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!

Writing buddy

As I type this, my cat is curled up on the back of the couch near my head, snoring. This entry goes out to her.

grimalkin, noun – A domestic cat–particularly, an old female cat.

Learned from: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (Playstation 3, Arcade, XBox 360)

Developed by Arc System Works

Published by Aksys Games (2008)

For fighting games, the BlazBlue series has always had a rather fleshed out story mode. Granted, after a couple entries, it stops making much sense, but it certainly is deep. A lot of the characters have extensive backstories that color their interactions with one another. Ragna and Jin are extreme examples of feuding siblings, Litchi and Arakune were lovers back when Arakune was still human (at least, in Litchi’s eyes), and the once-great hero, Hakumen (who’s now a living suit of armor), hates the mad scientist, Kokonoe. Kokonoe also happens to be a catgirl (because, Japan), which has earned her the derisive nickname of “Grimalkin” from Hakumen. He doesn’t seem to hate any of the other cat-people in the game though, so at least he’s not a racist.

kokonoe

I should point out that Kokonoe has a split tail, technically making her a nekomata: a Japanese mythological creature that’s essentially a house cat that’s lived for a very long time. So, maybe she’s older than she looks.

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.

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.