Tag: PC

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

Novembeard

I’ve never taken part in No-Shave November, but as the month is almost over, I thought a word related to the event might be fitting.

tonsorial adj. – Of, or relating to the business of a barber.

Learned from: Harvester (PC)

Developed by DigiFX Interactive

Published by Merit Studios (1996)

It’s tempting to describe Harvester as “like Twin Peaks, but…” yet I don’t think that’s fully accurate.  It’s set in a weird little town, filled with people who are all more than slightly off, true.  But whereas Twin Peaks had a certain undeniable charm, Harvester seemed dead-set on injecting the X-TREME nature of the ’90s into nearly every screen, and turning the dial up to 11.

Harvester is a point & click adventure game, which has you playing as a “teenager” (who’s clearly in his mid- to late-twenties), named Steve, who wakes up one morning in a town he doesn’t recognize, surrounded by people he doesn’t know.  His “mother” spends the entirety of her days baking sheet after sheet of cookies for an upcoming bake sale, his neighbor is a disgusting pig who only ever talks about meat, and the local mortician also owns a hotel, where random drifters seem to keep dying.  Oh, and Steve has also apparently traveled back to the 1950s, and is engaged to be married to a girl who also has no memory of how she got there.  And everyone is pushing Steve to join a mysterious group known only as The Lodge.

Sounds like an okay setup, right?  Well, it is, until you discover the local meat plant is killing random cats, the principal of the school is a pedophile, your “father” is tied to a bed in blood-smeared sex dungeon, the fire station is staffed by flamboyantly gay men who spend their time painting nude pictures…you get the idea.  I have a feeling DigiFX was simply trying to push the notoriety of Harvester as hard as they could, considering the panic around violent and objectionable video games that was rampant in the ’90s.  They certainly took things to extremes…but I have my doubts whether it helped their sales or not.

So, what does Harvester have to do with cutting hair?  Well, eventually you do get pushed into joining The Lodge, and the initiation requires you to perform a series of increasingly dangerous “pranks,” that range from scratching someone’s prized car, to setting a building on fire.  Along the way, you have to steal a barber pole from “Mr. Pastorelli’s tonsorial parlor,” I believe the shadowy Lodge member in the robe calls it–which seems like it would be one of the more harmless tasks, until the owner ends up getting electrocuted by the exposed wires when he opens the shop the next day.

Harvester is not a good game by any means, but there is a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor to be found in its laughably bad gore effects.  That’s kind of offset by the overall squicky nature of some of the other stuff (the father watching his own daughter get undressed every night comes to mind), but it’s pretty cheap on Steam, if you feel like checking it out.

Pastorellis

The tonsorial parlor in question.