Trench warfare

So, my job has been severely understaffed for about two months now. This is ostensibly because we had a system migration about two weeks ago, and they didn’t want to train someone in on the old system, only to have to turn around and immediately retrain them on the new one. Which would have made sense if they hadn’t transferred one of my coworkers to another department, fired another for calling in too much because her kid was sick, all while knowing another was going to be moving out of state. Oh, and in the midst of all this, another one found a different job elsewhere, leaving us with dreams of even having a skeleton crew.

Recently at meetings, the higher-ups have taken to telling those of us who are still here (for whatever reason) what a “great job” we’re doing on the front lines. Front lines of the Russian army, maybe, passing a single gun around between two or three people. And I’m sure they’re oh so appreciative of us putting up with all this stress and extra work, with no bump in pay to show for it. Venting aside, this brings us to today’s word.

vanguard, noun – the front line of a military force

Learned from: Vanguard (Atari 2600, Arcade, Atari 5200)

Developed by Tose

Published by Centuri, Atari Inc. (1981)

It’s a testament to how bad I was at this game as a kid, that I didn’t know there was a boss at the end until a random Facebook reel showed up in my feed the other day. Vanguard was a shoot-’em-up, or shmup, with a twist that not only did the levels switch between vertical and horizontal-scrolling, but that your ship would shoot in whichever direction you were moving the joystick. I don’t think it could do diagonals, though.

I have no idea if there was a story to this game or not–I’m pretty sure I got the loose cartridge from a garage sale for like, a quarter or something. And I never saw the arcade cabinet in the wild, so without the instruction manual or the hypothetical text crawl explaining things in the arcade version, I had no idea why I was flying through caverns, or that there was a boss monster behind everything. I just kind of assumed it was like Defender, where the levels just went on forever until you died. I do think Vanguard would work better as a twin-stick shooter though; having to move closer to the thing you’re shooting at in order to aim your shots at it was a very clunky control scheme, even back then.

Behold! The mastermind behind the alien invasion/doomsday countdown/robot rebellion, or whatever the setup to this game was.

Catching flak

I don’t normally give the word of the day away in the title of the post, but most of this story is going to be so convoluted, I thought at least some part of it should be straightforward.

So, Thanksgiving is a few days past at this point, and my cat has barely eaten since then. Like, she saw us preparing all these different and extravagant types of food in large quantities, looked at the food she had been eating–quite contentedly I might add–for awhile up until that point, and decided, “No. I also want something new and different. This plain old food simply will not do, human.”

At least, that’s the conclusion we eventually reached. Initially, we were worried that she was sick, or had swallowed something that was causing a blockage, or that she was depressed or something. But she would still eat treats–she caught and ate a spider, for that matter. And she’s eaten bits of the new food we’ve picked up for her. She was just throwing flak at us for having the audacity to celebrate a food-centric holiday without cutting her in on the deal. Which brings us to today’s word.

flak, noun – anti-aircraft fire, (or in the example above: harsh criticism)

Learned from: Mission X (Intellivision)

Developed by Data East

Published by Mattel Electronics (1983)

Mission X is a vertical-scrolling shooter, in the same style as the much better-known Xevious. And while its graphics are nowhere near as good, it actually brought a lot more to the table. You still had forward-facing guns, and could drop bombs, but you could also change the altitude of your plane, to be more accurate with your bombs, or fly above enemy planes or flak. There was also a day/night cycle, where it was significantly harder to see your targets during night missions, as well as a pretty decent variety of things to shoot at and bomb. The only thing Xevious had over Mission X aside from graphical fidelity (and market saturation), was the thematics: fighting sci-fi space aliens, instead of Axis powers in World War II…unless you were me, growing up.

See, despite having the manual for this game, I never really saw it as a WWII shmup. And that’s because I always conflated Mission X with the 1987 movie Project X that they played weirdly often on weekends for awhile. It starred Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt, and it was about a secret Air Force project designed to teach chimpanzees how to fly fighter jets. And my five-year-old brain latched onto that concept for dear life whenever I played Mission X, because the idea that I was an escaped, experimental chimp who stole a bomber and was wreaking havoc across the countryside was automatically a better, more fun idea than whatever dusty old nonsense the game was trying to be about.

There’s our floofy little tyrant, who, despite going on a hunger strike, has plenty of energy to climb up the spare mattress we haven’t gotten rid of yet, so she can judge us from on high.

Where we’re going, we won’t need…eyes.

You might be expecting me to be talking about a horror game today, with a title like that, but nope. Bit of a story behind what brought this word to mind:

So, my wife and I went to see the fireworks downtown last week. Our city is situated on a lake, so we went down to the lower harbor and found a spot to sit right by the water while we waited for it to get dark. At one point, I took them off to rub my eyes or something, and they just slipped out of my fingers, skidded across the concrete embankment, and disappeared 20+ feet underwater. I’ve been using a pair of cheaters since then (though a holiday weekend and several hundred dollars later, I do have a new pair of actual glasses ordered), but walking around with them on feels like I’m inside a fishbowl. That means, when I’m at home or work and I need to move around, I’ve relied a lot on remembering where stuff is. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.

homing, adj. – finding one’s way to a target or location through memory or technology

Learned from: Raiden (arcade, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Turbographx-16, PC, Atari Lynx, mobile)

Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu

Published by Tecmo (1990)

Raiden, to me, is the quintessential vertical-scrolling shmup. Other games are flashier, or have deeper mechanics, or fill the screen with more bullets, but there’s something about Raiden that keeps me coming back even after all these years. The sprite work is solid, the levels all look distinct, and there’s just something to the overall gameplay that simply feels right.

I don’t even remember if there’s much of a story, but sometimes all you need is to hop into the cockpit of a red or blue jet, decide if you want lasers or a spread of bullets, dumb-fire missiles or homing ones, and mow down wave after wave of enemy tanks and planes. Raiden is an emblematic arcade experience: difficult but fun, simple but addictive; it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time, and one of these days I’ll beat it on a single quarter.

I don’t even need my glasses to see this is a *Crystal Castles* arcade cabinet with the *Raiden* logo slapped on the side. Bizarre.

History repeats itself

Recently, I took part in an episode of the Friends Occasionally Not Disagreeing podcast about our favorite video game soundtracks. It was a nice, nostalgic break from the state of the world today, since a lot of our choices were from games made in a simpler time, when laws still mattered, and people could generally agree that the Russians were the bad guys. The experience also reminded me of a word I’d learned from one of these games, though not the exact context.

hence, adv. – from this point in time

Learned from: Silpheed (Apple IIGS, PC, and a whole slew of Japan-only computer formats)

Developed by Game Arts, Sierra On-Line

Published by Game Arts, Sierra On-Line (1986)

I actually learned several words from this obscure, isometric shooter, which I’m sure I’ll get to later. All I remembered about “hence” was that it was somewhere in the opening cutscene. (And yes, a game from 1986 had an opening cutscene, complete with rudimentary wireframe 3D graphics!) Going back and looking up the entirety of the text, it’s surprisingly poetic, if grammatically questionable, for a game about chasing down a space terrorist who’s stolen a super battleship. Reprinted in its entirety, odd punctuation and all:

…HOW MANY YEARS HENCE SHALL THIS OUR LOFTY SCENE BE ACTED OVER. IN STATES UNBORN AND ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN.

Five-year-old me didn’t really appreciate it, but this was the ’80s equivalent of Fallout 3‘s famous, “War…war never changes.” And its question mark-less question of how many times this story would be retold ended up being prophetic, considering the absurd number of times this archaic, four-decade-old game has been remade: it’s had reimaginings on the Sega CD, PS2, XBox 360, and even Android devices as recently as 2011! That’s quite the pedigree for a title that despite its early foray into 3D graphics, and excellent MIDI soundtrack, seems largely unknown to most people.

I’m glad I wasn’t one of them, because while the other kids had Mario and Zelda, I sunk countless hours into underappreciated gems like Silpheed that performed graphical feats that by all rights, my parents’ Apple IIGS shouldn’t have been capable of.

And I wasn’t kidding about the soundtrack. It’s only about six songs long, but some of them still pop into my head decades later.