Trouble’s a-brewing

A fun thing some friends and I do when we’re hanging out, and we’re not sure where to eat, is to pick a competitive game with a lot of characters, assign a restaurant to each one, and play (or watch) a round, and let the winner determine where we go. The first game we did this with was Overwatch, but lately we’ve been setting up 32-man AI tournaments in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It’s actually a really clever idea, and a lot of fun…until Diddy Kong wins, and we end up at Taco Bell. It took a little longer than usual, but Taco Bell is doing what Taco Bell always does to me. Which brings us to today’s word.

fulminating, adj. – volatile or explosive

Learned from: Diablo II (PC, Mac)

Developed by Blizzard North

Published by Blizzard Entertainment (2000)

Diablo II improved upon a lot from the original game. Though I missed some of the more random elements from its predecessor (shrines with mysterious names, whose effects were unknown until you activated them, quests that wouldn’t show up in every playthrough, etc.), the sheer variety of new material made up for it. One of these additions came in the form of offensive potions: green for poison, and orange for explodey-types (including fulminating potions).

These were kinda neat in the early game, as they gave even melee-focused characters a source of elemental damage, but there were only a couple “levels” of each type of potion, and they didn’t scale with your character’s level. So, as the enemies you faced kept getting stronger, the damage inflicted by these potions became less and less useful, until it became a pain to find them in item drops. A cool idea, but ultimately one that wasn’t used to its fullest potential, so that it might’ve been more than a novelty.

fulminating

Don’t let the screenshot fool you; fulminating potions would be hard-pressed to cause that kind of carnage in the early game. In the later stages, you’d be lucky to give the monsters a sunburn.

In sticking with a theme…

It would appear I still have an ax to grind, after that last post, but this time around, I’ll strive to make the entry more about the game, than the real world.

mendacious, adj. – relating to deception, falsehood, or divergence from the truth

Learned from: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (on damn near every platform since the XBox 360 and Playstation 3)

Developed by Bethesda Game Studios

Published by Bethesda Softworks (2011)

There are a lot of books scattered throughout the realm of Skyrim, and most of the words this game taught me came from a series of tales about the dark elf, Barenziah. There are plenty of other stories to be found, but for whatever reason, the writers decided to be the most verbose in talking about this particular elf. Mentions of mendacious caravans seeking to avoid paying tolls, or chary subjects, distrustful of their new rulers abound in the history of this character whom (to the best of my knowledge), you never actually meet in the game.

When you think about it, it’s odd that Skyrim gets as much praise as it does for being so “deep,” when so much of its lore breaks a cardinal rule of storytelling. e.g. telling, instead of showing. We’re (largely) well past the era of the text adventure, and video games are an inherently visual medium; we could very feasibly be seeing these events instead of killing our eyes, squinting at chapters of raw text in a virtual book, on a TV screen across the room (or a monitor on our desk). It’s like an audiobook presented in Morse Code: it really doesn’t take advantage of what the format has to offer.

skyrim

Skyrim: 10th Anniversary Edition, coming soon to a graphing calculator near you!

Happy Mothers’ Day

It’s not often that I encounter words (or themes) directly related to motherhood in games, so for today, I decided to do the next best thing, and post a word I learned from a game where one of the main antagonists is simply called Mother.

pertinacious, adj. – Obsessively or maddeningly persistent.

Learned from: Iconoclasts (PS4, Mac, PC, Switch, Vita)

Developed by Konjak / Joakim Sandberg

Published by Bifrost Entertainment

On the surface, Iconoclasts appears to be a fairly straightforward platformer with some interesting mechanics, light Metroidvania elements, and some really nice pixel art. Once you get into it, though, you’ll find a story about religious totalitarianism, oppression, backstabbing, sacrifice, and people clinging to their own ideals, no matter the cost. This includes the main character of Robin, an unlicensed mechanic in a world where all technology is controlled by the ruling elite. (At one point, one of the antagonists refers to her as the “pertinacious heroine of House Four,” hence today’s word.)

All in all, Iconoclasts handily lives up to its name (an iconoclast is sort of an anarchist–someone who works to tear down established belief systems or institutions. Yay, two-fer!). It’s a little rough around the edges, and a couple sections are a bit frustrating, but it’s a good game overall, with some boss fights that feel like they came straight out of a Treasure game. Oh, and (to the best of my knowledge), it was entirely developed and the music was composed solely by one man: Joakim Sandberg. Considering how well Iconoclasts came together, that’s quite a noteworthy feat.

iconoclasts

Such a bright, happy game, where assuredly nothing tragic will happen.

A not-so-reasonable facsimile

In my job, I work with money, and every so often I come across a situation that isn’t entirely…on the level. It’s been happening significantly more, lately, and with the increased frequency has come a dip in the quality of the attempted fraud. Really, some of these fake checks are almost laughable. But the situation did prompt me to pick today’s word.

ersatz, adj. – fake, not genuine; an imitation (of generally lesser quality).

Learned from: Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS)

Developed by Atlus

Published by Atlus USA (2013)

Shin Megami Tensei IV is an odd game, with a world that is by turns high fantasy, and near-future cyberpunk. The sci-fi portion has most of the trappings you’d expect from a modern dystopia: oppression, cynicism, crime, and black markets, galore. Even the bars can only offer up ersatz refreshments, because all the real stuff is so hard to come by.

I’m being deliberately vague on the details of the setting beyond this, because I feel like I may have already given spoilers. And really, this is a game that deserves to be played with as fresh eyes as possible. As with all games in the MegaTen series, it deals with some pretty heavy themes, and does so in such an unflinching manner, that it’s rare to see other games even try to imitate this particular approach.

smtiv

Not to be confused with Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, which is (I gather) an entirely different game…that I really do need to play at some point.

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.

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.