemed like I should do something to commemorate that. Which brings us to today’s word.

spinel, noun – a purplish, octahedral gemstone

Learned from: Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube, Playstation 2, Nintendo Wii)

Developed by Capcom

Published by Capcom (2005)

First off, yes I know you can play the remake of RE4 on newer platforms, but this is a post celebrating the Gamecube. And I’ve been told the remake is a fine game as well, but even the original version (which started out as a Gamecube exclusive) was an incredible game. Easily in my top 25 of all time; maybe top 10. At a time when the franchise had gotten stale, Capcom went in a completely different direction, and essentially reinvented what Resident Evil could be.

Gone are the shambling, mindless zombies of the first three games. Gone is Raccoon City. Hell, for most of the game, the Umbrella Corporation is AWOL as well. Instead, we’ve got a cult somewhere in Spain that’s kidnapped the president’s daughter, enemies who coordinate their attacks, a new parasite that I really wish Capcom would use again sometime, and a rescue mission that’s the absolute perfect blend of campy, scary, action-packed, and stealthy. There’s even a bit of Indiana Jones-esque reappropriation of priceless cultural artifacts that’s your main way of upgrading your gear.

Okay, they’re not all priceless. The random beer steins and gemstones (including the occasional spinel crystal) don’t exactly belong in a museum, but the necklaces, and chalices, and gold bars that Leon Kennedy pawns off with abandon to the trenchcoat-wearing shady merchant probably constitute some kind of international crime. But then, this is a game where you’re roundhouse-kicking rural villagers coming at you with pitchforks, and shotgunning your way through ancient castles while a tiny man in a tricorn hat taunts you over your radio. (You eventually shotgun him, too.)

Resident Evil 4 is…a lot, but damn near all of it is good. And just writing about it is making me want to play it again–or finally try out the remake. Either way, it’s been far too long since I last fought my way through Spain to save the president’s daughter from a parasite-god.

Surely, this is worth a couple of bullets, at least?

LFG

My wife and I were looking through photos from this year’s just-finished Dragon Con today. We weren’t there this year, and in fact I’ve only been there once, over a decade ago, now, but it’s always cool to see what people dress up as. From the hundreds of Dungeon Crawler Carl cosplays (there’s always at least one fandom that’s really popular each year), to the deep cuts, like the title character from Teen Wolf in full basketball getup, to the completely outside-the-box ideas like the entire Overlook Hotel from The Shining, you really never know what to expect. And while the teeming crowds might make me a little uncomfortable these days, I do miss the convention experience. And there’s one particular photo that brings us to today’s word.

tabard, noun – a sleeveless jerkin with no sides and a hole for the head, often embroidered with a crest or coat of arms

Learned from: World of Warcraft (PC, Mac)

Developed by Blizzard Entertainment

Published by Blizzard Entertainment (2004)

There’s a lot about this post that has me nostalgic for a time before a pandemic made shoulder-to-shoulder crowds seem icky; when MMOs seemed like they were destined to be the next big thing in gaming; when most games still came in boxes, and multinational corporations weren’t trying to kill physical media entirely. Before the world went mad.

There was one photo from the official Dragon Con Facebook page that featured someone I initially thought was a generic Skyrim guard standing by a quest board. But then I looked closer and saw the Alliance symbol on his tabard, and my wife looked closer still and saw familiar names from the Warcraft universe on, not a quest board, but a wanted board. A great cosplay, as you can see below.

I played WoW (and some of the earlier, non-massively multiplayer Warcraft games), like a fiend, back in the day. Despite being an introvert, there are some memories I made with folks online in that game that would’ve been impossible in single-player games. I even joined a guild at one point, which is how I found out about tabards.

Basically, once a group of players got together and established themselves as a guild, they could design their own guild symbol, and even have it emblazoned on tabards that their members could wear around. And, at least as of when I stopped playing, I think joining a guild was the only way to even get a tabard–and back before you could lock in your equipment’s appearance to whatever you wanted, there was a good chance your character would be walking around looking like they’d walked through a junkyard covered in superglue. So, having at least one piece of equipment that was always visually consistent was kind of a nice thing.

I don’t remember what the crest for the Call of Cthulhu guild looked like after all these years, but they were a good group of folks. But I do remember that what led me to stop playing was when our guild got absorbed into a larger guild, and overnight, that friendly atmosphere disappeared and I couldn’t even find help for basic quests because all anyone wanted to do was the raids.

So yeah, not all nostalgia is good nostalgia. But I still miss those days in more ways than one.

The cosplay in question. Thank you, whoever you are in the armor, for bringing me back to simpler times. Fantastic costume!

Simple joy

I’m writing this at the end of a pretty harsh week. Celebrity deaths usually don’t hit me too hard, but we lost a genuinely good person in Dolly Parton, a fantastically entertaining actor in Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, who was essentially the voice of my childhood, with how many cartoon characters he brought to life. Losing the three of them in as many days has hit a lot of people pretty hard, myself included. So, I thought it would be good to post something lighthearted, possibly even whimsical in a way, to counteract the gloom a bit.

It’s a bit early in the year, but the leaves are starting to change up here. And as further proof that autumn is just around the corner, there are patches of ground in the cemetery I cut through on my way to work that are practically carpeted in maple seeds. As a kid, I always got a simple joy out of watching those little helicopters spiral their way to the ground, sometimes trying to catch them. And seeing them now reminded me of today’s word.

whirligig, noun – a child’s toy that spins, typically a top or a pinwheel; something that constantly whirls around

Learned from: NetStorm: Islands at War (PC)

Developed by Titanic Entertainment

Published by Activision (1997)

NetStorm came out during the real-time strategy boom of the mid-’90s, when everyone and their grandmother was developing an RTS to cash in on the success of Warcraft II. You had sci-fi takes on the Cold War, ancient civilizations battling it out, robots, and wizards, and games where you were placing monsters in dungeons, trying to keep the heroes out–all vying for attention in a market that, by this time, had all its eyes on the upcoming Starcraft. NetStorm held the distinction of being one of the more thematically unique takes on the genre, though it wasn’t enough to save it.

The game was set on islands in the sky that you built up and connected as the game went on, sort of Tetris-style, trying to set things up in such a way that you could build what you needed and supply power to different buildings…I think. I only ever played the demo of this (I gather the instruction manual for the full game was practically a novella), so I did the best I could to make sense of the built-in tutorial. Anyway, being set in the sky, there were various tech trees broken up into things like Sun, Wind, and Storms, I think. One of the units I remember most was the Whirligig, which would spiral through the air across the map to drop bombs on the enemy. But there were also lightning cannons, and solar death rays, and airships–the last of which were important for capturing the enemy’s high priest (to sacrifice them and win the match), if memory serves.

To call NetStorm ambitious is something of an understatement. I remember being a little lost at sea, trying to juggle three or four different tech trees, all of which required different resources and arrangements of your islands. It was surprisingly deep and complex, and while I remember being intrigued, I never did pick up the full version. And it seems I wasn’t the only one; NetStorm virtually disappeared as soon as it came out. I don’t remember any talk of it on forums, or even many reviews, and I probably would have felt a bit cheated if I had spent my allowance on it, given how sparse the multiplayer scene must have been.

And that’s a bit of a shame. NetStorm was weird, but it certainly had its own identity, with a style that was a mix of tribalism and steampunk that at the time I hadn’t ever really seen before–and rarely, since. I’m sure there was depth there that would’ve been satisfying to fully explore, but it released into a market that was already pretty saturated, and just a year before the juggernaut that was Starcraft hit the scene…making this another game that Blizzard inadvertently helped murder before it had a chance to shine. RIP, Battleborn.

With all the unexpected game remakes and revivals these days, maybe it’s not too much to hope for someone to pick up the rights to *NetStorm*? It’s gotta be cheap.

Nothing’s perfect

If you’ve been following US politics lately, your feed has probably been filled with headlines about how Democratic Socialists have been enacting something of a coup in the Democratic party. Multiple establishment candidates have been passed over in favor of newer, younger, more progressive candidates in the primaries–that is, candidates who might actually try to give voters what they want, instead of shrugging their shoulders as Republicans steamroll over everything, and maybe writing a strongly-worded letter of condemnation if you donate $50.

Regardless of your political leanings, or your thoughts on Democratic Socialism, it seems undeniable that people are fed up with the old guard, and they want change. I’m not saying these progressive firebrands will magically change everything overnight and fix all the country’s many, many problems. Hell, I’m still not entirely confident we’re even going to have midterm elections, come November. But right here, right now, seeing record numbers of voters turning up and finally putting their feet down in protest of the completely ineffectual status quo, I feel something like hope that things might actually start getting a little better. Which brings us to today’s word.

utopia, noun – a perfect society

Learned from: Utopia (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel Electronics

Published by Mattel Electronics (1982)

When people think of real-time strategy games, they probably think of Starcraft, Command & Conquer, or maybe Age of Empires, games which by this point in time, are objectively kind of old. It’s a genre that died out a bit in the mid-2000s, with occasional attempts to revive it, to varying degrees of success. But the oldest game in the genre I can think of is Utopia, a one-screen, two-player game with a set time limit, where the objective wasn’t to build armies and decimate your opponent, but to try to make the people of your island as happy as possible.

That isn’t to say you couldn’t attack your opponent. If memory serves, the only offensive measure you could take was building PT boats to go after and sink the other player’s fishing boats, though I think they were expensive, and didn’t directly do anything to help your score. Instead, your focus should be on planting crops, building schools and hospitals, and repairing damage if a storm swept through your settlement.

Utopia was a surprisingly laid-back game, considering the warfare and defense-building that would come to define the real-time strategy genre in future years. It was also surprisingly complex for something that came out in 1982, on a console with a controller that kinda looked like a phone receiver.

The perfect society is surprisingly low-res. But considering there were no microtransactions, or expiring licenses, or season passes back then, maybe there’s something to this…

Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage

I have a few days off from work coming up, and I’m not wholly sure how the place is going to function in my absence. I also don’t think I care. I put in for this PTO before various circumstances led up to be operating with literally half the staff we’re supposed to have. At the time I put in the request, it was largely just because I didn’t want to deal with people and political talk for a few days around voting in the primaries (I put in for time off in early November for a similar reason). But now? We’ve been barely a skeleton crew for over two months, and it turns out this brief respite from work is more for my mental health than anything else. Which brings us to today’s word.

zoochosis, noun – a condition arising in captive animals presenting as repetitive and/or harmful behaviors, believed to be caused from the stress of captivity

Learned from: Zoochosis (PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Clapperheads

Published by Clapperheads, Storymode (2024)

Full disclosure: I have never actually played Zoochosis. It landed on my radar because the initial trailers looked creepy and different: You play as an overnight zookeeper who discovers that some of the animals in your care are infected with alien parasite things that cause them to mutate into Resident Evil-style abominations under certain conditions. It was a neat concept, and the trailers made it seem like once one of these animals transformed, you’d either have to chase it, or be chased yourself, potentially through the entire zoo, until you managed to escape or subdue it.

Then the game came out, the reviews were decidedly lukewarm at best, and I decided to watch a bit of gameplay before I decided to buy it.

I’m glad I did, because most of what the early trailers put forth was misleading at best. The basic setting is the same, but you don’t discover these horrors for yourself–you’re straight-up told about them, because the zoo administration is aware and actively cultivating these parasites for…reasons. The zoo is also significantly more compartmentalized than it initially seemed, meaning you have to deal with each set of animals/mutants in a pretty small area. Add in bad voice acting, dodgy animations, and gameplay that seemed much more tedious than expected, and I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger on this one. That’s not even touching on the laundry list of bugs that, judging from the comments on Steam, have largely gone unfixed.

I actually didn’t know zoochosis was a real word until just recently; I figured it was just something the developers made up as a cool-sounding title. So, for as much of a mess as the final product turned out to be, at least I got something out of the disappointment.

I wanted to run from mutant giraffe monsters through a dimly-lit zoo, not play a first-person farming sim sprinkled with glitchy, half-baked, small-scale combat.

Trench warfare

So, my job has been severely understaffed for about two months now. This is ostensibly because we had a system migration about two weeks ago, and they didn’t want to train someone in on the old system, only to have to turn around and immediately retrain them on the new one. Which would have made sense if they hadn’t transferred one of my coworkers to another department, fired another for calling in too much because her kid was sick, all while knowing another was going to be moving out of state. Oh, and in the midst of all this, another one found a different job elsewhere, leaving us with dreams of even having a skeleton crew.

Recently at meetings, the higher-ups have taken to telling those of us who are still here (for whatever reason) what a “great job” we’re doing on the front lines. Front lines of the Russian army, maybe, passing a single gun around between two or three people. And I’m sure they’re oh so appreciative of us putting up with all this stress and extra work, with no bump in pay to show for it. Venting aside, this brings us to today’s word.

vanguard, noun – the front line of a military force

Learned from: Vanguard (Atari 2600, Arcade, Atari 5200)

Developed by Tose

Published by Centuri, Atari Inc. (1981)

It’s a testament to how bad I was at this game as a kid, that I didn’t know there was a boss at the end until a random Facebook reel showed up in my feed the other day. Vanguard was a shoot-’em-up, or shmup, with a twist that not only did the levels switch between vertical and horizontal-scrolling, but that your ship would shoot in whichever direction you were moving the joystick. I don’t think it could do diagonals, though.

I have no idea if there was a story to this game or not–I’m pretty sure I got the loose cartridge from a garage sale for like, a quarter or something. And I never saw the arcade cabinet in the wild, so without the instruction manual or the hypothetical text crawl explaining things in the arcade version, I had no idea why I was flying through caverns, or that there was a boss monster behind everything. I just kind of assumed it was like Defender, where the levels just went on forever until you died. I do think Vanguard would work better as a twin-stick shooter though; having to move closer to the thing you’re shooting at in order to aim your shots at it was a very clunky control scheme, even back then.

Behold! The mastermind behind the alien invasion/doomsday countdown/robot rebellion, or whatever the setup to this game was.

They always told us vegetables were good for you

It’s 2026, and the wealthiest country in the world is dealing with food sanitation issues you’d have expected maybe in the 19th century. The biggest headlines are about cyclosporiasis, which seems to be caused by a single-celled parasite being found in an ever-increasing list of produce. That’s not to say the life of a carnivore is any safer, since screw worms are literally eating livestock alive. Oh, and half the continent is currently on fire. What a great time to be alive. Though, at least one of those things brings us to today’s word.

amoeba, noun – a single-celled organism that engulfs its prey using pseudopods

Learned from: The Boulder Dash Construction Kit (Apple II, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC, ZX Spectrum)

Developed by First Star Software

Published by Epyx, Databyte (1986)

I learned something today, in looking up this game; the Boulder Dash Construction Kit is apparently the fourth game in the series. I’d always assumed it was just the first game, with a level editor included. Maybe that’s why some of the levels seemed so tricky to my much younger self.

At any rate, the series casts you as a cave explorer looking for diamonds, while avoiding amoebas (which would keep multiplying unless you walled them off and suffocated them), slime (which slowed you down I think), moths (which…ate you?), and of course, the titular boulders (which could crush you as boulders tend to do), and other things I’m probably forgetting. The levels ranged from fairly straightforward to maddeningly difficult, and while I dabbled in the level editor a bit, I never really liked the game enough to make many stages. Not that there was an Internet around back then to share them on anyway–that was an incentive later in life, and I did make a few multiplayer Half-Life maps back in the day. But if nothing else, the game taught me a word or two.

Totally not Indiana Jones, you hear us, Lucasfilm?!

And good riddance

Since at least 3/4 of my news feed today is about Linsey Graham’s sudden death, I may as well chime in on it. The man was a spineless hypocrite, even by the so-low-you-could-trip-over-them standards of the GOP. He was staunchly anti-Trump, calling him a “kook” and saying if he got the Republican nomination, “we’d be destroyed, and we’d deserve it”…up until both the nomination and election went to him in 2016, at which point Graham couldn’t lick those boots hard enough. Same when Trump ruthlessly and continuously mocked Graham’s close friend, John McCain; I’ve seen stronger pushbacks from paraplegics. And then of course, there’s his record regarding women’s rights, gay marriage, and really anyone who wasn’t a crusty old white dude. He was a pestilent dung heap of a human being, and the world is better off without him. Which brings us to today’s word.

objurgate, verb – to denounce, condemn, severely rebuke

Learned from: Neverness to Everness (PC, Mac, mobile, Playstation 5)

Developed by Hotta Studio

Published by Perfect World Games (2026)

We got anime Grand Theft Auto, before GTA6, except with paranormal stuff and catgirls with superpowers, so I’d argue there’s no real reason for GTA6 to even exist, honestly. Especially when it’s going to cost $80, while Neverness to Everness is free to play. And yeah, it’s a gacha game, but there’s a surprising amount of stuff to do without spending a dime. Want to steal cars and get into fights with biker gangs and the cops? Go for it. Want to get lost in a D&D-inspired game-within-a-game and go on a medieval hack & slash adventure? Well, you have to progress the main story to get to it, but it’s there. Want to explore pocket dimensions where you’re being chased by shadows that only move if your back is turned; or fight spectral fish who are causing trouble by following a river that no longer exists; or run down a tanuki who’s stealing from vending machines? There’s weird stuff around every corner. Or you can play mahjong, or go fishing, or do street races, or buy and decorate an apartment, or…yeah, it’s a lot.

And it’s populated by a cast of quirky and (mostly) likable characters. There’s also Taygedo, but we don’t talk about Taygedo.

But the good characters range from the catgirl who fancies herself a mob boss, to the werewolf security agent, to the guy whose move set taught me today’s word, who I…don’t really know much about. I got him on my team through a random pull, but he hasn’t shown up a ton in the story yet. His name’s Baicang, and he curses enemies. One of the curses is called objurgate, which deals AoE damage…I think. See, his curses are all tied to activations in a string of combos, where Chinese characters pop up over enemies as he fights them. The problem being, I don’t read Chinese, so I’m not sure which curse I’m ever going to activate at any given time. He still dishes out a lot of damage, but my strategy with him is trash, because while his skill descriptions are in English, the visuals aren’t. So, I never know what I’m really tossing out there.

Still, NTE is a fun game so far. Maybe a bit on the easy side sometimes, but there’s enough to see and do in the city of Hethereau, that even if the combat isn’t often a challenge, there’s still a lot of other stuff to experience.

Based on the official title card from the game, Baicang works for the Bureau of Anomaly Control, likes a good drink, and seems pretty professional. In-game, he comes across as a bit more of a loose cannon.

Can’t touch this

I was talking to a coworker today about the recent holiday weekend. Neither of us went to the fireworks, because we don’t really like crowds–especially post-COVID. And I mentioned how it’s kind of amazing that I actually went to a convention as big as Dragon Con about ten years ago, considering people were packed into the hallways like sardines. Simpler times, and I guess being in costume helped. But that brings us to today’s word.

aphenphosmphobia, noun – the fear of being touched

Learned from: Death Stranding (PC, Mac, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Kojima Productions

Published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, 505 Games (2019)

If you know me personally, you know I am not a fan of Hideo Kojima. At all. I think his games are bloated and pretentious, and the man really should just start making movies. But Death Stranding was free on the Epic Games Store at one point, and for that price, I figured it was worth a try. I still want my money back.

In the future, a cataclysmic event has fractured the United States, and inexplicably caused what remains to look an awful lot like Iceland. Invisible monsters roam the land which can only be detected by weird test tube babies, and if someone dies they explode for some reason, unless their bodies are properly dealt with. And we’re expected to take all this seriously, when the game is populated by characters with names like “Die-Hardman.”

I hate Hideo Kojima so much.

Anyway, our hero, Sam Porter Bridges, is tasked with delivering cargo from one isolated settlement to another, to try and reestablish connections between people. And in case the “joke” in his name flew over your head, I’m pretty sure the game explains to you how fitting it is, considering he’s porting things to people to build bridges. Oh, and Sam has aphenphosmphobia. The irony!

Most of the “gameplay” involves you guiding Sam across vast expanses of empty, bizarrely treeless wilderness (because again, post-apocalyptic America looks like Iceland, I guess), listening to mellow music and trying to avoid any slopes that are too steep–because Sam might fall and hurt himself or damage his cargo. And honestly, the implied threat of having to make the long, boring trek back to base after making a misstep was enough to keep me meticulously navigating him through the first mission. Then I got to the second task, and encountered roving gangs of people who are just so keen on making deliveries, that they attack any couriers they see to try and steal their cargo, and I just couldn’t anymore.

I don’t care how cool the boss fights look. They aren’t worth suffering through the rest of the game.

Nice going, birdbrain

Earlier this week, I went to an author presentation at the library, where James McCommons was talking a bit about his book, The Feather Wars, about the history of bird conservation. My father got me interested in birdwatching at an early age, so while this might not sound like the most thrilling subject to you, dear readers, it was right up my alley. Even when he got into some sobering territory, like how Canada Geese were endangered at one point, or how passenger pigeons used to outnumber human beings and now they don’t exist at all. And in a way, that brings us to today’s word.

birdlime, noun – an adhesive spread on twigs for the purposes of trapping birds

Learned from: Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (Nintendo 3DS)

Developed by P-Studio

Published by Atlus (2014)

Birdlime was a real thing, used by real-world hunters/poachers in the past to easily catch large numbers of small birds by literally sticking them to a branch so they couldn’t fly away. Sometimes it was for food (people ate songbirds the way we eat chicken in the 19th century), sometimes for fashion (it wasn’t just larger birds like dodos and ostriches that had feathers women wanted for their hats), but either way, there was a steady demand.

Pretty depressing stuff, when you think about it. The usage in the game was, er…quite a bit different.

Believe it or not, there was a time before Atlus just endlessly milked Persona 5 for all it was worth. Instead, they milked Persona 4. There was a lackluster anime series, fighting game spinoffs, dancing game spinoffs, and in the Persona Q series, first-person dungeon crawler spinoffs. Most of these side projects found convoluted ways to get the cast from Persona 4 and Persona 3 together on the same screen, to varying degrees of narrative coherence. Some of these were actually pretty fun, regardless of whether they made much sense.

Persona Q had the extended casts running into each other due to some sort of time travel MacGuffin, as an excuse to have the cartoonish Teddy fight alongside the knife-wielding dog, Koromaru; or the robot, Aigis, fight next to the emotionally distant (some might almost say “robotic”), Naoto.

At one point, you can find a weapon for Aigis called the “Lime Howitzer,” a long-range cannon that fires birdlime. Which I think in game terms meant it had a chance to debuff the enemy’s speed, or paralyze them or something. So, a much more whimsical take on the stuff than the historical use of it.