I don’t think they know about second winter…

Ages ago, comedian and then-anchor at The Daily Show, Lewis Black, came to the town where I’d been going to college in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to do a stand-up show. My friends and I managed to get tickets for some of the last seats still available, way in the back of the auditorium, but I’m glad we went, because the way he kicked off the show still sticks with me. Not verbatim, but close enough:

“I don’t know if anyone’s told you people, but it’s April! There’s supposed to be birds singing, and flowers blooming, and fucking grass! But I look around here, and everything’s white, and gray, and dead–I want to slit my wrists, just so I can see some color!”

Welcome to da U.P., eh? Which brings us to today’s word.

isochoric, adj. – performed, maintained, or existing under a constant volume

Learned from: The Bazaar (PC, Mac, mobile [soon, as of this writing])

Developed by Tempo

Published by Tempo (2025)

The Bazaar is an interesting mix of Slay the Spire, Backpack Hero, and Team Fight Tactics, that has been devouring my free time since the open beta dropped a few months ago. It’s in full release now, and it’s still free to play if you want to check it out. There are some cosmetic purchases, and some cards you can buy–but those cards will become available for free at the end of their respective seasons, if you don’t mind waiting.

Anyway, you play as one of several heroes (though only Vanessa is available to start; you have to unlock the rest), making their way through the dangerous streets of the titular Bazaar. Vanessa is a pirate, Pygmalien is kinda-sorta a buff orc, Mak is an immortal alchemist, and my personal favorite, Dooley, is a little spherical robot pyromaniac. It’s one of his cards, the Isochoric Freezer, that taught me today’s word, a small item which freezes one of your opponent’s items for a time.

The Bazaar is PvP, but there’s no direct interaction between you and your opponents; if you’re like me, and steer away from multiplayer games in general due to toxic communities, then rest easy. So, you start out with nothing, and get to pick from one or two starting items to begin the match. These might be enchanted cards, or skills, or just extra money (I think; I never pick this option), which usually form the basis of your strategy. Pick a toxic blowfish for Vanessa’s first item, and you’re probably going to go for a poison build; pick the hamster wheel core for Dooley, and you’re probably going to focus on friend cards; etc. There are a ton of different approaches you can take, and since you start from zero each time, it’s fun to experiment.

Rounds are broken up into days, and days into six hours each. You’ll typically get four hours each day to acquire cards, have random events, buy skills and consumables, etc. Midway through the day, you’ll fight a non-player monster, to get XP and usually an item/skill if you win, and at the end of the day you’ll go up against another player, with their own deck layout. The cards in each of your decks activate automatically on cooldowns, so it’s all on you to arrange them in the most efficient way, and hope it’s enough to win. Sure, the RNG can screw you over sometimes, if your opponent has gotten better cards than you, but there’s still a lot of strategizing involved. Ideally, you fight until you’ve beaten 10 other players, but chances are, you’ll lose enough times that you’ll be out of the match before then. Still, it’s a ton of fun, whether you’re playing casual or ranked (ranked earns you chests if you do well enough, which contain cosmetic items and gems you can spend to unlock other heroes and things like that).

I know I’ve rambled a bit here, but The Bazaar really is a blast, and certainly worth checking out for the price point of free.

Guess the month! If you said anything but June, July, or August, you might be right!

Balrogs not included

I considered several titles for this post, including “ain’t no mountain high enough,” and simply, “you shall not pass!” but ultimately went with this one because out of all the bizarre assortment of monsters in this game, Balrogs aren’t one of them. Which brings us to today’s word.

impassable, adj. – unable to be traversed

Learned from: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel Electronics

Published by Mattel Electronics (1982)

I have to confess something here: I’ve never actually played this game. I had the other D&D game for the Intellivision, Treasure of Tarmin, but when I got the system from one of my cousins, it somehow came with the instruction manual for this game, but not the game, itself. But I sunk countless hours in to Tarmin, and I always wondered what this mysterious other game would be like to play, as I would occasionally look through the manual and dream.

Cloudy Mountain put you in charge of a team of three identical adventurers, armed only with a bow & arrow, sent on a quest to find and reunite two halves of a lost crown atop the eponymous mountain. Standing in your way was a menagerie of monsters that went from 0 to 60 (or from rat to demon) with seemingly nothing in between. I don’t know how evenly dispersed these beasts were, but the idea of fighting spiders and snakes, only to turn a corner and find a dragon or an unkillable slime seemed absurd–but also exciting–to my five- or six-year-old imagination.

But it wasn’t just things that wanted to kill you that were keeping you from your quest; various environmental obstacles barred your path. On the (presumably) randomized overworld map, there were forests you could only cut through with an ax, rivers you could only cross by boat, and color-coded mountains that either had caves or were impassable (black and brown, respectively).

I’m aware that I’ve had ample opportunity to download a ROM of this game, and finally experience it after all these years…but I know it could probably never live up to the experience I dreamt up in my imagination decades ago. Plus, the Intellivision controller looked like an old-school phone receiver with a paddle on the bottom of it, and I really don’t know how you’d effectively replicate that on modern hardware. (A numeric keypad, sure, but for the analog paddle it almost seems like you’d need a Joycon or something in your other hand.)

I’m sure it doesn’t look like much to daydream about, but as a small child, I imagined a story in every one of those mountains.

And let loose the dogs of war

When people think of cyberpunk movies, the first one that probably comes to mind is Blade Runner–and for good reason. It’s an amazing film, and a shining example of the genre. It’s also not at all what reminded me of today’s word; that would be the mostly-forgotten cyberpunk flick, Split Second, starring Rutger Hauer and Kim Cattrall. My wife and I watched it recently, because I told her it’s like a really good Shadowrun adventure, just from the side of law enforcement–a statement I still stand by. It’s got the grimy underbelly of a large city, shady characters, and a serial murder case full of occult underpinnings and strange goings-on. Anyway, this brings us to today’s word. I promise.

havoc, noun – mass destruction, chaos, and confusion

Learned from: Major Havoc (arcade)

Developed by Atari, Inc.

Published by Atari, Inc. (1984)

So, in Split Second, there’s a guard dog that features in a couple scenes. He’s a big old boy (a Rottweiler, I think), who the credits say was played by a pooch with the real-life name of Havoc. My wife and I agree that’s a great name for a dog–and that it might be an even better name for a little dog, for the comedic factor.

Major Havoc, the game, is also kinda cyberpunk in its presentation: lots of bright, almost neon polygonal vector graphics, like what people in the ’80s thought the Internet would look like. I think the title is actually the main character’s military rank, and it pits him in a quest to fight his way to various space stations, board them, make his way through their maze-like interiors, and set their reactors to self-destruct, ideally escaping before everything blew up. It was an interesting juxtaposition of shmup, physics-based landing simulator (a la Lunar Lander), and platformer. So you may be asking yourself, “Why have I never heard of it?” or “Why didn’t it ever get ported to home consoles?” Well, dear reader, that would be because of the game’s ludicrous controls.

Most arcade games control movement with a joystick: a nice, simple, intuitive interface. Less common was the trackball, sort of a stationary mouse that you spun in place in the direction you wanted your character to go–a little awkward, but with the added benefit of controlling speed. A handful of arcade cabinets even had simple buttons for left/right, or acceleration. For Major Havoc, Atari looked at all of those and said, “Nah, all that crap’s for squares. Check this out!” and invented the absolute worst control scheme I’ve ever seen, making you move by spinning a cylinder, while assigning a button to make your character (in the bases) awkwardly jump. Like, it sounds simple enough, but I remember it being sluggish and unresponsive in practice.

But hey, this was the wild west of game development; nobody really knew what would work until they tried it. Major Havoc isn’t a good game, but it’s one the left a mark on me all the same. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

And you thought the N64 controller was weird.

I know Mardi Gras was last week, but…

I love it when foreign words officially enter the English dictionary. It shows that language is a fluid, ever-evolving thing, and considering today’s word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as recently as 2021, it shows that, barring an Idiocracy-style collapse of civilization, that’s not likely to stop anytime soon…even if the probability of that collapse seems to be increasing every year. Anyway, onto today’s word.

mukbang, noun – a livestreamed video wherein the host eats a large quantity of food and chats with viewers

Learned from: Goddess of Victory: Nikke (PC, mobile)

Developed by Shift Up

Published by Level Infinite (2022)

Contrary to some of the other gacha games I’ve featured on here, Nikke is much more par for the course for the genre: You form a team of whatever scantily-clad anime girls the random number generator deems fit to give you, and then set off on a quest to save the world. Though, Nikke does do a few things that help it stand out.

First, the setting is post-apocalyptic instead of fantasy which, while not unique, is a nice change. Second, the gameplay is actually pretty enjoyable; it’s essentially a rail shooter, where your team of girls blasts away at evil robots using various types of guns with their own strengths and weaknesses, occasionally triggering special abilities, and whatnot. And if you get tired of that, there’s always something else to do: Play a tower defense minigame, or try a surprisingly competent Vampire Survivors clone, or a vertical-scrolling shmup (as in the recent Evangelion crossover event). And lastly, there’s the characters, themselves.

Even when you’re not getting familiar faces as guest stars in the crossover events, the girls you can recruit are generally fun and quirky. There’s the “core” group that moves the story along: Rapi, Anis, and Neon, a straight-laced soldier, a jaded tomboy, and an adorkable self-proclaimed spy, respectively. But the side characters can be a lot of fun, too. There’s Drake, the far-too-nice one who wants to be a supervillain; Ether, the mad scientist who just might actually be a supervillain; the gamer trio of Exia, Elegg, and Trony; and Belorta, the foodie who’s fond of playing pranks on people. And more, of course, but it’s Belorta that gives us today’s word.

Your troops will chat with you sometimes, and in one text message I got from Belorta, she tried to set up a mukbang with my character and her friend, Mica. At the time, I thought it was more of an eating competition, but it turns out mukbangs were (and possibly still are?) bizarrely popular spectator events in South Korea. Who knew?

I’m not sure I had a choice in the matter.
Art by Amagasa Nadame.

History repeats itself

Recently, I took part in an episode of the Friends Occasionally Not Disagreeing podcast about our favorite video game soundtracks. It was a nice, nostalgic break from the state of the world today, since a lot of our choices were from games made in a simpler time, when laws still mattered, and people could generally agree that the Russians were the bad guys. The experience also reminded me of a word I’d learned from one of these games, though not the exact context.

hence, adv. – from this point in time

Learned from: Silpheed (Apple IIGS, PC, and a whole slew of Japan-only computer formats)

Developed by Game Arts, Sierra On-Line

Published by Game Arts, Sierra On-Line (1986)

I actually learned several words from this obscure, isometric shooter, which I’m sure I’ll get to later. All I remembered about “hence” was that it was somewhere in the opening cutscene. (And yes, a game from 1986 had an opening cutscene, complete with rudimentary wireframe 3D graphics!) Going back and looking up the entirety of the text, it’s surprisingly poetic, if grammatically questionable, for a game about chasing down a space terrorist who’s stolen a super battleship. Reprinted in its entirety, odd punctuation and all:

…HOW MANY YEARS HENCE SHALL THIS OUR LOFTY SCENE BE ACTED OVER. IN STATES UNBORN AND ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN.

Five-year-old me didn’t really appreciate it, but this was the ’80s equivalent of Fallout 3‘s famous, “War…war never changes.” And its question mark-less question of how many times this story would be retold ended up being prophetic, considering the absurd number of times this archaic, four-decade-old game has been remade: it’s had reimaginings on the Sega CD, PS2, XBox 360, and even Android devices as recently as 2011! That’s quite the pedigree for a title that despite its early foray into 3D graphics, and excellent MIDI soundtrack, seems largely unknown to most people.

I’m glad I wasn’t one of them, because while the other kids had Mario and Zelda, I sunk countless hours into underappreciated gems like Silpheed that performed graphical feats that by all rights, my parents’ Apple IIGS shouldn’t have been capable of.

And I wasn’t kidding about the soundtrack. It’s only about six songs long, but some of them still pop into my head decades later.

I know I’ve said it before, but I also miss box art like this–or, I guess it’s cover art these days, since hardly anything comes in boxes/cases anymore.

So much for context clues

Lately, I’ve been on something of a side-quest in life, to better understand trends that don’t make sense to me: the enduring popularity of isekai light novels; the appeal of free-to-play gacha games; why the majority of the country would vote to re-elect a convicted felon who doesn’t care about anything but his own material wealth. It’s the middle one of those three things that brings us to today’s word.

mancozeb, noun – an organometallic fungicide humans apply on plants

Learned from: Reverse: 1999 (PC, mobile)

Developed by Bluepoch

Published by Bluepoch (2023)

Apologies for the weird phrasing in the definition, but as you can see from the screenshot below, that is the verbatim definition the game, itself, gives the player. One of the characters ends up getting poisoned after a fight, and another member of the party who specializes in potions, starts rattling off a list of ingredients she’ll need to try and heal him–to which he replies that he’d probably be better off with some mancozeb. It’s worth noting that the poisoned character in question is a floating apple wearing a shirt collar and tie…Reverse:1999 is a weird game.

I’m only in Act II so far, so I don’t know how this all shapes up. The story so far though, involves an event called the Storm that happened right at the end of 1999, causing time to lurch backwards, and erasing anyone caught in the incident. But now other Storms are hitting other points in history, particularly around times of social turmoil: the civil rights movement of the ’60s, the stock market crash that kicked off the great depression in 1929, etc. In the midst of all this are various factions of arcanists–people (and other things) with magical abilities–fighting for their own ends, or just to survive. And since this is a gacha game, you’ll end up with a team of characters from across large swathes of history, from Victorian necromancers; to futuristic space rangers; to quasi-historical figures like proclaimed time traveler, John Titor; to possessed radios; to the metaphysical manifestation of rabies; to a floating sentient apple. It’s a bizarre, wild setup, and while it doesn’t always make the most sense (not helped by the occasionally spotty translation), it’s actually one of the best games I’ve played in this genre.

A lot of it has to do with the gameplay–it’s the only gacha I’ve stumbled across that uses a turn-based card battle system, similar to Slay the Spire, and that sort of thing is just my jam. Plus, the art is gorgeous, opting for a more painted look than your standard cel-shaded anime style, which really sets it apart. And so far at least, there’s surprisingly little fanservice; I don’t mind that sort of thing by any means, but I do feel that its absence here is noteworthy. Especially since Reverse: 1999 manages to stand on its own without using T&A as a crutch. It’s a game that deserves more recognition, so if you’re intrigued by the concept and don’t mind being a little confused along the way, it’s well-worth checking out. And it’s not like they paid me to say any of this; I’ve just really been enjoying my time with this one so far.

Sonetto, in the center here, is one of the main characters. In any other gacha, she’s probably have at least two more cup sizes, and two fewer layers of clothing.

Are you ready for some football?!

I’ll take “Questions I am almost guaranteed to answer ‘no’ to,” for $800. It’s Super Bowl Sunday, which I only really know because some people at work haven’t shut up about it for a week. And in case the fact that I’m sitting here, posting about nerdy crap isn’t enough of an indication, I really, really don’t care about football. But that wasn’t always strictly the case. Which brings us to today’s word.

forfeit, verb – to give up, to admit defeat

Learned from: Mutant League Football (Sega Genesis)

Developed by Mutant Productions

Published by Electronic Arts (1993)

Throughout my life, sports have never really appealed to me. I’ll make the occasional exception for hockey, because it’s so fast-paced, but for the most part I never saw the appeal of watching a bunch of guys spending 3-4 hours throwing a ball to each other, or smacking it with a stick–but mostly standing around between plays. Especially when video games offered spaceship battles, dungeons filled with monsters to fight and treasures to find, and countless other things that were actually interesting. So if anything was going to make football at all noteworthy to me, it was going to be video games.

Enter Mutant League Football, a game that still might not have shown up on my radar if not for the surprisingly robust ad campaign it had. There were full-page magazine spreads, and even mock trading cards for the players you could cut out if you wanted to (I can neither confirm no deny that I did this). But suddenly, football wasn’t just a bunch of dudes running into each other, trying to move a ball a few yards for an entire afternoon; it was skeletons and aliens running through stadiums pockmarked with craters and strewn with firepits and land mines. I miss the days when Electronic Arts was (believe it or not) a pretty experimental company, willing to take chances with ideas.

I credit Mutant League Football with the fact that I know the rules to the sport at all–even if the real game doesn’t let you murder the refs or the other players, and games in the NFL generally don’t get forfeited for one team’s roster being too depleted to put a full line on the field. The fact that I rented this game more than once is a testament to how fun it was. I’d say I wish the franchise would make a comeback, but I guess we do have the Warhammer-derived Blood Bowl now, to fill the gap. Maybe I should give that one a try sometime….

Look at this gloriousness! The football has *spikes* for crying out loud! How could I not be interested?

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.