Shrug it off

Happy New Year, everyone! I know 2025 wasn’t…great, for a lot of reasons. And I know that the whole concept of a new year being some momentous turning point is largely manufactured with nothing to really back it up, but the only way to really go is forward. So, if 2025 has left you damaged, try your best to keep pushing on, and leave as much of that unpleasantness behind you as you can, even if it’s only a little. Which brings us to the first word of the year.

ablative, adj. – relating to the loss or removal of something, often via surgery, melting, or evaporation

Learned from: Cyber-Cop (known as Corporation outside the US) (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Atari ST, PC)

Developed by Core Design, Synthetic Dimensions

Published by Core Design, Virgin Games (1990 – Amiga, Atari ST; 1991 – PC; 1992 – Genesis)

Cyber-Cop was a wildly complex and ambitious game for a system like the Genesis. Not the only first-person shooter on the console, it was definitely the least-approachable. The story of a corporation developing a genetic supersoldier that went rogue, and the government contracting a shadowy spy organization to break in and get evidence (covertly, so as not to chase the corporation out of the country and hurt the economy), is pretty straightforward. If a bit depressingly representative of dystopian capitalism. It’s the execution where things get wonky.

As you’ll see in the screenshot below, there are multiple regions on your character’s body where you can sustain damage. Each of those areas could have various pieces of armor or gear attached to them (from visors, to cybernetic implants, to ablative armor that shears off as it takes damage). And you had to make sure you healed damage to flesh with med-kits (but not too many, because you could develop a dependency, from what I remember–which was baffling at the time, since I’d never seen side-effects to healing before), and damage to cybernetics or equipment with different repair kits. I think the game had an encumbrance stat, so you couldn’t carry too much at once. Oh, and you also had stamina that you had to manage by sleeping or taking stimulants; similarly, you had to keep the batteries on your various gear charged. And…

Really, that’s just the stuff related to gear. The environment (while made mostly of the same gray walls), was pretty interactable, with control panels to use and/or hack, environmental hazards to account for, enemies with different tactics to take down or avoid, and puzzles to solve (including one that involved shifting your view of a hologram so you could see all of a door code, which I always thought was pretty damn cool).

Cyber-Cop was really more System Shock than Doom, rewarding slower, more methodical exploration (despite your stamina and energy constantly draining). But I only ever rented this, and when I had a real-life, 3-day time limit, that sort of approach really wasn’t in the cards. I’d probably enjoy it more now, but at the time, I never really got very far.

What? No, not *Robocop*; I distinctly said *Cyber-Cop*, a completely original and legally distinct intellectual property!

Where we’re going, we won’t need…eyes.

You might be expecting me to be talking about a horror game today, with a title like that, but nope. Bit of a story behind what brought this word to mind:

So, my wife and I went to see the fireworks downtown last week. Our city is situated on a lake, so we went down to the lower harbor and found a spot to sit right by the water while we waited for it to get dark. At one point, I took them off to rub my eyes or something, and they just slipped out of my fingers, skidded across the concrete embankment, and disappeared 20+ feet underwater. I’ve been using a pair of cheaters since then (though a holiday weekend and several hundred dollars later, I do have a new pair of actual glasses ordered), but walking around with them on feels like I’m inside a fishbowl. That means, when I’m at home or work and I need to move around, I’ve relied a lot on remembering where stuff is. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.

homing, adj. – finding one’s way to a target or location through memory or technology

Learned from: Raiden (arcade, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Turbographx-16, PC, Atari Lynx, mobile)

Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu

Published by Tecmo (1990)

Raiden, to me, is the quintessential vertical-scrolling shmup. Other games are flashier, or have deeper mechanics, or fill the screen with more bullets, but there’s something about Raiden that keeps me coming back even after all these years. The sprite work is solid, the levels all look distinct, and there’s just something to the overall gameplay that simply feels right.

I don’t even remember if there’s much of a story, but sometimes all you need is to hop into the cockpit of a red or blue jet, decide if you want lasers or a spread of bullets, dumb-fire missiles or homing ones, and mow down wave after wave of enemy tanks and planes. Raiden is an emblematic arcade experience: difficult but fun, simple but addictive; it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time, and one of these days I’ll beat it on a single quarter.

I don’t even need my glasses to see this is a *Crystal Castles* arcade cabinet with the *Raiden* logo slapped on the side. Bizarre.

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?

Jinkies

The 1990s were an interesting time in the United States. The “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s was dying down, but panic over AIDS and street crime was kicking into high gear. Sleeping with an intern was somehow enough to trigger impeachment hearings for a sitting president. The “war on drugs” was unironically going full-steam ahead, and even before the “war on terror” kicked off, the military was beginning to dabble in wars–excuse me, “military operations”–for oil. And despite all the chaos and absurdity of that decade, looking back at it, those were simpler times. Which brings us to today’s word.

jink, verb – to abruptly change direction

Learned from: Desert Strike (Genesis, Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Mac, PC, Super Nintendo, PSP)

Developed by Electronic Arts, Foresight New Media (PC version), Ocean Software (Game Boy version)

Published by Electronic Arts (1992)

Operation Desert Storm, the quick assault on Iraq after they invaded Kuwait, was the first thing approaching a war that kids in the ’90s were really exposed to, and to say that it captured the public consciousness is an understatement. I mean, just look at how many platforms this hastily-coded game released on. Still, despite capitalizing on a contemporary, real-world conflict, Desert Strike created a splash (and several sequels) for good reason.

First, it was different from pretty much everything else on the console market at the time, with impressively large maps and complete freedom of movement. Desert Strike wasn’t really a shmup; it was slower-paced, the levels didn’t auto-scroll, and you could move your helicopter forward, back, left and right, and even jink on a dime to try and dodge projectiles. Add in a decent array of weapons and enemy vehicles, and the experience was really quite memorable.

I couldn’t really see something like this getting released today, for a variety of reasons: the problematic game-ification of a questionable military assault; giving the leader of a fictitious Middle Eastern country the name “Kilbaba”; etc. But like I said, simpler times.

Also, back then we used to at least *pretend* we were fighting against tyranny…

‘Tis the season of giving…

…and of getting back to things. Hello, world, I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It’s like skipping time at the gym: You let one day slip by, and before you know it, months have gone by, and you’re 20 pounds heavier. But it’s the middle of the Holiday season right now, and I wanted to do a little something for both myself, and anyone who might happen upon this. Plus, holidays just so happen to be relevant to today’s word.

alms, noun – charitable donations to the poor; specifically: donations of leftover trenchers from the previous evening’s feast

Learned from: The Faery Tale Adventure (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Commodore 64, PC)

Developed by MicroIllusions

Published by MicroIllusions (1987 – Amiga, 1988 – Commodore 64, 1989 – MS-DOS) Electronic Arts (1991 – Genesis)

I don’t remember a whole lot of The Faery Tale Adventure. The terrible spelling on the cover caught my attention at my local video store when I was little, and set my expectations low, even to my young mind. But, it was an RPG, and I hadn’t played it before, so I gave it a shot…and was summarily rather lost, because someone had lost the instruction manual, and this was back in the days when those were actually important.

Most of what I recall from the gameplay is aimlessly wandering around a massive world (for the time), as one of the three playable characters, who might have been brothers or something. Well, that, and the beggar who tried to kill me.

I was traveling along some random stretch of road, and there was a guy standing off to the side, who asked me if I had any alms for the poor. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I think I said yes, because I was supposed to be the hero in this story, and this man was clearly a beggar…except when I answered, several other guys jumped out of nearby bushes, and they all started attacking me.

During the fight, I remember wondering what I did wrong. Did I actually not have any of whatever “alms” were, and was this guy pissed off that I lied to him? Were “alms” some sort of bad thing? Was this a secret code for a quest I hadn’t discovered yet, and I answered incorrectly?

Later, I looked up the word, and put the pieces together: I’d done the right, charitable thing, but this guy was just a bandit pretending to be a beggar, and I fell into his trap. It’s a moment that stuck with me all these years, and it’s the only solid memory I have of The Faery Tale Adventure.

What brought it to mind, all this time later, is a book I recently read: Medieval Holidays and Festivals, by Madeleine Pelner Cosman. I was trying to get inspiration for celebrations to work into a Pathfinder game I’m running, when I came across mention of what exactly alms are. Durable plates were expensive back then, so many feasts were served on plates or in bowls made of bread, called trenchers. At the end of the meal, the flavor-soaked remnants of the trenchers could be eaten, or donated the next day to the needy. These days, alms refer to any charitable gift to the needy, but during Medieval times, it had a more specific connotation.

And hey, I may have even given you a bonus word this time around, if you didn’t know what a trencher was. Happy holidays, everyone!

With a cover this generic, is it any surprise I don’t remember much from this game?

Blast from the past

Growing up in the ’80s, I was too young to fully comprehend the horrors of impending nuclear annihilation. Granted, those were the last years of the Cold War, and it ended when I was eight years old, but still, my main takeaway at the time was that the Soviet Union was bad…except, someone from there made Tetris, so they couldn’t be all bad. And once the USSR dissolved, I kinda just went on with life, dimly aware that something potentially terrible had been averted.

Fast forward 30 years, and we’ve got the Russians invading Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin implicitly threatening to make this go nuclear. There’s no ambiguity about this in my mind, anymore. Which brings us to today’s word.

megalomania, noun – an obsession with obtaining power, wealth, or importance

Learned from: Tyrants: Fight Through Time (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Atari ST, Super Nintendo, PC)

Developed by Sensible Software

Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Image Works for the original version, 1991)

I didn’t exactly learn this word from playing Tyrants, but rather from an ad in an old gaming magazine. Similar to Odium being called Gorky 17 in other regions of the world, Tyrants was known overseas as Mega-lo-mania. Both titles fit for a variety of reasons.

Tyrants/Mega-lo-mania was an early real-time strategy game, where you play as one of four gods, differentiated only by their portrait and color palette, with the task of defeating the other three on a variety of islands. You do this by influencing your followers to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons and defenses through a variety of technological eras, from stone axes up to ballistic missiles. While simple by conventional standards, the game featured a surprisingly large tech tree that could even lead you to developmental dead ends, depending on what you decided to research. It also featured some pretty braindead AI, to the point where if you were really backed into a corner, you could just keep spamming the “form alliance” button at the god attacking you, until the RNG would eventually make him give in. If only we could do that in real conflicts…

Don’t let the door hit you

So, we’re down yet another teller at work. Granted, this particular guy was no huge loss; he had a tendency to wander away from his window if there was nothing going on, his attempts to call people over to his window when he was there were half-hearted at best, and he barely seemed to know how to do the job when he had to do it, anyway. Still, we can’t seem to keep a decent staff, because people keep getting fired or leaving. Which brings us to today’s word.

egress, verb – to leave (also noun – an exit)

Learned from: Shining in the Darkness (Sega Genesis)

Developed by Climax Entertainment

Published by Sega (1991)

Shining in the Darkness is a game that took me years of renting to beat. Back in the days before standardized game pricing, you might get lucky and find a game for $40, or you might get gouged for as much as $90, depending on the title, its development costs, number of copies produced, and the alignment of the stars, for all I know. This one fell closer to the pricy end of that spectrum, though my parents probably spent close to its retail price on rental payments, by the time I finally finished it. Yay, irony.

Objectively, the game wasn’t anything special from a story standpoint: the king’s daughter has been kidnapped by an evil wizard, and you take up the quest to delve into an enormous dungeon and rescue her. But it was the presentation that kept me coming back. The artwork in this (and the later Shining Force games) had a style I loved, the soundtrack occasionally pops into my head even today, and the characters actually had interactions beyond simple “here’s your quest, now go, brave adventurers!” And again, the dungeon was HUGE–requiring you to draw your own maps if you had any hope of figuring out where you were going. If you didn’t (or if you got too beat up), you could cast the Egress spell to pop back to the entrance and regroup.

A map to the credit union where I work, if any brave adventurers want to take up a quest.

Something’s fishy

With the announcement of the first paid DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons the other day, which takes place on an archipelago, I found myself reminded of the first time I learned that word, decades ago from a game that…probably wasn’t as good.

archipelago, noun – a chain of islands

Learned from: James Pond 3: Operation Starfish (Genesis, Amiga, Super Nintendo, Game Gear)

Developed by Vectordean, Millenium Interactive

Published by Electronic Arts (1993)

As you probably guessed from the name, the James Pond series was a spoof of spy films, except starring a fish. I don’t remember a whole lot about the character aside from that (and the fact that he seemed to do a lot less spying and a lot more jumping), except that James also had the ability to…er…get really long.

The idea was that he could stretch really far to grab high platforms, and then lift the rest of his body up. I’m not sure if he still had this power in the third game or not. I do seem to remember that the series, while always silly, went from fighting against pollution, to…running around on stages made of food. One of those stages in James Pond 3 was the Arran Archipelago, and as the name suggests, I think it was a series of food-inspired islands that you had to jump across. I…don’t really remember much else about this game; the video store was my friend, growing up, exposing me to a wealth of games I never would’ve even looked at, otherwise.

I mean seriously. Would *you* have played this if it cost you more than $3 for five nights?

The new normal

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post all about COVID. At least, not directly. Over the past few months, the company I work for has bled off no fewer than seven employees. We aren’t large, so this has really hurt. And because there’s a labor shortage in the US right now (the exact reasons why are a subject for another time), every place is hiring. That means we’ve had a ridiculously hard time getting people to apply–and if they do apply, most of them only stick around for a month or so before leaving to look for something less stressful. “Normal” this year has become an endless cycle of working extra hours because we’re so short-staffed, leading to a more stressful environment among those of us who have stuck around, and the new employees we do get pick up on that, and don’t want to stay, leading to more long hours, and more stress, and…

I miss the old normal. Which brings us to today’s word.

mundane, adj. – normal, ordinary, commonplace

Learned from: The Immortal (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Genesis, NES, PC, Nintendo Switch)

Developed by Will Harvey

Published by Electronic Arts (1990)

The Immortal was an odd, but memorable game. Part-adventure game, part-light RPG, it put you in the shoes of a rather old wizard, trying to find his mentor somewhere in a sprawling labyrinth. It sounds pretty straightforward (aside from the protagonist older than 30–how often do you see something like that, these days?), but the game was anything but. Your adventure was chock-full of clever puzzles to solve (or bash your head against), traps to avoid (or blunder into), monsters to fight (or sneak by, or even befriend), and spells to cast–even spells as “mundane” as fireballs, according to the manual.

The world usually felt threatening, sometimes alien (the will-o’-the-wisps stand out in my memory), and always lived-in. Even despite the clunky controls, and some would say unfair difficulty (how was I supposed to know that chest was full of spiders, ahead of time?!), I still have very fond recollections of my time with The Immortal. Despite the bland initial setup, the game is anything but mundane.

Believe it or not, EA publishing good, inventive games also used to be normal.

Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!!

So, as you may know, today was Independence Day for those of us here in the United States. As you may also know, we…haven’t been doing the greatest at following simple instructions designed to keep ourselves alive. This combination brings us directly to today’s word.

lemming, noun – a small, Arctic rodent falsely made famous for the belief that they willingly run off of cliffs

Learned from: Lemmings (Genesis, Amiga, NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Sega Master System)

Developed by DMA Design

Published by Psygnosis (1991)

Video game developers seem to have a fondness for unusual animals, from echidnas, to bandicoots, to lemmings. I probably wasn’t the only kid whose first exposure to some of these critters was through games featuring them.

Lemmings is a puzzle game. You’re tasked with safely guiding a bunch of the titular creatures (depicted as green-haired humanoids in blue robes for some reason), across a series of hazards, by assigning them different tasks. The lemmings, themselves, have no sense of self-preservation, and will walk blindly into lava pits, spikes, acid pools, and many, many other deadly fates. It isn’t an easy task, and the fact that I was playing the Genesis version (with very sluggish controls in a real-time game) only made it harder. Still, it’s considered a classic for good reason, because it is a lot of fun. Certainly more fun than…

lemmings

This is an image taken today from a local beach. Half of these people are probably tourists, which means it’s anyone’s guess how many people they came into contact with, across how many states, before they got here. The faces of anyone close enough to be identified have been replaced with something more fitting.