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.

In sticking with a theme…

It would appear I still have an ax to grind, after that last post, but this time around, I’ll strive to make the entry more about the game, than the real world.

mendacious, adj. – relating to deception, falsehood, or divergence from the truth

Learned from: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (on damn near every platform since the XBox 360 and Playstation 3)

Developed by Bethesda Game Studios

Published by Bethesda Softworks (2011)

There are a lot of books scattered throughout the realm of Skyrim, and most of the words this game taught me came from a series of tales about the dark elf, Barenziah. There are plenty of other stories to be found, but for whatever reason, the writers decided to be the most verbose in talking about this particular elf. Mentions of mendacious caravans seeking to avoid paying tolls, or chary subjects, distrustful of their new rulers abound in the history of this character whom (to the best of my knowledge), you never actually meet in the game.

When you think about it, it’s odd that Skyrim gets as much praise as it does for being so “deep,” when so much of its lore breaks a cardinal rule of storytelling. e.g. telling, instead of showing. We’re (largely) well past the era of the text adventure, and video games are an inherently visual medium; we could very feasibly be seeing these events instead of killing our eyes, squinting at chapters of raw text in a virtual book, on a TV screen across the room (or a monitor on our desk). It’s like an audiobook presented in Morse Code: it really doesn’t take advantage of what the format has to offer.

skyrim

Skyrim: 10th Anniversary Edition, coming soon to a graphing calculator near you!

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.

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.)

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.

And now for something completely different.

I’m going to take a break from the usual today, and actually review a game I just played. Since (in a way) this blog is about how games can impact our lives, it seems in keeping with the spirit of things–especially when I’m left feeling uncertain of how I should feel at all about a particular title. This will be long, so if you want the tl;dr version, skip to the last paragraph. So, without further ado…

labyrinth_of_refrain

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned how my early experiences with Dungeon Master shaped my love of the first-person dungeon crawler, and how happy I am that the genre is still alive and well in Japan. So, even though many contemporary releases don’t reach the level of depth and immersion of that old classic, I still tend to pick them up. Some I enjoy more than others, and despite its shortcomings, Labyrinth of Refrain was proving to be a fun example of the genre…until one of the characters was unceremoniously killed in a back alley nearly 60 hours in, and I lost.

This is a problem, because I have no idea what I did to get a bad ending. In, say, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (another dungeon crawler), if you got an ending you didn’t want, the story made it clear that you supported the wrong people. Going a bit further afield, in something like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, if you got a bad ending, it was because you trusted the wrong people, or split the party into the wrong groups. You might not know exactly what went wrong, but you had an idea of what to try. Even in Silent Hill 2, a game with some of the most subtle elements that influence which ending you get, you at least see a list of statistics at the end, so you have an inkling of what you can do differently the next time around. In Labyrinth of Refrain, I have absolutely no clue what I did wrong, and this is due in large part to how the story is presented.

See, you aren’t the main character. Your role in things is to just venture into the (increasingly inexplicable) dungeons, kill monsters, and answer the occasional yes or no question (or remain silent). The actual plot plays out around you in visual novel-style cutscenes, that happen mainly when you enter a new area, or find a certain item. There’s no way to choose which scenes to watch, so I can’t opt out of the one that gets me the bad ending, and I’m at a complete loss as to what I did that got me to this point. Did I complete a side quest I wasn’t supposed to? Was my karma too high? Too low? Did I not sell enough items at the market, or too many? None of the yes/no questions seemed to pertain to how things ended up, so I don’t think it’s that, but I have no way of knowing, because the game doesn’t communicate my mistakes at all. And after sinking that much time into it, that’s frustrating.

The experience leading up to that point was…more enjoyable than it probably should have been, honestly. In about 95% of the battles, I just ordered my units to attack, and sat back until the enemy was dead. The other 5% was the early game, where you’re a lot more fragile, and thus have to experiment more to stay alive, and during boss fights. Attack magic usually wasn’t worth sacrificing the base attack damage from your units, and it’s fairly easy to get a skill that auto-heals your party after battles, so healing magic is pointless most of the time. What kept me going was the story I wasn’t directly involved in, and the loot…for awhile. I’ll touch more on the story in a bit, but the loot takes some explaining, because even that has issues.

Your adventuring party consists of five slots (called covens) of units. Each coven can hold between one and three individual units, depending on its type, with the possibility of having numerous “support” units attached as well. And each unit has its own set of equipment: left arm, right arm, head, chest, boots, accessory.

Starting to see the issue?

Weapons aren’t so bad, because not everyone is going to be using a crossbow, or lance, but for armor, nearly every class and gender can wear any armor in the game. So, whenever you find a new armor piece, you have to go though potentially 15+ units, comparing its stats to what they’re currently wearing. And loot drops ALL THE TIME. Stats are randomized (within a range) for each piece, too, and if you factor in the Diablo-style item prefixes (“breezy” sword, “odorous” traveler’s cape, etc.), there’s no shorthand way of knowing whether an item’s worth checking or not. You can have one piece of gear with four pages of stats you need to consider. Do you sacrifice a bit of illusion resistance for a boost to your guard chance? Is losing some defense worth the increase in charm? It’s micro-managing to the extreme. But for awhile at least, it’s fun chasing higher numbers.

The dungeons themselves are distinct and nicely drawn (as are the enemies), though they’re nonsensical in how they fit together. Maybe it gets explained in the “good ending,” how you go from underground areas, to open-air kingdoms, to towers who knows where, but it wasn’t during my 58 hours of play time. And while there are some puzzles, they’re never terribly complex–find the key, or the switch, or the MacGuffin to move forward.

As for the story itself, it’s very disjointed, but there’s enough of a sense of mystery and foreboding, that I wish I’d been able to see it through to the real ending. The characters aren’t always sympathetic, and some are downright confounding (like the nun who has an immediate and seemingly-inexplicable crush on one of the other characters), but underneath it all, there’s more I wanted to learn. Something is undeniably wrong with the town of refrain, and the people in it, and discovering just what’s going on is a big part of what kept me going…which makes my sudden, unavoidable failure all the more galling.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a hard game to recommend–or to completely write off. There’s enough tension to the combat (will an attack miss, deal a critical hit, apply a status effect to give your units a breather?), that even just spamming “attack” like I did kept my interest in the battles, more often than not. The maps are huge, with tons of loot to find (for better or worse). And the graphics are quite good for a game of this type. But at the same time, you as a player aren’t a direct actor in the story that unfolds, and whatever impact you do have behind the scenes can lead you down an unwinnable path, and good luck figuring out what you did wrong. Also, your predilection for micromanagement might greatly influence your enjoyment, when you get to the point of having to juggle equipment between upwards of a dozen characters. There are also some, uh…questionable scenes of either a surprisingly violent, or weirdly sexual nature, depending on which ones you get. You never directly see anything overtly gory, or X-rated (at least I didn’t), but reading about someone being mercilessly beaten, or pursued by someone they have no interest in can be uncomfortable. It’s a very mixed bag, but there’s some fun to be had here–just be warned that you can lose a lot of time, if the game decides you deserve a bad ending, for whatever arbitrary and unexplained reason. Best of luck, if you decide to pick this one up. In a very literal sense, you’ll need it.

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?”