I’m surprised this word isn’t used more, these days.

Maybe it’s just my perspective, but in recent years, it seems like everybody is a lot more tense than they used to be. From money issues, to health scares, to concerns about politics, society in general just feels significantly more worried, angry, and fearful than I remember it, even five years ago. Given that, it does seem a bit odd that you don’t hear this word bandied about more often:

anxiolytic, noun – Medication or treatment that reduces anxiety.

Learned from: Enter the Gungeon (PS4, PC, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Dodge Roll

Published by Devolver Digital (2016)

Enter the Gungeon is an odd little game; it’s a roguelike, twin-stick shooter, where almost everything is a gun or something gun-/explosive-related. Many of your standard enemies are anthropomorphic bullets and grenades, copyright-free versions of iconic weapons from other games abound, and there are a ton of D&D references with gun puns worked in (beholders are “beholsters,” medusas are “gorguns,” and the latest update was even called “Advanced Gungeons and Draguns”).

The developers really took this theme to the hilt and ran with it, which gives Enter the Gungeon a lot of heart and personality. But not every item you find entirely fits this tongue-in-cheek mold, as is the case with the Muscle Relaxant. It fits well in the overall theme of intense gunplay, in that it calms your character’s nerves and steadies their aim, but I guess they couldn’t work in a groaner into the item description itself. Instead, they taught me a word.

enter_the_gungeon

If you enjoy roguelikes, this one will blow you away. (See? I can do it, too.)

Lexical ambiguity

I used to live in an apartment building with a lot of old people. In fact, I think my wife and I were the youngest people there, being in our early thirties. Given that–and the fact that the other residents apparently had nothing better to do with their retirement–we became quite the regular topic of conversation. This wouldn’t have been quite so bad, if not for the fact that anywhere from two to five of them would be sitting outside, in front of the main entrance at any given time. And gods forbid, if you tried to just go home from a long day at work, without first engaging them in a 20-minute conversation. Carrying groceries? They were 100% sure there wasn’t anything perishable, and that we were young and strong enough to just stand there, holding them, while they yammered at us. Moving furniture? Oh, where’d you buy that from? What, could I hold the door for you? That’s crazy talk.

We took to calling these people “The Gauntlet.” We’ve since moved out, but one of them still shows up at the place where I work from time to time, and still tries to pry into my personal life. Which brought today’s word to mind.

gauntlet, noun – A long, grueling ordeal.

Learned from: Gauntlet (Arcade, and ports to virtually anything that can display graphics)

Developed by Atari Games

Published by Atari Games, U.S. Gold (1985)

When I first discovered Gauntlet, I wondered why this game about going through mazes, killing hordes of ghosts and demons was named after a glove. Was it a magical gauntlet? Was it a treasure you were trying to recover? Why has it never shown up, in all the hours (and quarters) I spent playing this game?

So, eventually I looked it up, and was introduced to my first example of lexical ambiguity–inferring the wrong definition of a word, when there are several to choose from–even though I wouldn’t know the term for it until decades later. And suddenly, the game made a lot more sense, because it really was a long, challenging experience. It was also one of the first multiplayer games I remember playing, though since you could hurt each other, keep the screen from scrolling, and accidentally (“accidentally”) destroy useful items, having friends along often didn’t make the challenge any easier.

Still, it’s a true classic, and a series that’s kinda still alive, today, in name and in spirit. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Writer needs food.

gauntlet

If you look closely, you can see several friendships ending, as the Warrior is chucking an ax at the Elf, while the Wizard is going to destroy that potion, because he missed the ghost. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

Happy Pi Day!

Obligatory pie-related post for 3.14, and it’s a bit of a long one.

atelier, noun – A workshop–specifically the workshop of an artisan, artist, or designer.

Learned from: Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland (PS3, PS Vita, Switch)

Developed by Gust

Published by NIS America (2010)

Atelier Rorona isn’t a game about saving the world, or overthrowing an evil empire, or anything like that. Instead, it’s about trying to keep your master’s alchemy shop from going bankrupt. But the small scale of the adventure doesn’t mean it’s any less harrowing.

You’re given a series of tasks to complete for the king, to prove to him that your shop is worth keeping around, and each of these has a time limit. And everything takes time. Going out to collect ingredients eats up time. Making items takes time. Side events? You guessed it: time. It’s a surprisingly tense mechanic for a relatively prosaic concept.

Thankfully, you’re not alone in your quest, as a variety of colorful characters will join you, from a puppeteer, to a ghost, to a journeyman cook…and that bloody cook is what ties this in to Pi Day. Iksel wants to become a famous chef, and his goal is reflected in how he acts in the party–a lot of his moves can heal or provide buffs/recovery for the rest of the characters. Plus, he dishes out (pun fully intended) a good amount of damage, to boot. He was one of my strongest party members…and then I made too many pies.

See, in Atelier Rorona, you have two kinds of leveling: character levels, and your alchemy skill level. You need this latter to be high enough to make certain items, so you’ll occasionally have to grind lesser items to get there. A good way through the game, I had a lot of ingredients for making pies on-hand, and decided to use some of my time churning those out like nobody’s business (alchemy can make damn near anything in Japanese RPGs). So, I’m going about my business, when one day, Iksel bursts into my shop, sees what I’m doing, and thinks I’m trying to upstage him. He then challenges me to a pie-making contest a week later, storms out of my shop, and leaves my party. I still hadn’t gathered the ingredients I needed for whatever the king was asking for, and without him in my lineup, I was left with some severely under-leveled alternatives, to fill the gap.

Looking back on it, years later, I’m actually rather impressed that Gust put in such an obscure Easter egg. It adds a layer to the character, and makes me wonder what other events I could’ve unlocked by accident. But at the time, I’d lost one of my best characters, and I was pissed. Some time later, my PS3 bit the dust, and I lost my save files, so I still haven’t beaten this game. I really should revisit it at some point, because the series is huge, and I did enjoy my time with Rorona up until this point.

iksel

Look at this smug bastard.

The worm turns

I have a long history with the first Dark Souls. When the game first came out, I made it to the Four Kings, got stuck, and had my PS3 die before I had a chance to get any further. Later, when I’d replaced my system, I bought the DLC, and got frustrated when I couldn’t figure out how to access this thing I paid extra money for. So I put it down again. Later still, I looked up what I had to do to get into the new content, got to the point where you free Dusk of Oolacile…and accidentally killed her, when I set my controller down, and the R2 trigger registered that as being pressed.

Long story short, I loved the game, but it kept frustrating me for the wrong reasons. Just recently, I picked it up again and finally beat it. Since it’s fresh in my mind, here’s one of the words I learned from it.

vermifuge, noun – A medicine that kills or expels parasitic worms from the body.

Learned from: Dark Souls (PS3, PC, PS4, Switch, XBox 360, XBox One)

Developed by From Software

Published by From Software (2011)

Once you’ve finally fought your way through the horrible frame rate of Blighttown, you enter the realm of Quelaag, one of the Daughters of Chaos. She, herself, can be a tricky fight, but her minions are pretty pathetic: regular humans who are infested with giant maggots. As long as you just run past them, they can’t do much to you, but if you kill them, their parasites burst free, and they’re more of a pain to deal with. Happily, they do sometimes drop the vermifuge needed to end your own infection, if you’re unlucky enough to be bested by the worms. Though, it’s still easier to just avoid them.

vermifuge

“Do you have a moment to talk about our lady and savior, Quelaag?”

%#)@!

Multiplayer console games that require memberships to services other than the platform-specific subscription you pay for to play online drive me up the wall. The Anthem demo has shown me that I can apparently never play another EA game online on my PS4, or any other iteration of the Playstation brand. Because at some point, I created an EA account, linked to an email address that literally does not exist anymore, and there seems to be no way to change it. (I think it may have been way back with Dead Space 2 on my PS3.)

I’d been cautiously looking forward to Anthem, so EA’s stubborn insistence on making Bioware shackle the game to its own online service (and rendering it unplayable for me), has me rather livid. So, after that lead-in, here’s today’s word:

coprolalia, noun – Uncontrollable swearing.

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (PS4, PC, PS3, PS Vita, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is a roguelike platformer, where the gimmick is that once your character dies, you start over as his/her child, come to avenge the long line of ancestors who came before. You’re given a little choice over what traits you want each descendant to have, from gigantism to color blindness–there are dozens of attributes. It’s a quirky little feature that can affect gameplay in a lot of ways….

…or not, as in the case of a descendant with coprolalia. The only thing this really does (as far as I can tell), is cause a cartoon text bubble filled with gobbledegook swearing to appear, every time your character takes damage. Neither helpful nor harmful, it is at least worth a bit of a chuckle.

Q*bert: Gaming’s first foul mouth.

Deep freeze

Things have been very, very cold lately, in my neck of the woods, so let’s go with a word that captures that idea this time around.

permafrost, noun – A permanently frozen region of land.

Learned from: Neuromancer (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, PC)

Developed by Interplay Productions

Published by Mediagenic (1988)

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been playing Neuromancer as early as I did. It’s a game that involves corporate espionage, existential crises, red light districts, organ harvesting, and a whole slew of other themes I didn’t fully appreciate until years later. Still, adventure games were things I could play with my father, and we both enjoyed the experience of puzzling our way through the narratives. It was also my first exposure to the cyberpunk genre, and it’s a love that’s endured to the present day.

“Permafrost” was a password you needed to give someone on a forum, to enter into a shady arms deal, if memory serves. I’m pretty sure that deal resulted in your character getting arrested, but then, there seemed to be little in that dystopian world that wasn’t illegal, so that’s neither here nor there.

neuromancer

Cutting edge graphics for the time, really.

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

Happy New Year!

Oh, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Between visiting family, traveling, and spending time with friends, getting to update this just wasn’t going to happen. But it was fun, and I hope you all had holidays as enjoyable as mine. Still, it was kind of a mess in a way, so this word seemed fitting.

snafu, noun – A situation characterized by egregious mistakes.

Learned from: Snafu (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel

Published by Mattel (1981)

Originally a military acronym (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up), snafu has since become a word in its own right. While my holiday excursion was hardly full of mistakes, it was pretty hectic at times.

So what was the game? Well, it’s essentially a competitive version of Snake. Or the light cycle races from Tron, if you prefer…except that Snafu predates that film by about a year. It’s also nowhere near as fun or fast as Tron made it seem. It’s just you and maybe one other person (the Intellivision only had two controllers), and a couple of AI bots making lines around the field, and trying to steer the others into them so they crash. Even for its time, the gameplay was kind of lacking, compared to other one-screen, competitive multiplayer games like Combat! or Archon, which came out in a similar window. Still, even something this simple can have value.

snafu

No theme this time

Nothing immediately jumped out at me as a theme for this week, so I decided to just go with the most recent word I’ve learned from a game so far.

cenotaph, noun – A monument or tomb containing no actual remains.

Learned from: Immortal: Unchained (PS4, PC, XBox One)

Developed by Toadman Interactive

Published by Sold Out Sales and Marketing Ltd. (2018)

Immortal: Unchained is a game affectionately referred to (by those who’ve actually heard of it), as “Gun Souls.” And it is a game that tries to imitate the Dark Souls formula as closely as it can, in a sci-fi setting–but like a child wearing its parents’ clothes, the final result is…uneven, at best. The format is pretty similar, with obelisks standing in for bonfires, a nebulous quest for which you’re the Chosen One, and all that. But the difficulty curve is all over the place–case in point, the second-to-last area is a cake walk (minus the boss), but the final level is flat-out unfair. To the point where most regular fights felt like taking on the Capra Demon for the first time: i.e. you don’t have enough room (or time) to get out of the way of everything that suddenly pops up.

Even the backstory is imparted in the same way as in the Dark Souls games–that is, primarily through item descriptions. Every gun you pick up, or lost idol you find will have some lengthy synopsis of where it came from, and what group of people was using it. The problem is, there are so many different factions, and mythical figures, and conflicts that have happened off-screen, that it’s hard to keep any of them straight–especially when most of the enemies are just dark humanoid dudes with glowy bits on them.

Speaking of them, in addition to guns or health kits, enemies will occasionally drop things that are referred to as cenotaphs. If you’re feeling charitable, this choice is almost poetic, considering your enemies are the undead remnants of fallen civilizations…at least, I think that’s what they’re supposed to be. (As I said, the story’s kinda vague.) The civilizations themselves quite literally have no remains of their inhabitants left, since they all seem to be rising from their graves, so these “cenotaphs” (which can be anything from pendants, to data pads) are the only memorials left that speak of their history.

Or, maybe I’m giving too much credit to a mediocre game.

Still might be worth checking out, if you can find it cheap.

United States of SMASH

With the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate just a few days away, I felt I should do something in honor of the series…in a roundabout way. The first Smash Bros. game I played was Melee, on the Gamecube, yet I learned that word many years prior.

melee, noun – A close-quarters fight among several people.

Learned from: Dungeon Master (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Turbografx-CD, Sharp X68000, PC-9801, FM Towns)

Developed by FTL Games

Published by FTL Games (1987)

I remember being six or seven years old, and unwrapping this game on Christmas morning, only to see the sticker on the box that said it required an entire megabyte of memory to run. I also remember the feeling of surprise and awe, when my father told me he’d upgraded our Apple IIGS from 512k to a whopping TWO megabytes of RAM for the occasion–to this day, I do kinda wonder if he bought the game as much for himself, as for me.

And I can understand why. Dungeon Master is still close to the epitome of the first-person dungeon crawler, for me. Its levels were huge and mysterious, its puzzles actually made you think, and you were just as likely to die of starvation or dehydration, as you were by falling down a pit or getting killed by monsters, if you weren’t careful. Magic worked by entering the arcane alphabet of each spell, no area was entirely safe, and weapons and armor didn’t have obvious numerical stats, so you had to experiment to see which ones worked best for your party.

This carried over to attacks as well, where one sword might offer a slash and a slice attack, while another might be designed for thrusts. Each type of attack used a different amount of stamina, and seemed to work better against certain types of monsters, though the more stamina used, the stronger the hit, generally. Which brings us to the battle ax, which had a strong (yet inaccurate) attack simply labeled “melee.” As a child of less than ten, I probably relied on that attack (and others like it) way too much, which explains why I didn’t do very well in the game until years later.

And I know a dungeon crawler is about as far from a Smash Bros. game you can get, without delving into sports, but I learned a lot of words from Dungeon Master, so this seemed like a good opportunity to get one out of the way.

dungeon_master_logo