Nailed it

It was very slow at work today, and the topic of conversation got around to a box of nails that had been strewn across a busy roundabout on the edge of town. It’s not clear whether it was scattered maliciously, or fell out of a truck bed, or what, but the ice on the roads this time of year is bad enough without throwing sharp metal hazards into the mix. Which brings us to today’s word.

caltrop, noun – a sharp, metal instrument designed to cause injury and/or impede movement

Learned from: Team Fortress Classic (PC, Mac)

Developed by Valve

Published by Sierra Studios (1999)

Believe it or not, back before Valve just ran the world’s most successful digital games distribution platform, they actually made games, themselves. Pepperidge Farm remembers. Though I guess I can’t really make that joke for much longer, considering they’ve had Deadlock in development for awhile now.

Anyway, Team Fortress Classic was a mod for Half-Life, based on a mod for the original Quake. But it was developed in-house, back when teams would make more content for games that weren’t called No Man’s Sky, and distribute them for free to people who’d already bought the base product. Pepperidge Farms remembers that, too.

You’re probably more familiar with the standalone sequel, Team Fortress 2, but TFC was a beacon of creativity in an FPS multiplayer landscape that was almost entirely variants of standard deathmatch modes at the time. The game was entirely based on one team vs another, and had a variety of objectives depending on the map. It might be capture the flag, or defending an area, or even one team escorting a (mostly) defenseless third party across the map, while the other team tried to assassinate them. You might be trying to fight your way to a safe room and flood the map with poison gas, or initiate (or prevent!) a nuclear missile launch. Fantastic stuff, when most alternatives were just shooting other players with rockets.

And man, did the game emphasize teamwork, because there were 9 character classes you could choose from. Engineers who built turrets and provided armor, spies who could look like enemy players, medics who fared about as well as healers ever do in multiplayer games–team composition really mattered. And then there were the scouts, who moved faster, and had their grenades replaced with caltrops, to try and control the movement of the enemy team. I have a lot of fond memories of the innumerable hours I sunk into this game over my parents’ dial-up connection.

Believe me, this looked a lot more impressive in 1999…

Always look for the humour

We are certainly living through interesting times–in the Chinese curse sense of the term–here in the US. It’s barely been a week into the new administration, and from one day to the next, you can pick a random group of people, and there’s a good chance that the status of their employment, healthcare, liberty, etc. will be anything but certain. Entire swathes of our society are already being reworked, and by this time next year, our cars are probably going to be running on coal, and doctors are going to be relegated to diagnosing illnesses as imbalances of the four humours. Which brings us to today’s word.

splenetic, adj. – spiteful, ill-tempered, or melancholic

Learned from: Astrologaster (PC, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch)

Developed by Nyamyam

Published by Nyamyam (2019)

Astrologaster is an odd little adventure game, where you play as a freelance physician in Elizabethan England, who believes that superior medical treatment can be provided by consulting the stars. You go through the story meeting various (sometimes famous and powerful) clients, listening to their complaints and symptoms, and after consulting your star charts, offering what astrology claims is the proper diagnosis and cure, like prescribing cherries to a particularly splenetic individual…or warning them away from cherries; I don’t exactly remember what the stars said, but I remember cherries were involved in the consultation.

Along the way, you can lie and try to screw over clients you don’t like, have love affairs, dodge draconian regulations, try to get rich by nefarious means, and more. Your character isn’t a particularly good person, as you come to learn over time (spoilers), and my main gripe with the game is that you have very little say in this. As far as I can tell, certain events play out regardless of what you do, and whether you’d want your character to act in certain ways or not. Still, it’s an interesting, and quite different narrative adventure game, and worth a look if you can find it on sale.

If nothing else, it’s funny to diagnose someone with the plague, and tell them their only hope lies in daily enemas of honey and prune juice or whatever.

The “N” is for “Nowledge”

As we still live in the vicinity of our old alma mater, my in-laws tend to get season tickets for hockey, for themselves, my wife, and I. It’s a way to stay connected to where we went to college, and oftentimes, the team is at least halfway decent. This season…is not one of those times. It’s a rebuilding year, sure (the team is mostly incoming freshmen), but our record is still pretty abysmal. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s word.

sieve, noun – a utensil used for straining liquid out of a substance

Learned from: Betrayal at Krondor (PC)

Developed by Dynamix

Published by Sierra On-Line (1993)

As with any sports team, there are a variety of traditions and in-jokes associated with the NMU Wildcats. There’s the, er…glowing endorsement of the university as a whole, in the title of this post; shouting “And Tech still sucks” when there’s one minute to go in a period; and most pertinent, chanting “Sieve!” and pointing at the other team’s goalie, whenever we score a goal.

In a recent game, we were actually doing pretty well for a change, so there was ample opportunity to do this chant. Which was actually pretty invigorating…until a college-age girl a row or two back loudly asked her friends “What does it mean when we shout ‘sieve’ after we score?” I mean, okay, if you’re not thinking about it, it might take awhile for you to come to the realization that it means their goalie is full of holes, and lets everything through. But as this girl’s friends stumbled over the explanation (and my wife turned around to spell it out), I came to the mortifying conclusion that these adults, who presumably had made it through 12 years of basic schooling and were now shelling out tens of thousands of dollars each semester for college…didn’t know what a sieve even was.

Granted, growing up, I think we usually just called them “strainers” in my house, but I still knew this word long before I was old enough to vote.

So, you’re probably asking how this all fits in with Betrayal at Krondor. Is it a cooking RPG? Because I’ve certainly played a few of those (Battle Chef Brigade, the Atelier series, to some extent). But no, Krondor was an open-world, standard fantasy RPG, trying to compete with the likes of The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, and generally falling short, as people actually remember Daggerfall.

I gather the game was based on the Riftwar novels, by Raymond E. Feist, though I’ve never read them, so I can’t say how it connects. Which also might explain why I don’t remember much about the plot–plus, I got the game for free, when Sierra was having some sort of giveaway for some reason.

I do remember a few choice things about Krondor though: First, it was surprisingly hands-on with some of its mechanics. In a lot of games, you might find a book about stealth, that your character reads and gets a stat boost–here, you can have someone teach you some tricks…and they actually teach you. I still remember the instructions to step with your heel, and smoothly pivot your foot down along the outside of the arch, so that you don’t step too firmly on the ground. A really cool touch, with unexpectedly real-world applications.

The other thing I remember is the chests. Rather than relying on just a lockpicking skill, or anything like that, many of the chests in Krondor were sealed with words. They’d have anywhere from 3 to 5 (possibly more) tumblers with various letters on them, and when you had them spell the right word, the chest would open. And that word might be the name of an important NPC or a place, and there might be clues around the chest. Or it might be a simple word like “sieve.” It was neat and different, and it clearly stuck with me more than most of the rest of the game.

I didn’t even realize how cool the box art was until today; like I said, Sierra was giving this away as a free download for some reason. But *look* at this!

Find your comfort food

There are times at my job, where I’m told to do things I’m not entirely comfortable with. I don’t mean like in a religious sense, or that I’m being harassed; more that this just doesn’t seem right to do in a given situation. Like, objectively. And because of the nature of my job, I can’t even talk to anyone about it–confidentiality and all that. I’m sure you’ve all probably had something similar crop up in your lives at some point. And at times like this, it’s important to have some sort of “comfort food.”

It doesn’t have to be an actual meal, though it could be. Rather, I mean something you can turn to when for whatever reason, you don’t have someone you can turn to. It should come as no surprise that for me, it’s games. Sometimes books. For you, it might be movies or music, gardening or cleaning, or any of a thousand other avenues that let you escape your problems for a while, and recover. Which brings us to today’s word.

balm, noun – something soothing or restorative

Learned from: Dark Wizard (Sega CD)

Developed by Sega

Published by Sega (1994)

As I may have mentioned in another post, I was one of those kids who actually pestered his parents into buying him a Sega CD (and later, a 32X) for Christmas. I didn’t actually own many games for them, but I rented damn near everything my local video store had in stock at one point or another. Dark Wizard is one of the titles that stuck with me the most after all these years–perhaps a bit ironically, considering how generic it sounds.

I’d always had a love of turn-based tactical/strategy RPGs, ever since cutting my teeth on Shining Force, but Dark Wizard took what I knew and elevated it to a level of complexity I hadn’t seen before: Four different generals you could pick from, each with their own unit types and stories. Terrain that had an entire chart, showing how it affected different types of units. Territory you needed to sacrifice some of your units to defend, even when you were pushing forward on the battlefield. Compared to the simplicity of “forests give +20% defense” in other games I played, this was a lot to keep track of. And I loved it. I don’t think the story was anything to write home about–something about an evil priest trying to resurrect a dark god–but the strategy elements were really engaging.

Oh right, the word. It seems to be something of a trend for different RPGs to have different names for their healing spells and items. Cure, dia, vulnerary, etc. Balm was the term for the basic healing spell in Dark Wizard.

But yeah, find your comfort food, your welcome distraction, your balm. You never know when life’s going to throw something at you that you can’t talk about, and things like this can really help.

Even the cover art looks a bit generic–though kudos for Sega of America keeping the overall anime look to the characters.

Hey, whatever helps you get through the day

Well, 2025 is here, and I’m actually going to give a bit more focus to my New Year’s resolutions than normal, because that’s at least something to distract me from, well *gestures broadly*. One of those resolutions is overcoming my backlog paralysis by having friends help me choose which games to play next with random numbers. And wouldn’t you know it? The first game I landed on ended up teaching me a word or two already; and perhaps a more drastic way of escaping reality. Which brings us to today’s word.

entheogenic, adj. – hallucinogenic, psychoactive

Learned from: Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder (PC)

Developed by Zoetrope Interactive

Published by Iceberg Interactive (formerly: Lighthouse Interactive) (2007)

Darkness Within is Myst-style point & click adventure game with an emphasis on Lovecraftian horror, before Lovecraftian horror became all the rage. You play as a police detective on the trail of a man named Loath Nolder (yes, seriously), a private eye, who’s suspected of murder. During your investigation of the victim’s house, you discover that he was into some weird stuff: exotic drugs, mystic rites, bizarre local folklore, etc. I personally also learned that it was apparently somewhat common for people to have wells inside their homes in the 19th century (a discovery I’m simultaneously relieved and a little disappointed not to have made in my own house, which is rather old).

I’m not finished with it yet, as the year is still young, but so far Darkness Within is a fairly standard adventure game, with graphics that would’ve been decent at the time, and at least one gameplay feature I’ve never seen before.

As is common with games of this type, there’s a lot of reading to do: newspaper clippings, journals, notes, police reports, etc. But here, there’s a mechanic that has you underlining pertinent information in these documents to find leads and clues. The problem (if you’re playing on the hardest difficulty, like I am), is that there’s an awful lot to read through, and it’s not always clear what you should be underlining–or if there’s anything in a passage worth underlining at all. Add to that, the fact that you can’t take certain papers with you, and it leads to a fair amount of backtracking and frustration, as you underline something about strange statues that seem almost alive, only to have the game tell you, “Nothing particularly interesting.” I could lower the difficulty, sure, but we’ll see how much of a roadblock this ends up being.

7 seems a bit young for something like this. Not for any explicit content (so far), but I can’t imagine kids’ attention spans back in 2007 were that much longer. This game is a slow burn.

You can’t win if you don’t play

It’s Christmas Eve, and since I have the day off, I thought it would be a fine time to do an update. I couldn’t think of any seasonal words off the top of my head, but I and the gents over at the Friends Occasionally Not Disagreeing podcast recently took a look at the indie smash hit, Balatro, which made me think back to a much, much older poker game I played as a kid. It’s back-to-back Intellivision games with today’s word.

ante, noun – the minimum bet required to play a round of gambling;

verb – to put forth the minimum bet required to play a round of gambling

Learned from: Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack (Intellivision)

Developed by APh Technical Consulting

Published by Mattel Electronics (1979)

People sometimes make a fuss about how loot boxes in games today are essentially gambling, but when I was a kid growing up on the mean streets of Not Having A Nintendo, I was learning the ropes of actual gambling. And I know “ante” generally refers to card games, but I’m stretching the definition a bit, considering you also need to pay before shooting craps, or spinning a roulette wheel.

Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack was never my favorite game on the Intellivision, but I did spend plenty of afternoons alone or with my father, trying to beat the dapper, yet shifty-eyed dealer at his own game. The game offered blackjack, and several variants of poker, all of which I ended up with at least a working knowledge of, while I was still in elementary school. Despite this early exposure, you might be relieved to know that I did not grow up to have a gambling problem. Maybe being introduced to card games at the same time as games where I could shoot aliens, or explore dungeons showed me there were more entertaining options out there. Compared to fighting monsters and venturing to different worlds (or, decades later, playing a roguelike version of poker), the prospect of sitting in a smoke-filled room with a bunch of strangers and (likely) losing all my money seems downright boring.

Do you read me?

Recently, my friends and I over on the Friends Occasionally Not Disagreeing Podcast did a review of Faith: The Unholy Trinity, which has voice work that reminds me a lot of the synthesizer module they made as an add-on for the Intellivision. That is to say, everything sounded garbled, heavily synthetic, and only borderline-intelligible. Here, that was by design, but back in the day, it was the best they could do. Which brings us to today’s word.

gauge, noun – an instrument displaying a readout for some value

Learned from: B-17 Bomber (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel

Published by Mattel (1982)

Based on the fact that Mattel was trying to add actual voice lines to games way back in 1982, you could say they had lofty ambitions. Even the base Intellivision was ahead of its time, with an actual analog pad instead of a joystick or 4-directional d-pad, and an entire phone’s worth of buttons, allowing for games with a staggering amount of options for the time, from displaying maps, to managing weapon loadouts, to pulling up gauges for things like altitude, pitch, and roll (I thought yaw was included here too, but I appear to be mistaken; I must have learned that one directly from my father).

Anyway, B-17 Bomber puts you in the role of the pilot (and bombardier, and gunners) of the titular plane, tasked with hitting various targets in WWII Europe. All the while, enemy fighters would be assaulting you, forcing you to worry about ammo management, fuel management, and timing the dropping of your bombs (not to mention how many bombs to load in the first place), and then trying to return home in one piece. Again, this was 1982, ambitious stuff in a time when most games weren’t any more complex than “avoid the ghosts in the maze and eat all the dots.”

I was never terribly good at this game, but I would occasionally load it up, just to hear the technology of the time croak out “Bee se-ven-teen Baw-mer!” at the title screen. Those were simpler times.

Behold, the IntelliVoice module! You’d plug this unwieldy thing into the cartridge slot, then jam a cartridge into the right-hand side, and if you were lucky, it would load. Mattel: Being Sega before Sega was Sega!

Hit me with your best shot

It’s Thanksgiving here in the US, which means long hours in the kitchen, eating enough calories to feed a small, third-world country for a week, and then burning all those calories doing everything humanly possible to avoid uncomfortable political arguments with family members. Especially this year. But aside from dodging uncomfortable topics, the centerpiece of the meal is turkey. Usually just bought from the store, you can get permits to hunt them in some areas. Which brings us to today’s word.

blunderbuss, noun – a large-bore firearm, precursor to the modern shotgun

Learned from: American McGee’s Alice (PC, Mac)

Developed by Rogue Entertainment

Published by Electronic Arts (2000)

Playing this, I had no real idea who American McGee was. Apparently he worked on the Doom and Quake series, but the only name I really knew from id Sofware was John Carmack. At any rate, the idea of a twisted, grimdark take on Alice in Wonderland, imagined as a third-person action game was enough to hook me, regardless of who this guy was.

American McGee’s Alice takes place years after the books, with Alice in an insane asylum, the only survivor of a house fire that awakened her from her earlier dreams of being in Wonderland. Perhaps as a psychological break, she finds herself beckoned back through the looking-glass to save Wonderland from the Queen of Hearts’ machinations. Like I said, pretty grim.

The gameplay however, was a lot of fun. The environments were colorful, the platforming was well-designed, the enemies were all dark versions of classic characters, and there was a nice variety of tools with which to dispatch them. Alice’s primary weapon was a knife, but there were more series-specific weapons like playing cards and a croquet mallet shaped like a flamingo. Then there was the blunderbuss.

This was the strongest weapon in the game, but it only fired one shot. I don’t remember if it took forever to reload, or if ammo was incredibly scarce, or both, but it would kill most enemies in one hit. And like everything else in this game, it was hyper-stylized, with a barrel that flared out at the end to comic proportions, as if you were shooting buckshot out of a gramophone.

Happy Thanksgiving. Just remember not to give any table scraps to your cat–no matter how emaciated he might look.

Always the odd one out

When I first began writing this blog, I hadn’t really intended to ever really get political; I just wanted to have a nice little corner of the Internet, where I could educate people a little bit, and ideally make them laugh in the process. But those are both things which seem anathema to the incoming administration, given their version of humor is coldhearted and cruel, and they’re planning on dismantling the Department of Education, and probably replacing it with a system where the only correct answer on any given test question is “Jesus.” If they aren’t already, education and entertainment will soon be inherently political acts by default. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s word.

theotropic, adj. – tending towards religion

Learned from: Snowbreak: Containment Zone (PC, mobile)

Developed by Seasun Games PTE. LTD.

Published by Seasun Games PTE. LTD. (2023)

For a time, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to try out a few gacha games, to see what all the hype was about. Sadly, none of them held my interest for more than a week. Snowbreak seemed like it might be an exception at first, with gameplay that was more a third-person shooter than an action beat ’em up, but the shine wore off pretty quickly–the fact that character voices would randomly change languages, with no way to set them back, certainly didn’t help.

The story is a convoluted sci-fi yarn centering around Titans that have been wreaking havoc on humanity, and the handful of superpowered sexy ladies (because, of course) who are fighting against them. Your character gets wrapped up in all this after being exposed to a toxic substance called Titagen (I think), which instead of killing him, alters his brain chemistry and growing theotropic nerves in his grey matter that…you know, I don’t even know. The whole thing ends up being a justification to have your sexy female operatives run around disappointingly tiny environments, shooting cannon fodder enemies, and fighting the occasional bullet-spongy boss.

If the levels weren’t so small, or there was more to do between lengthy infodumps and spinning for loot boxes, I might’ve given Snowbreak more of a chance. Alas, it didn’t do anything to make itself more compelling than the other games I tried in this genre, so I’ll never know if all the terms appropriated from Norse mythology ever solidify into a coherent plot.

But hey, at least it’s free. If your backlog is smaller than mine, you might find this one more worthwhile.

The times, they are a-changing.

So, it’s been a pretty momentous week. But one of the least-seismic, and perhaps best developments is the mass exodus of users from Twitter. Sorry, Elon, nobody is going to call it X. That platform has been a cesspool for awhile now, and I don’t think I’ve used it since WordPress removed their auto-post integration, but the recent TOS change, saying anything you post can be used to train AI…well, that’s actually been kind of great, because it’s made people realize there are other options out there.

All of this is to say, I’m now on Bluesky Social: brainrotblog.bsky.social

Also, this brings us to today’s word.

climacteric, adj. – constituting or related to a major event or critical period

Learned from: Mass Effect 2 (Playstation 3, PC, XBox 360)

Developed by Bioware

Published by Electronic Arts (2010)

The Mass Effect games fall into the same category of RPGs as your Fallouts, your Elder Scrolls, and even your Genshin Impacts, in that there is a metric boatload of in-game lore to read through, if you’re so inclined. You could easily just ignore the plot for an hour or two, kick back, and read through piles of data logs about anything from the Reapers, to the complex interrelations between the Hanar and the Drell, to the centuries-long life cycles of the Asari. I think it was the latter where I first saw climacteric, in relation to when Asari reach adulthood, or something. (It’s been quite a long time since I’ve played this series; I should fix that.)

Fun bonus fact: Climacteric is also a noun, meaning a major event or critical period. This also makes it one of my least-favorite words, right up there with “chiropractic.” Some people hate the word “moist.” I hate nouns that end in -ic. It’s like saying, “I’m going to study scientific.” There’s nothing about that that sounds right.