The root of the problem

So, today is 9/11, and I debated whether or not to make a post. After all, it was a terrible event, the effects of which still resonate strongly with many people–myself included. It’s one of those “where were you when” moments, that people carry with them for the rest of their lives. But at the same time, it wouldn’t have felt right to say nothing at all, considering this year, an entire generation has been born, and gone through school since it happened. A generation who’s too young to even have witnessed the towers coming down, and might still be asking themselves what would drive people to do something like that. One could argue there are many reasons, but I’d posit that a strong contender is hatred of the Other. Which brings us to today’s word.

odium, noun – intense hatred or contempt

Learned from: Odium (PC, Mac)

Developed by Metropolis Software, Hyperion Entertainment (Linux)

Published by Monolith Productions (Windows), Linux Game Publishing (Linux), e.p.i.c. Interactive (Mac) (1999)

Known in other regions as Gorky 17, Odium is kind of what you’d get if you took an early Resident Evil, and made it into an isometric, turn-based strategy game. You control a team of commandos, sent to investigate some weird goings-on at a top-secret research lab in Poland, only to find it’s been overrun by biomechanical horrors. It wasn’t a terribly good game, but it was a deceptively difficult one. Even the early monsters frequently hit you for at least half a health kit’s worth of damage, which doesn’t seem too bad at first, when supplies are plentiful. But soon you’re entering combats with your troops at half health, just to try and conserve what few healing items you have left. It doesn’t help that new (harder-hitting) monster types are introduced in almost every battle, giving you even less time to breathe and find your footing.

I never got far enough to discover why the game was renamed Odium for the US release, but the word seemed fitting. Hatred of the Other stems from ignorance and tribalism. When the only people you feel you can trust are from your own group, that tends to engender a sense that anyone outside that group is somehow untrustworthy/unclean/evil. And sadly, 18 years later, rather than bringing all of us together, one need only to look at the political climate in this country to see that tribalism has only gotten worse. Except this time, it’s from within our own population, instead of from without.

I know it sounds vaguely hippie-ish to say that a nation can’t survive if its citizens are at each other’s throats, but we’ve seen what happens when that sort of fear-mongering takes hold elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how prolonged exposure to that sort of thing will end up within our own borders.

A wise, green alien once said that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. And despite Yoda being a muppet, he’s right; hatred leads to all sorts of terrible things, like flying planes into buildings, or driving cars into crowds of people, or shooting up schools. So, on the anniversary of this particular tragedy, I implore you to remember it by trying to rise above what caused it. There’s a lot of shit wrong with this world, but hating people of a different religion, or race, or political leaning isn’t going to do a damn thing to make it better.

odium

Just like slapping an edgy title on a mediocre game won’t make it any less disappointing.

Cool story, sis.

I got into a friendly argument with a friend of mine about retro-styled games recently, where I said one trend that should stay dead and buried is full-motion video. We both grew up during the initial FMV fad, but I actually owned a Sega CD, and remember all too well renting things like Corpse Killer and Surgical Strike, and being very underwhelmed. I’m also a bit disgruntled that this style of game seems to be making a comeback.

His argument was that the medium has come a long way in the past twenty years, and there’ve been some good FMV games made recently. I didn’t believe him, which ended with him gifting me a copy of Her Story on Steam. Which brings us to today’s word.

glazier, noun – a craftsman who cuts and fits glass

Learned from: Her Story (PC, Mac, mobile)

Developed by Sam Barlow

Published by Sam Barlow (2015)

Some people would be hard-pressed to call Her Story a game, but if visual novels count as games, and this has more interactivity than many of them, then it fits the bill. You’re kind of just thrown into the interface, which is a police database that you can search through, using keywords. Each valid keyword gives you video clip(s), which might contain other keywords to search for, until you piece together what happened in the case. It’s an interesting (if cumbersome) format, and only one actor ever appears on screen in an interrogation room, responding to questions you never actually hear. Your mileage on the story itself might vary, depending on how much themes like motherhood stir you (they don’t do much for me, personally), but as an experiment, it was a decent mystery doled out piecemeal. I’ve certainly played worse games, but I don’t know if I’m exactly on the FMV renaissance bandwagon either.

Anyway, as you’re cobbling together a chain of events, you eventually learn that some of the characters worked at a glazier’s. Soon, the theme of mirrors and reflections becomes prominent in the story, so it’s of more metaphorical relevance than anything directly relating to the case. It gets a little heavy-handed by the end, but at least Sam Barlow tried to be artsy and sophisticated.

All in all, I can’t necessarily recommend spending money on Her Story. It’s a very short experience (I “beat” it in less than two hours), and there’s not really any replay value. At least something like Sewer Shark, as flawed as it was, had enough gameplay to feasibly make it worth revisiting. And that’s a flaw with FMV games–the director only recorded so much footage, and once you’ve seen it all, if there’s nothing else to the experience, there’s no point in going back. Unless it’s a really good set of clips, but let’s face it: Most FMV titles are more Sharknado than Avengers Endgame.

herstory

For what it’s worth, this actress delivered the lines she was given pretty well.

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.

Right in front of my eyes

Ever have one of those moments where you suddenly discover there’s a specific term for something you’ve been aware of for years? It happened to me, just the other day.

hypermetropia, noun – farsightedness

Learned from: Crossing Souls (PS4, Mac, PC, Switch)

Developed by Fourattic

Published by Devolver Digital (2018)

It’s been about twenty years since I was diagnosed with being farsighted, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard the technical term for the condition until now. Maybe the optometrist didn’t want to worry young me with an imposing-sounding medical term like that, or something. The world will never know.

As for its usage in the game, first, a bit of backstory. Crossing Souls is an attempt to cash in on the ’80s nostalgia sparked by pop culture phenomena like Stranger Things and Ready Player One, and it’s…not as successful. It starts off okay, with a freak storm knocking out power in a small, suburban town during summer vacation, and in the midst of it all, a group of friends stumbles across a magical artifact. But then the cracks start to show.

It’s as if the folks at Fourattic felt they needed to reference all of the 1980s, often times directly and without purpose. Shady government types have cordoned off a house to try and steal back the artifact–time for an E.T. reference! Simon was a thing in the ’80s, so we need to work that in–no, it doesn’t need to make sense that you have to beat an undead bus driver at a game of it…or that when you win, an inexplicable machine pours lava on him–it needs to be there! And of course, there’s a reclusive Chinese pawn shop owner, straight out of Gremlins. Which brings us to today’s word.

The pawn broker is in possession of a key that he won’t give up, so you need to steal it from him. In order to do that, you need to distract him with increasingly absurd requests for things you ostensibly do want to buy, so that he’ll disappear into the back long enough for you to swipe the key. One of those things is, well…I’ll let the screenshot speak for itself.

hypermetropia

It’s not often I catch a shot of one of these words in the wild, so to speak.

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 sign of things to come?

As I’m sure most of you are aware, Bungie cut ties with Activision-Blizzard just a few days ago. So, this week, it only seems fitting to go with a word that I learned from one of their games.

thrall, noun – An enslaved servant.

Learned from: Myth II: Soulblighter (PC, Mac)

Developed by Bungie

Published by Bungie (1998)

Myth II is one of my favorite real-time strategy games ever, partly because it had so much character. You didn’t just have healers, or ghosts, but rather journeymen and soulless. Thralls were the game’s equivalent of zombies: slow, shambling units that absorbed a good amount of damage, and hit pretty hard if they ever closed the distance. When you get down to it, arguing semantics doesn’t seem like it should amount to much, but these little choices in nomenclature did help give the series its own atmosphere. Instead of just a mindless corpse, the thralls were dead bodies pressed into service against their will–that’s a lot of information to convey in just a simple name.

It’s also nice to see that this word is no longer applicable to Bungie, themselves.

thrall

#Mondays