No theme this time

Nothing immediately jumped out at me as a theme for this week, so I decided to just go with the most recent word I’ve learned from a game so far.

cenotaph, noun – A monument or tomb containing no actual remains.

Learned from: Immortal: Unchained (PS4, PC, XBox One)

Developed by Toadman Interactive

Published by Sold Out Sales and Marketing Ltd. (2018)

Immortal: Unchained is a game affectionately referred to (by those who’ve actually heard of it), as “Gun Souls.” And it is a game that tries to imitate the Dark Souls formula as closely as it can, in a sci-fi setting–but like a child wearing its parents’ clothes, the final result is…uneven, at best. The format is pretty similar, with obelisks standing in for bonfires, a nebulous quest for which you’re the Chosen One, and all that. But the difficulty curve is all over the place–case in point, the second-to-last area is a cake walk (minus the boss), but the final level is flat-out unfair. To the point where most regular fights felt like taking on the Capra Demon for the first time: i.e. you don’t have enough room (or time) to get out of the way of everything that suddenly pops up.

Even the backstory is imparted in the same way as in the Dark Souls games–that is, primarily through item descriptions. Every gun you pick up, or lost idol you find will have some lengthy synopsis of where it came from, and what group of people was using it. The problem is, there are so many different factions, and mythical figures, and conflicts that have happened off-screen, that it’s hard to keep any of them straight–especially when most of the enemies are just dark humanoid dudes with glowy bits on them.

Speaking of them, in addition to guns or health kits, enemies will occasionally drop things that are referred to as cenotaphs. If you’re feeling charitable, this choice is almost poetic, considering your enemies are the undead remnants of fallen civilizations…at least, I think that’s what they’re supposed to be. (As I said, the story’s kinda vague.) The civilizations themselves quite literally have no remains of their inhabitants left, since they all seem to be rising from their graves, so these “cenotaphs” (which can be anything from pendants, to data pads) are the only memorials left that speak of their history.

Or, maybe I’m giving too much credit to a mediocre game.

Still might be worth checking out, if you can find it cheap.

United States of SMASH

With the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate just a few days away, I felt I should do something in honor of the series…in a roundabout way. The first Smash Bros. game I played was Melee, on the Gamecube, yet I learned that word many years prior.

melee, noun – A close-quarters fight among several people.

Learned from: Dungeon Master (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Turbografx-CD, Sharp X68000, PC-9801, FM Towns)

Developed by FTL Games

Published by FTL Games (1987)

I remember being six or seven years old, and unwrapping this game on Christmas morning, only to see the sticker on the box that said it required an entire megabyte of memory to run. I also remember the feeling of surprise and awe, when my father told me he’d upgraded our Apple IIGS from 512k to a whopping TWO megabytes of RAM for the occasion–to this day, I do kinda wonder if he bought the game as much for himself, as for me.

And I can understand why. Dungeon Master is still close to the epitome of the first-person dungeon crawler, for me. Its levels were huge and mysterious, its puzzles actually made you think, and you were just as likely to die of starvation or dehydration, as you were by falling down a pit or getting killed by monsters, if you weren’t careful. Magic worked by entering the arcane alphabet of each spell, no area was entirely safe, and weapons and armor didn’t have obvious numerical stats, so you had to experiment to see which ones worked best for your party.

This carried over to attacks as well, where one sword might offer a slash and a slice attack, while another might be designed for thrusts. Each type of attack used a different amount of stamina, and seemed to work better against certain types of monsters, though the more stamina used, the stronger the hit, generally. Which brings us to the battle ax, which had a strong (yet inaccurate) attack simply labeled “melee.” As a child of less than ten, I probably relied on that attack (and others like it) way too much, which explains why I didn’t do very well in the game until years later.

And I know a dungeon crawler is about as far from a Smash Bros. game you can get, without delving into sports, but I learned a lot of words from Dungeon Master, so this seemed like a good opportunity to get one out of the way.

dungeon_master_logo

Novembeard

I’ve never taken part in No-Shave November, but as the month is almost over, I thought a word related to the event might be fitting.

tonsorial adj. – Of, or relating to the business of a barber.

Learned from: Harvester (PC)

Developed by DigiFX Interactive

Published by Merit Studios (1996)

It’s tempting to describe Harvester as “like Twin Peaks, but…” yet I don’t think that’s fully accurate. It’s set in a weird little town, filled with people who are all more than slightly off, true. But whereas Twin Peaks had a certain undeniable charm, Harvester seemed dead-set on injecting the X-TREME nature of the ’90s into nearly every screen, and turning the dial up to 11.

Harvester is a point & click adventure game, which has you playing as a “teenager” (who’s clearly in his mid- to late-twenties), named Steve, who wakes up one morning in a town he doesn’t recognize, surrounded by people he doesn’t know. His “mother” spends the entirety of her days baking sheet after sheet of cookies for an upcoming bake sale, his neighbor is a disgusting pig who only ever talks about meat, and the local mortician also owns a hotel, where random drifters seem to keep dying. Oh, and Steve has also apparently traveled back to the 1950s, and is engaged to be married to a girl who also has no memory of how she got there. And everyone is pushing Steve to join a mysterious group known only as The Lodge.

Sounds like an okay setup, right? Well, it is, until you discover the local meat plant is killing random cats, the principal of the school is a pedophile, your “father” is tied to a bed in blood-smeared sex dungeon, the fire station is staffed by flamboyantly gay men who spend their time painting nude pictures…you get the idea. I have a feeling DigiFX was simply trying to push the notoriety of Harvester as hard as they could, considering the panic around violent and objectionable video games that was rampant in the ’90s. They certainly took things to extremes…but I have my doubts whether it helped their sales or not.

So, what does Harvester have to do with cutting hair? Well, eventually you do get pushed into joining The Lodge, and the initiation requires you to perform a series of increasingly dangerous “pranks,” that range from scratching someone’s prized car, to setting a building on fire. Along the way, you have to steal a barber pole from “Mr. Pastorelli’s tonsorial parlor,” I believe the shadowy Lodge member in the robe calls it–which seems like it would be one of the more harmless tasks, until the owner ends up getting electrocuted by the exposed wires when he opens the shop the next day.

Harvester is not a good game by any means, but there is a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor to be found in its laughably bad gore effects. That’s kind of offset by the overall squicky nature of some of the other stuff (the father watching his own daughter get undressed every night comes to mind), but it’s pretty cheap on Steam, if you feel like checking it out.

Pastorellis

The tonsorial parlor in question.

The Mission of Brain Rot

This is an idea I’ve had rattling around in my head for awhile, now. I’ve been a gamer, pretty much since I could walk, and I realized one day that many of the words in my vocabulary are ones I first learned through video games. Some of these were, predictably, during my formative years, but even to this day I still find myself adding new words to my repertoire from the games I play.

Brain Rot is a way to help show the world that video games aren’t just mindless entertainment, and that they can offer more of value than hand-eye coordination. Case in point: I have clear memories of when, and from which games I learned these words, precisely because the situations in which they cropped up were so heavily contextualized. Learning works best when you can draw connections between subjects, and video games are particularly well-suited for that, considering how varied and distinct the worlds and settings they present tend to be.

I plan to post one word per week. Perhaps making exceptions for more, on holidays and things like that. Even if I doubled that rate, I have enough content to last for years. I hope you’ll enjoy this little experiment enough to stick with me for that time.

And just to cover my legal bases, I should note that I claim no ownership of any of the games mentioned here. They are all copyright of their respective developers/publishers/creative teams, and I intend to give credit as clearly as I can (though I will always list the platform I personally played a particular game on as the first one on the list, and give a publishing date accordingly).

The memories, and the stories that appear here on the other hand, are entirely my own, and copyright of Justin Henry.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a holiday about family, friends, and togetherness, but say the word, and the first thing that comes to mind for most people is probably food. So, it made sense to me to kick this whole project off with a food-based word.

coulis (noun) – Fruit or vegetables, pureed into a thick sauce, and used as a garnish

Learned from: Odin Sphere (PS2, PS4, Vita)

Developed by: Vanillaware

Published by: Atlus (2007)

George Kamitami seems to love two things in life, above all else: food and women. And he draws both subjects in exquisite detail. Playing a Vanillaware game is a feast for the eyes, as each one features jaw-dropping spritework, fluid animations, and character designs that are somewhat exaggerated, but very distinctive. Most of them also involve an emphasis on cooking.

Odin Sphere has several locations where your characters can rest and order food, all of which are run by Pookas (rabbit-like critters). One such place specializes in desserts, where you can order (among other things), ice cream with coulis, if you’ve collected the right ingredients on your travels. These regenerated your health, raised your stats, and if memory serves, most were drawn well enough that they looked like things you might actually want to eat in the real world.

I’ve yet to try a dessert with a coulis sauce, but it’s on my bucket list.