Tag: mobile

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.

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.