I’m surprised this word isn’t used more, these days.

Maybe it’s just my perspective, but in recent years, it seems like everybody is a lot more tense than they used to be. From money issues, to health scares, to concerns about politics, society in general just feels significantly more worried, angry, and fearful than I remember it, even five years ago. Given that, it does seem a bit odd that you don’t hear this word bandied about more often:

anxiolytic, noun – Medication or treatment that reduces anxiety.

Learned from: Enter the Gungeon (PS4, PC, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Dodge Roll

Published by Devolver Digital (2016)

Enter the Gungeon is an odd little game; it’s a roguelike, twin-stick shooter, where almost everything is a gun or something gun-/explosive-related. Many of your standard enemies are anthropomorphic bullets and grenades, copyright-free versions of iconic weapons from other games abound, and there are a ton of D&D references with gun puns worked in (beholders are “beholsters,” medusas are “gorguns,” and the latest update was even called “Advanced Gungeons and Draguns”).

The developers really took this theme to the hilt and ran with it, which gives Enter the Gungeon a lot of heart and personality. But not every item you find entirely fits this tongue-in-cheek mold, as is the case with the Muscle Relaxant. It fits well in the overall theme of intense gunplay, in that it calms your character’s nerves and steadies their aim, but I guess they couldn’t work in a groaner into the item description itself. Instead, they taught me a word.

enter_the_gungeon

If you enjoy roguelikes, this one will blow you away. (See? I can do it, too.)

Happy Easter

As a kid, the whole Easter Bunny thing never made sense to me, because rabbits clearly don’t lay eggs. As I grew older, their roles as symbols of fertility became clearer, which tie strongly into Easter’s pre-Christian roots, so it started to make more sense. But in the spirit of my youthful confusion, here’s a word that references a completely different nonsensical belief regarding what hatches from what.

anatiferous, adj. – Producing ducks or geese.

Learned from: Skullgirls (PS3, Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, XBox 360, XBox One)

Developed by Reverge Labs

Published by Autumn Games, Konami (2012)

Skullgirls has the distinction of being one of the quirkiest fighting games I’ve ever played, from its character designs, to its old-timey theater aesthetic, to the fact that every combo has an associated descriptor. For example, a 7-hit combo is “Lucky,” while an 18-hit combo is “Barely Legal,” and so on. For some reason, a 32-hit combo is “Anatiferous.” It’s inexplicable in the game, and even the history of the word fails to shed any light on the reasons why it’s there.

See, at one point in time, it was believed that barnacle geese hatched from barnacles on the sides of ships. As if that weren’t weird enough, people somehow got the notion that the barnacles themselves grew on trees, and dropped off into the water, before floating over to ships and attaching themselves. Because geese hatching from barnacles hanging from trees would just be silly. I marvel at what kind of worldview must have prevailed at that time, to not only come up with this idea, but to somehow make it stick.

barnacle_goose

Even the goose is unimpressed by its origin story.

Lexical ambiguity

I used to live in an apartment building with a lot of old people. In fact, I think my wife and I were the youngest people there, being in our early thirties. Given that–and the fact that the other residents apparently had nothing better to do with their retirement–we became quite the regular topic of conversation. This wouldn’t have been quite so bad, if not for the fact that anywhere from two to five of them would be sitting outside, in front of the main entrance at any given time. And gods forbid, if you tried to just go home from a long day at work, without first engaging them in a 20-minute conversation. Carrying groceries? They were 100% sure there wasn’t anything perishable, and that we were young and strong enough to just stand there, holding them, while they yammered at us. Moving furniture? Oh, where’d you buy that from? What, could I hold the door for you? That’s crazy talk.

We took to calling these people “The Gauntlet.” We’ve since moved out, but one of them still shows up at the place where I work from time to time, and still tries to pry into my personal life. Which brought today’s word to mind.

gauntlet, noun – A long, grueling ordeal.

Learned from: Gauntlet (Arcade, and ports to virtually anything that can display graphics)

Developed by Atari Games

Published by Atari Games, U.S. Gold (1985)

When I first discovered Gauntlet, I wondered why this game about going through mazes, killing hordes of ghosts and demons was named after a glove. Was it a magical gauntlet? Was it a treasure you were trying to recover? Why has it never shown up, in all the hours (and quarters) I spent playing this game?

So, eventually I looked it up, and was introduced to my first example of lexical ambiguity–inferring the wrong definition of a word, when there are several to choose from–even though I wouldn’t know the term for it until decades later. And suddenly, the game made a lot more sense, because it really was a long, challenging experience. It was also one of the first multiplayer games I remember playing, though since you could hurt each other, keep the screen from scrolling, and accidentally (“accidentally”) destroy useful items, having friends along often didn’t make the challenge any easier.

Still, it’s a true classic, and a series that’s kinda still alive, today, in name and in spirit. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Writer needs food.

gauntlet

If you look closely, you can see several friendships ending, as the Warrior is chucking an ax at the Elf, while the Wizard is going to destroy that potion, because he missed the ghost. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

And now for something completely different.

I’m going to take a break from the usual today, and actually review a game I just played. Since (in a way) this blog is about how games can impact our lives, it seems in keeping with the spirit of things–especially when I’m left feeling uncertain of how I should feel at all about a particular title. This will be long, so if you want the tl;dr version, skip to the last paragraph. So, without further ado…

labyrinth_of_refrain

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned how my early experiences with Dungeon Master shaped my love of the first-person dungeon crawler, and how happy I am that the genre is still alive and well in Japan. So, even though many contemporary releases don’t reach the level of depth and immersion of that old classic, I still tend to pick them up. Some I enjoy more than others, and despite its shortcomings, Labyrinth of Refrain was proving to be a fun example of the genre…until one of the characters was unceremoniously killed in a back alley nearly 60 hours in, and I lost.

This is a problem, because I have no idea what I did to get a bad ending. In, say, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (another dungeon crawler), if you got an ending you didn’t want, the story made it clear that you supported the wrong people. Going a bit further afield, in something like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, if you got a bad ending, it was because you trusted the wrong people, or split the party into the wrong groups. You might not know exactly what went wrong, but you had an idea of what to try. Even in Silent Hill 2, a game with some of the most subtle elements that influence which ending you get, you at least see a list of statistics at the end, so you have an inkling of what you can do differently the next time around. In Labyrinth of Refrain, I have absolutely no clue what I did wrong, and this is due in large part to how the story is presented.

See, you aren’t the main character. Your role in things is to just venture into the (increasingly inexplicable) dungeons, kill monsters, and answer the occasional yes or no question (or remain silent). The actual plot plays out around you in visual novel-style cutscenes, that happen mainly when you enter a new area, or find a certain item. There’s no way to choose which scenes to watch, so I can’t opt out of the one that gets me the bad ending, and I’m at a complete loss as to what I did that got me to this point. Did I complete a side quest I wasn’t supposed to? Was my karma too high? Too low? Did I not sell enough items at the market, or too many? None of the yes/no questions seemed to pertain to how things ended up, so I don’t think it’s that, but I have no way of knowing, because the game doesn’t communicate my mistakes at all. And after sinking that much time into it, that’s frustrating.

The experience leading up to that point was…more enjoyable than it probably should have been, honestly. In about 95% of the battles, I just ordered my units to attack, and sat back until the enemy was dead. The other 5% was the early game, where you’re a lot more fragile, and thus have to experiment more to stay alive, and during boss fights. Attack magic usually wasn’t worth sacrificing the base attack damage from your units, and it’s fairly easy to get a skill that auto-heals your party after battles, so healing magic is pointless most of the time. What kept me going was the story I wasn’t directly involved in, and the loot…for awhile. I’ll touch more on the story in a bit, but the loot takes some explaining, because even that has issues.

Your adventuring party consists of five slots (called covens) of units. Each coven can hold between one and three individual units, depending on its type, with the possibility of having numerous “support” units attached as well. And each unit has its own set of equipment: left arm, right arm, head, chest, boots, accessory.

Starting to see the issue?

Weapons aren’t so bad, because not everyone is going to be using a crossbow, or lance, but for armor, nearly every class and gender can wear any armor in the game. So, whenever you find a new armor piece, you have to go though potentially 15+ units, comparing its stats to what they’re currently wearing. And loot drops ALL THE TIME. Stats are randomized (within a range) for each piece, too, and if you factor in the Diablo-style item prefixes (“breezy” sword, “odorous” traveler’s cape, etc.), there’s no shorthand way of knowing whether an item’s worth checking or not. You can have one piece of gear with four pages of stats you need to consider. Do you sacrifice a bit of illusion resistance for a boost to your guard chance? Is losing some defense worth the increase in charm? It’s micro-managing to the extreme. But for awhile at least, it’s fun chasing higher numbers.

The dungeons themselves are distinct and nicely drawn (as are the enemies), though they’re nonsensical in how they fit together. Maybe it gets explained in the “good ending,” how you go from underground areas, to open-air kingdoms, to towers who knows where, but it wasn’t during my 58 hours of play time. And while there are some puzzles, they’re never terribly complex–find the key, or the switch, or the MacGuffin to move forward.

As for the story itself, it’s very disjointed, but there’s enough of a sense of mystery and foreboding, that I wish I’d been able to see it through to the real ending. The characters aren’t always sympathetic, and some are downright confounding (like the nun who has an immediate and seemingly-inexplicable crush on one of the other characters), but underneath it all, there’s more I wanted to learn. Something is undeniably wrong with the town of refrain, and the people in it, and discovering just what’s going on is a big part of what kept me going…which makes my sudden, unavoidable failure all the more galling.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a hard game to recommend–or to completely write off. There’s enough tension to the combat (will an attack miss, deal a critical hit, apply a status effect to give your units a breather?), that even just spamming “attack” like I did kept my interest in the battles, more often than not. The maps are huge, with tons of loot to find (for better or worse). And the graphics are quite good for a game of this type. But at the same time, you as a player aren’t a direct actor in the story that unfolds, and whatever impact you do have behind the scenes can lead you down an unwinnable path, and good luck figuring out what you did wrong. Also, your predilection for micromanagement might greatly influence your enjoyment, when you get to the point of having to juggle equipment between upwards of a dozen characters. There are also some, uh…questionable scenes of either a surprisingly violent, or weirdly sexual nature, depending on which ones you get. You never directly see anything overtly gory, or X-rated (at least I didn’t), but reading about someone being mercilessly beaten, or pursued by someone they have no interest in can be uncomfortable. It’s a very mixed bag, but there’s some fun to be had here–just be warned that you can lose a lot of time, if the game decides you deserve a bad ending, for whatever arbitrary and unexplained reason. Best of luck, if you decide to pick this one up. In a very literal sense, you’ll need it.

Happy Pi Day!

Obligatory pie-related post for 3.14, and it’s a bit of a long one.

atelier, noun – A workshop–specifically the workshop of an artisan, artist, or designer.

Learned from: Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland (PS3, PS Vita, Switch)

Developed by Gust

Published by NIS America (2010)

Atelier Rorona isn’t a game about saving the world, or overthrowing an evil empire, or anything like that. Instead, it’s about trying to keep your master’s alchemy shop from going bankrupt. But the small scale of the adventure doesn’t mean it’s any less harrowing.

You’re given a series of tasks to complete for the king, to prove to him that your shop is worth keeping around, and each of these has a time limit. And everything takes time. Going out to collect ingredients eats up time. Making items takes time. Side events? You guessed it: time. It’s a surprisingly tense mechanic for a relatively prosaic concept.

Thankfully, you’re not alone in your quest, as a variety of colorful characters will join you, from a puppeteer, to a ghost, to a journeyman cook…and that bloody cook is what ties this in to Pi Day. Iksel wants to become a famous chef, and his goal is reflected in how he acts in the party–a lot of his moves can heal or provide buffs/recovery for the rest of the characters. Plus, he dishes out (pun fully intended) a good amount of damage, to boot. He was one of my strongest party members…and then I made too many pies.

See, in Atelier Rorona, you have two kinds of leveling: character levels, and your alchemy skill level. You need this latter to be high enough to make certain items, so you’ll occasionally have to grind lesser items to get there. A good way through the game, I had a lot of ingredients for making pies on-hand, and decided to use some of my time churning those out like nobody’s business (alchemy can make damn near anything in Japanese RPGs). So, I’m going about my business, when one day, Iksel bursts into my shop, sees what I’m doing, and thinks I’m trying to upstage him. He then challenges me to a pie-making contest a week later, storms out of my shop, and leaves my party. I still hadn’t gathered the ingredients I needed for whatever the king was asking for, and without him in my lineup, I was left with some severely under-leveled alternatives, to fill the gap.

Looking back on it, years later, I’m actually rather impressed that Gust put in such an obscure Easter egg. It adds a layer to the character, and makes me wonder what other events I could’ve unlocked by accident. But at the time, I’d lost one of my best characters, and I was pissed. Some time later, my PS3 bit the dust, and I lost my save files, so I still haven’t beaten this game. I really should revisit it at some point, because the series is huge, and I did enjoy my time with Rorona up until this point.

iksel

Look at this smug bastard.

The worm turns

I have a long history with the first Dark Souls. When the game first came out, I made it to the Four Kings, got stuck, and had my PS3 die before I had a chance to get any further. Later, when I’d replaced my system, I bought the DLC, and got frustrated when I couldn’t figure out how to access this thing I paid extra money for. So I put it down again. Later still, I looked up what I had to do to get into the new content, got to the point where you free Dusk of Oolacile…and accidentally killed her, when I set my controller down, and the R2 trigger registered that as being pressed.

Long story short, I loved the game, but it kept frustrating me for the wrong reasons. Just recently, I picked it up again and finally beat it. Since it’s fresh in my mind, here’s one of the words I learned from it.

vermifuge, noun – A medicine that kills or expels parasitic worms from the body.

Learned from: Dark Souls (PS3, PC, PS4, Switch, XBox 360, XBox One)

Developed by From Software

Published by From Software (2011)

Once you’ve finally fought your way through the horrible frame rate of Blighttown, you enter the realm of Quelaag, one of the Daughters of Chaos. She, herself, can be a tricky fight, but her minions are pretty pathetic: regular humans who are infested with giant maggots. As long as you just run past them, they can’t do much to you, but if you kill them, their parasites burst free, and they’re more of a pain to deal with. Happily, they do sometimes drop the vermifuge needed to end your own infection, if you’re unlucky enough to be bested by the worms. Though, it’s still easier to just avoid them.

vermifuge

“Do you have a moment to talk about our lady and savior, Quelaag?”

%#)@!

Multiplayer console games that require memberships to services other than the platform-specific subscription you pay for to play online drive me up the wall. The Anthem demo has shown me that I can apparently never play another EA game online on my PS4, or any other iteration of the Playstation brand. Because at some point, I created an EA account, linked to an email address that literally does not exist anymore, and there seems to be no way to change it. (I think it may have been way back with Dead Space 2 on my PS3.)

I’d been cautiously looking forward to Anthem, so EA’s stubborn insistence on making Bioware shackle the game to its own online service (and rendering it unplayable for me), has me rather livid. So, after that lead-in, here’s today’s word:

coprolalia, noun – Uncontrollable swearing.

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (PS4, PC, PS3, PS Vita, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is a roguelike platformer, where the gimmick is that once your character dies, you start over as his/her child, come to avenge the long line of ancestors who came before. You’re given a little choice over what traits you want each descendant to have, from gigantism to color blindness–there are dozens of attributes. It’s a quirky little feature that can affect gameplay in a lot of ways….

…or not, as in the case of a descendant with coprolalia. The only thing this really does (as far as I can tell), is cause a cartoon text bubble filled with gobbledegook swearing to appear, every time your character takes damage. Neither helpful nor harmful, it is at least worth a bit of a chuckle.

Q*bert: Gaming’s first foul mouth.

Deep freeze

Things have been very, very cold lately, in my neck of the woods, so let’s go with a word that captures that idea this time around.

permafrost, noun – A permanently frozen region of land.

Learned from: Neuromancer (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, PC)

Developed by Interplay Productions

Published by Mediagenic (1988)

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been playing Neuromancer as early as I did. It’s a game that involves corporate espionage, existential crises, red light districts, organ harvesting, and a whole slew of other themes I didn’t fully appreciate until years later. Still, adventure games were things I could play with my father, and we both enjoyed the experience of puzzling our way through the narratives. It was also my first exposure to the cyberpunk genre, and it’s a love that’s endured to the present day.

“Permafrost” was a password you needed to give someone on a forum, to enter into a shady arms deal, if memory serves. I’m pretty sure that deal resulted in your character getting arrested, but then, there seemed to be little in that dystopian world that wasn’t illegal, so that’s neither here nor there.

neuromancer

Cutting edge graphics for the time, really.

A sign of things to come?

As I’m sure most of you are aware, Bungie cut ties with Activision-Blizzard just a few days ago. So, this week, it only seems fitting to go with a word that I learned from one of their games.

thrall, noun – An enslaved servant.

Learned from: Myth II: Soulblighter (PC, Mac)

Developed by Bungie

Published by Bungie (1998)

Myth II is one of my favorite real-time strategy games ever, partly because it had so much character. You didn’t just have healers, or ghosts, but rather journeymen and soulless. Thralls were the game’s equivalent of zombies: slow, shambling units that absorbed a good amount of damage, and hit pretty hard if they ever closed the distance. When you get down to it, arguing semantics doesn’t seem like it should amount to much, but these little choices in nomenclature did help give the series its own atmosphere. Instead of just a mindless corpse, the thralls were dead bodies pressed into service against their will–that’s a lot of information to convey in just a simple name.

It’s also nice to see that this word is no longer applicable to Bungie, themselves.

thrall

#Mondays

Happy New Year!

Oh, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Between visiting family, traveling, and spending time with friends, getting to update this just wasn’t going to happen. But it was fun, and I hope you all had holidays as enjoyable as mine. Still, it was kind of a mess in a way, so this word seemed fitting.

snafu, noun – A situation characterized by egregious mistakes.

Learned from: Snafu (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel

Published by Mattel (1981)

Originally a military acronym (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up), snafu has since become a word in its own right. While my holiday excursion was hardly full of mistakes, it was pretty hectic at times.

So what was the game? Well, it’s essentially a competitive version of Snake. Or the light cycle races from Tron, if you prefer…except that Snafu predates that film by about a year. It’s also nowhere near as fun or fast as Tron made it seem. It’s just you and maybe one other person (the Intellivision only had two controllers), and a couple of AI bots making lines around the field, and trying to steer the others into them so they crash. Even for its time, the gameplay was kind of lacking, compared to other one-screen, competitive multiplayer games like Combat! or Archon, which came out in a similar window. Still, even something this simple can have value.

snafu