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Tags: Video games, Word cloud, Wordle
Here’s a superficial analysis on game titles. I have used Wordle to generate a word cloud from lists of recurring phrases in game titles.
What the word clouds show are very generic words like “space” or “super”, the number two (a game series is more likely to be two than three games long) and multiple word phrases which usually are popular game series, or games with many expansion packs. It is interesting that the generic words tend to be the same across 30 years — all generations of gamers seem to prefer dragons. Another point of interest is that a phrase from a 1980s game title is much less likely an established brand as it most likely is in the 1990s. Also, in the 1990s is became common that a game title has the release year attached to it, since EA et al started to churn out minor updates to their sports games as brand new releases.
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Tags: Algorithms, Collision detection, Game programming, OpenGL, Source code, Video games
Here we describe a method for checking collisions between arbitrary objects drawn by the GPU. The objects are not limited to any shape, complexity or orientation. The objects that are checked for collisions can be the same objects that are drawn on the screen. The algorithm is pixel perfect but without further refining is limited to 2D collisions.
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Tags: 8-bit, Asteroids, Atari, C64, NES, Nostalgy, Retro gaming, Reviews, Video, Video games
Probably my most favorite video games are thrustlike games — games that relate to Thrust similarly how Rogue relates to roguelikes. Here are some of the games I consider the best examples of this genre.
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Tags: Nostalgy, Retro gaming, Reviews, Video, Video games
ROM CHECK FAIL is quite possibly the most original game I have seen in a while. That’s saying a lot considering the game is a mishmash of classic arcade and video games. The main idea is that, for example, at one moment you are playing Zelda and after a few seconds the game randomly switches to Super Mario Bros. Or Asteroids. Or Spy Hunter. While you might still be Link or the tank from Space Invaders.
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Tags: Dreamcast, Ikaruga, LCD, Shmup
It only occured to me yesterday that there’s a clear benefit in that I bought a new LCD screen a while ago. I leaned on the screen and realized the screen of course rotates 90 degrees flipping the vertical and horizontal axes. For me, realizing that old feature was a revelation: it allows playing vertically scrolling shmups properly.
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