1,000 Points of Light

By this point, I’m sure most of you know about the situation in Australia. If somehow you aren’t, the continent is on fire. Millions of animals have died, thousands of people have been displaced, and as of right now, the fires show no signs of stopping. Today’s word should be self-explanatory….

inferno, noun – an intense, uncontrollable blaze

Learned from: Shadowgate (Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Amiga, CD-I, Game Boy Color, Macintosh, NES, Palm OS, PC, mobile phone)

Developed by ICOM Simulations, Inc.

Published by Mindscape (1987), (Kemco, 1989 for the NES)

Far from the real-world horrorscape that is Australia right now, opening a door to find just an entire chasm full of fire seems downright passe. Shadowgate was known for being unpredictable. Each door, or hatch, or hallway could just as easily lead to a wizard’s laboratory, or a dragon’s hoard, or a bridge over a sea of flames. The sheer variety of scenes led to an equally broad set of creative solutions in order to progress.

Sadly, there’s no icy crystal orb we can shatter against the ground to put out the infernos raging across Australia. Indeed, once you see some of the photos from the area, it can be easy to feel like there’s no solution at all. And for any one of us, that’s true. Fortunately, fixing this–or any other problem of this scope–doesn’t fall on the shoulders of any one person. The most any one of us can do is what we can. If you’re inclined to spit in the face of impossible odds, and do all that anyone could ask, this article has a list of things you can do to help, at the bottom. Again, no one person could be expected to do all of them, but any of us could do at least one.

Creepy stuff knows no season

I know Halloween was awhile ago, but recently on my way to work, I walked through a scene straight out of a horror movie. But first, today’s word.

eviscerate, verb – to disembowel; to remove the entrails

Learned from: Quake (PC, Mac, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, mobile)

Developed by id Software (PC), Lobotomy Software (Saturn), Midway Games (N64)

Published by GT Interactive (PC), MacSoft (Mac), Sega (Saturn), Midway Games (N64) (1996)

Quake had a lot of personality, from the Lovecraftian overtones, to the goading messages taunting you whenever you went to quit the game, to the death messages unique for every monster that could kill you. The most memorable one for me was, “You’ve been eviscerated by a fiend.”

At the time, the graphics were pretty much first-generation 3D. Character models were blocky, animations were stiff and jerky, and blood was just a spray of square red pixels. Obviously, they couldn’t effectively display every unique death with the technology of the time, but flavor text like this really lent a vivid level of detail as to exactly what happened to your character…and now, to continue the story.

So, I pass by a cemetery on my way to work, which is enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. I’m going along like normal, until something catches my eye along the fence: a beachball-sized area of the fence itself, where it looked like something had been either pulverized against the side of the fence, or else staked on the spikes at the top. The main area was a bloody mess, with bits of hair and actual flesh still clinging to the posts. It had dripped down the fence, to a patch of grass the size of a coffee table–I should clarify, it had soaked a patch of grass the size of a coffee table. And as I followed it off the grass, I realized I was standing in a smear of blood that trailed all the way down the hill, occasionally meandering to the edge of the sidewalk and pooling. As if whatever it was had dragged itself as far as it could, before stopping periodically to regain a bit of strength, before forcing itself onward.

It was too late in the year to be a Halloween prank, and there was far too much blood for it to have been a bird that flew into the fence or something (and again, hair, not feathers was sticking to the metal). At the time, I was at a complete loss, but rather freaked out; after some consideration, the best explanation I have, is that a deer tried to jump the fence, and didn’t make it…yet managed to tear itself off the spikes, and continue on its way…which is pretty horrifying, in and of itself.

Quake seems downright tame, by comparison.

04a-fiend

Far less bloody than what I (literally) walked through.

Because it feels like I’ve been living under a rock…

October ended up being a very busy month for me. Besides the joys of homeownership requiring a lot of attention, I also got put in charge of training at work, which is pretty stressful for an introvert. Throw in Halloween commitments, and figuring out logistics for some things later this year, and it really does feel like I’ve been locked away for several weeks. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s word.

undercroft, noun – a brick-lined cellar

Learned from: The Letter (PC, Mac, Mobile)

Developed by Yangyang Mobile

Published by Yangyang Mobile (2017)

Given that it was October, I wanted to play at least one horror-themed game, and I’d picked up this visual novel on Steam during a sale awhile back. It plays out through the viewpoints of several characters, but the story centers around the sale of a huge mansion with a checkered past. Obviously, something is Very Very Wrong (TM), and you get to see the various characters get wrapped up in the supernatural events over the course of a…rather plodding plot. It starts out fairly strong, but there are some characters I honestly didn’t like enough to care whether they lived or died, and the story unfortunately spends as much time with them, as with more likable members of the cast. It also doesn’t help that the game is riddled with typos and grammatical errors, as well as the fact that it sometimes doesn’t seem to know what tone it wants to have (e.g. the property is the “Ermengarde Mansion,” which seems like it should indicate a lighthearted tone full of puns and memes…except they never really do anything with it. It just sits there like a turd in a punch bowl).

Anyway, the first character you play is the real estate agent who’s hoping to find a buyer for this problematic property. In showing one set of potential clients around, one of them notices a trapdoor in the kitchen that leads to the undercroft. But surely nothing horrible would ever happen in a dusty old wine cellar beneath a trapdoor, right?

letter

Belated happy Halloween, and all that. Sadly, this game is a lot less scary than this image would imply.

Have fun storming the castle!

By now, you’ve likely heard about the…situation with Blizzard. If you haven’t, here’s the short version: Following a championship match of Hearthstone, one of the players used his post-game interview time to deliver a political statement advocating for the liberation of Hong Kong from China. Blizzard had a fit, took back his prize money, and banned him from competition for a year–and essentially fired the commentators that just so happened to be on the stream at the time, even though they tried to get off-camera when they realized what was happening. (These bans were later scaled back to six months, but still…) In the following days, things only got worse, as Blizzard delivered conflicting press releases to Western and Eastern audiences, failed to enact the same penalties to streamers who did the same thing (because they were on Western streams), went against one of their own company tenets that everyone should have a voice, regardless of who they are or where they’re from, and in general have just kept digging themselves a deeper hole.

And yeah, I get that they’re a company, and profits are quite literally the bottom line. And China is a huge market. But the undeniable message here, is that Blizzard (an American company, mind you), is fine with denying people freedom of speech, in favor of the promise of profits from an authoritarian regime. People are understandably angry about this, I’d say. You might even say that Blizzard is under siege by its own (former?) fans. Which brings us to today’s word.

ballista, noun – a medieval siege weapon in the shape of a large crossbow

Learned from: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (PC, Mac, Playstation, Sega Saturn)

Developed by Blizzard Entertainment

Published by Blizzard Entertainment (1995)

Once upon a time, Blizzard was a respectable company, making games full of heart, charm, and love of the medium. Warcraft II was a perfect example of this, with a ton of little details and Easter eggs (Christmas lights on the trees and buildings in the winter maps, units that would say funny things if you clicked on them a lot, etc.). And while the orcs and the humans had different looking units, most of them functioned the same. Goblin sappers and dwarven sappers both blew up the same amount of terrain; trolls threw axes and elves shot bows, but they had about the same range and damage; catapults and ballistae both flung heavy projectiles over about the same distance, etc. The handful of differences were in the magics wielded by each side, and that actually imbalanced the game pretty heavily in favor of the orcs, but it was still a fun game for its time…back when Blizzard actually cared about making things fun, instead of just profitable.

blizzard_china

I can’t take credit for this image, but it sums up the current situation quite nicely.

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