Who are you, again?

I recently attended a presentation by author, Sue Harrison, where she talked about her journey to becoming a writer. She genuinely seems like a delightful person, and her personal story was an uplifting one. But when she mentioned that she has difficulty remembering faces–to the extent that the first draft of one of her books had virtually no facial descriptions of the characters–I realized I knew the technical term for that. Which brings us to today’s word.

prosopagnosia, noun – face blindness

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (Playstation 4, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 3, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is, as the title might suggest, a roguelike platformer. The gimmick in this one is that when your character dies, he or she is replaced by an heir you select from a few possible options. Some of the options are pretty straightforward, like the character’s class, but the cool part is that each one has a selection from a vast variety of traits they can be born with. From the innocuous (being bald), to the mildly inconvenient (colorblindness), to things like prosopagnosia, which made it so you couldn’t see any of the traits of the next generation. Not horrible, compared to something like schizophrenia (which I think showed enemies and platforms that aren’t there, while sometimes not showing ones that are), but it meant you’d have no idea what to expect on the next run.

And really, that’s what kept Rogue Legacy fun. The actual platforming and combat isn’t bad, but without the quirky results of genetic chance, the repetitive runs probably would have gotten boring before the end. It’s still a fun little game, easily worth the $15 it’ll set you back on most platforms.

Go, my balding, vampiric dwarf with ADHD! You are the hero we deserve!

Everything old is new again

Pixel graphics! ’80s references across all of popular media! The stock market crashing! Retro is in, baby, and it’s only a matter of time before 3D glasses make a comeback in movie theaters again…assuming theaters survive the streaming wars. But hey, paying way too much to go see a movie in dirty room full of loud people is totally retro too, so maybe there’s hope! Anyway, this all does lead us to today’s word.

anaglyph, noun – an image printed in two different colors overlayed across each other, to give the illusion of being in three dimensions when viewed through special glasses

Learned from: Balatro (PC, Mac, mobile, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by LocalThunk

Published by Playstack (2024)

Balatro, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, or you’re reading this in the future, is a deconstruction of the roguelike deckbuilding genre, where there are no monsters, no dungeons, no trips across the stars–just poker. Your cards are literal playing cards that can be modified in various ways to give more points, generate more money, trigger multiple times, generate other cards, etc. It’s a game that you really have to play to understand its appeal, but it’s simple, addictive, and worth every penny.

As you play and learn winning combos, Balatro offers you ways to up the challenge, from decks that are missing cards, to higher stakes runs that impose restrictions on what you can do. But the further you go, the more you unlock, and beating the game on the “black chip” difficulty unlocks the Anaglyph Deck, which gives you a free double tag whenever you beat the boss blind at the end of an ante. That probably doesn’t mean much if you haven’t played it, but it can be a useful bonus. If you’re lucky.

Once upon a time, these were *the* coolest thing. I swear.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

For this entry, I find myself in the odd position of writing about a game that hasn’t been released yet. I’ll explain in a moment.

oniric, adj. – variant of oneiric: dreamlike or pertaining to dreams

Learned from: Iris and the Giant (projected platforms: PC, PS4, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Louis Rigaud

Published by Goblinz Studio, Maple Whispering Limited (projected release: 2020)

So, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed today, and an ad for this game showed up, proclaiming it to be a “roguelike oniric deckbuilder”. I knew what two of those words meant, but I’d never heard the term “oniric” before. After looking it up, and perusing some of the screenshots on Steam, I can say it does look rather dreamlike. As a fan of deckbuilding games (100+ hours in Slay the Spire, and counting), and the randomness of roguelikes, I may have to give this one a shot whenever it comes out–I almost feel I owe it that much for already teaching me a new word.

iris

I do love how indie games are willing to experiment with different art styles.

Happy New Year

Ye gods, the holidays are busy. Between social obligations, longer hours at work, and an unfortunately-timed head cold, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and focus on this project. I did have time to bake two surprisingly gigantic loaves of cardamom bread, after discovering how much my wife likes that particular spice…which brings us to today’s word.

pestle noun – a club-shaped utensil for pounding or grinding material in a mortar

Learned from: Tower of Doom (Intellivision)

Developed by Mattel Electronics

Published by INTV Corporation (1987)

So, the recipe I was using called for ground cardamom, but all we had on hand were whole seeds. After grinding them by hand, I think Home Ec. should count as a gym class substitute–those things were tough! Also, the entire house smelled wonderful for days afterward, so it was totally worth it.

As for the game itself, Tower of Doom is one of the first roguelike games I ever played, and certainly the first one I played with real-time combat. The story was simple: You’re stuck in a labyrinthine tower full of monsters and traps, and you have to find your way out. For some inexplicable reason, you start at the top of the tower, but coherent plots generally weren’t a high priority back in the ’80s.

In traditional roguelike fashion, besides the enemies, the tower was filled with a variety of mysterious items that had different effects, each time you played. So, that red potion might heal you, or poison you, or make you blind. The same thing went for scrolls, wands, mortars & pestles, etc. Tower of Doom was actually pretty complex for a console game of its time, and thinking back, the Intellivision actually had a lot of games like that. It was a system ahead of its time, and the fact that they’re going to be reviving it this year with the Intellivision Amico makes me smile.

tower_of_doom

I mean, look at this: a procedural map, inventory system, health bar. This was impressive stuff for a system whose games were only a few kilobytes.

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.)

%#)@!

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.