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.

Jinkies

The 1990s were an interesting time in the United States. The “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s was dying down, but panic over AIDS and street crime was kicking into high gear. Sleeping with an intern was somehow enough to trigger impeachment hearings for a sitting president. The “war on drugs” was unironically going full-steam ahead, and even before the “war on terror” kicked off, the military was beginning to dabble in wars–excuse me, “military operations”–for oil. And despite all the chaos and absurdity of that decade, looking back at it, those were simpler times. Which brings us to today’s word.

jink, verb – to abruptly change direction

Learned from: Desert Strike (Genesis, Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Mac, PC, Super Nintendo, PSP)

Developed by Electronic Arts, Foresight New Media (PC version), Ocean Software (Game Boy version)

Published by Electronic Arts (1992)

Operation Desert Storm, the quick assault on Iraq after they invaded Kuwait, was the first thing approaching a war that kids in the ’90s were really exposed to, and to say that it captured the public consciousness is an understatement. I mean, just look at how many platforms this hastily-coded game released on. Still, despite capitalizing on a contemporary, real-world conflict, Desert Strike created a splash (and several sequels) for good reason.

First, it was different from pretty much everything else on the console market at the time, with impressively large maps and complete freedom of movement. Desert Strike wasn’t really a shmup; it was slower-paced, the levels didn’t auto-scroll, and you could move your helicopter forward, back, left and right, and even jink on a dime to try and dodge projectiles. Add in a decent array of weapons and enemy vehicles, and the experience was really quite memorable.

I couldn’t really see something like this getting released today, for a variety of reasons: the problematic game-ification of a questionable military assault; giving the leader of a fictitious Middle Eastern country the name “Kilbaba”; etc. But like I said, simpler times.

Also, back then we used to at least *pretend* we were fighting against tyranny…

Blast from the past

Growing up in the ’80s, I was too young to fully comprehend the horrors of impending nuclear annihilation. Granted, those were the last years of the Cold War, and it ended when I was eight years old, but still, my main takeaway at the time was that the Soviet Union was bad…except, someone from there made Tetris, so they couldn’t be all bad. And once the USSR dissolved, I kinda just went on with life, dimly aware that something potentially terrible had been averted.

Fast forward 30 years, and we’ve got the Russians invading Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin implicitly threatening to make this go nuclear. There’s no ambiguity about this in my mind, anymore. Which brings us to today’s word.

megalomania, noun – an obsession with obtaining power, wealth, or importance

Learned from: Tyrants: Fight Through Time (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Atari ST, Super Nintendo, PC)

Developed by Sensible Software

Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Image Works for the original version, 1991)

I didn’t exactly learn this word from playing Tyrants, but rather from an ad in an old gaming magazine. Similar to Odium being called Gorky 17 in other regions of the world, Tyrants was known overseas as Mega-lo-mania. Both titles fit for a variety of reasons.

Tyrants/Mega-lo-mania was an early real-time strategy game, where you play as one of four gods, differentiated only by their portrait and color palette, with the task of defeating the other three on a variety of islands. You do this by influencing your followers to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons and defenses through a variety of technological eras, from stone axes up to ballistic missiles. While simple by conventional standards, the game featured a surprisingly large tech tree that could even lead you to developmental dead ends, depending on what you decided to research. It also featured some pretty braindead AI, to the point where if you were really backed into a corner, you could just keep spamming the “form alliance” button at the god attacking you, until the RNG would eventually make him give in. If only we could do that in real conflicts…

Something’s fishy

With the announcement of the first paid DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons the other day, which takes place on an archipelago, I found myself reminded of the first time I learned that word, decades ago from a game that…probably wasn’t as good.

archipelago, noun – a chain of islands

Learned from: James Pond 3: Operation Starfish (Genesis, Amiga, Super Nintendo, Game Gear)

Developed by Vectordean, Millenium Interactive

Published by Electronic Arts (1993)

As you probably guessed from the name, the James Pond series was a spoof of spy films, except starring a fish. I don’t remember a whole lot about the character aside from that (and the fact that he seemed to do a lot less spying and a lot more jumping), except that James also had the ability to…er…get really long.

The idea was that he could stretch really far to grab high platforms, and then lift the rest of his body up. I’m not sure if he still had this power in the third game or not. I do seem to remember that the series, while always silly, went from fighting against pollution, to…running around on stages made of food. One of those stages in James Pond 3 was the Arran Archipelago, and as the name suggests, I think it was a series of food-inspired islands that you had to jump across. I…don’t really remember much else about this game; the video store was my friend, growing up, exposing me to a wealth of games I never would’ve even looked at, otherwise.

I mean seriously. Would *you* have played this if it cost you more than $3 for five nights?

Levity, by way of lexical ambiguity

Apologies again for the long break; politics, and skyrocketing COVID numbers (which, insanely, is also somehow political in my country) have made it hard to focus on projects like this. I’d been trying to distract myself, but it took months to even get a one-shot session of a tabletop RPG off the ground. That finally happened, though, and I’d forgotten how much I liked running games for friends–even over Discord, with all its technical glitches. In a roundabout way, this brings us to today’s word, because of joking around with friends, and also the game’s title.

jerkin, noun – a long, close-fitting jacket, usually without sleeves

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)

Dungeon Master was a great first-person dungeon crawler (or DRPG, as the genre is sometimes called today). The puzzles actually made you think, the magic system was very interesting in how spells were put together, and it was pretty damn challenging. It was also rather obtuse at times, particularly when it came to equipment.

Weapons came with different types of attacks (slash, hack, bash, etc.), and you could see via experimentation, which ones packed more oomph. But armor? There was no “defense” rating, or anything like that; all you had to go on was the picture, and the item’s weight. So, while you could infer that a breastplate would protect a character more than a silk shirt, was a tunic better or worse than a jerkin? Impossible to say. So, you just had to kind of guess your way through outfitting your characters, which made staying a live more difficult than it needed to be. Then again, it’s not like real-life gear tends to have numerical ratings for anything but temperature ranges for winter coats.

And now for the lexical ambiguity joke:

Enjoy this stock image, because googling “dungeon master jerkin” brings up some very…different results.

Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!!

So, as you may know, today was Independence Day for those of us here in the United States. As you may also know, we…haven’t been doing the greatest at following simple instructions designed to keep ourselves alive. This combination brings us directly to today’s word.

lemming, noun – a small, Arctic rodent falsely made famous for the belief that they willingly run off of cliffs

Learned from: Lemmings (Genesis, Amiga, NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Sega Master System)

Developed by DMA Design

Published by Psygnosis (1991)

Video game developers seem to have a fondness for unusual animals, from echidnas, to bandicoots, to lemmings. I probably wasn’t the only kid whose first exposure to some of these critters was through games featuring them.

Lemmings is a puzzle game. You’re tasked with safely guiding a bunch of the titular creatures (depicted as green-haired humanoids in blue robes for some reason), across a series of hazards, by assigning them different tasks. The lemmings, themselves, have no sense of self-preservation, and will walk blindly into lava pits, spikes, acid pools, and many, many other deadly fates. It isn’t an easy task, and the fact that I was playing the Genesis version (with very sluggish controls in a real-time game) only made it harder. Still, it’s considered a classic for good reason, because it is a lot of fun. Certainly more fun than…

lemmings

This is an image taken today from a local beach. Half of these people are probably tourists, which means it’s anyone’s guess how many people they came into contact with, across how many states, before they got here. The faces of anyone close enough to be identified have been replaced with something more fitting.

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.

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