NEWER POSTS

Overused Words in Game Titles

By Shamus Posted Sunday Feb 15, 2015

Filed under: Programming 114 comments
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It’s been a running joke for a couple of years that half the games coming out have the word “Dead” in the titleAlso, games with ‘half’ in the title are dead.. Dead Space, Dead Island, Deadlight, Left 4 Dead, etc. So it got me thinking: Just how common is the practice, really? Is the word “Dead” really as played out as it seems, or is this a case of confirmation bias run amok? Aside from “dead”, what are the top overused words in game titles? Are there any overused words that we just don’t notice?

So I’m going to find out. Since I don’t want to run through and manually enter the name of every videogame ever made, I need a way to automate this. The path of least resistance seems to be to use Steam’s library. Being a PC platform, Steam is obviously missing a ton of games. But this should be close enough for our purposes. This isn’t science, it’s trivia.

Sadly, I can’t find a clean way to extract a full list of titles from Steam. The closest I can come is this file, which looks kind of promising at first. But there’s no way of knowing how old the list is, or if all games are listed.

Worse, the list includes a lot of non-game stuff like DLC and trailers. Which means that if there was a game called Dead Shooter, then it might appear several times in our list like so:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overused Words in Game Titles”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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114 comments

 

Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP5: Radiator Gladiator

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 13, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 73 comments
Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP4: Alyx is CrankyPrevious Post
Next PostHalf Life 2 Episode 1 EP6: The Room of Sadness


Link (YouTube)

I’ve said in the past that Spoiler Warning seems to polarize my thoughts on a game. I develop admiration for some games, and animosity for others. This one is definitely falling into the “admiration” category. Yes, I know there are annoying bits all over the place. But overall I just love the rollercoaster of tension I feel when playing it. Like Chris said in an earlier episode: Nobody can create a sense of relief like Valve.

This is the same reason I enjoy survival horror. Not for the dread, but the relief. And Episode One is really good about this. You keep exiting horrible places into moments of quiet safety and exploration. That really scratches my itch.

So the Episode One Spoiler Warning is going to be seven episodes longThat sentence sounds ridiculous when deprived of context. Heck, it sounds a little silly IN context.. The final two episodes will happen next week. And then… I don’t know.

We’re still haggling over what game to cover next. We’re down to a list of four games, all of which were supported by three people and vetoed by the fourthMumbles wasn’t there for our last meeting..

Half-Life 2 and its episodes are so fun to do that I want to suggest we go back and do a season on the original Half-LifeWell, not the ORIGINAL original. The source engine remake would be easier to get running., but that would be a long season and that game has been thoroughly picked over, commentary-wise. I’m sure we’d have lots to talk about, but I doubt we would say anything that hasn’t been said a thousand times already. Also the game is crazy long by today’s standards. And kind of hard by today’s standards.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP4: Alyx is CrankyPrevious Post
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73 comments

 

Project Button Masher: UNATCO Office Party

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 12, 2015

Filed under: Music 26 comments
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And so we come to the end of the project. This was an interesting exercise, and it pushed me into doing a lot of new things. So regardless of how good the music is (or isn’t) it was still a success for my purposes.

This week I’m going to attempt to make something that would feel like it belongs in the Deus Ex soundtrack:


Link (YouTube)

Notable characteristics:

  1. The particular sound of the late-90’s UMX music. This technology was used in Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex, and has a pretty distinctive sound. If I had to describe it, I’d say it sounded like the mid 90’s synth MIDI music, but with lots of chorus effects. (More on that below.)
  2. Lots of climbing and descending sequences of notes.
  3. There is some really mild gliding and pitch-bending going on in a lot of tracks. That’s when a long note goes slightly out of tune – or glides to a different note – during its duration. I’ve fiddled with this, but I don’t think I really nailed it. Sounds interesting when it works, though.
  4. Echo effects. Nothing says “moody cyberpunk” like echoing synths.

For the purposes of making something Deus Ex-ish, I made a track that has both a slow ambient part and a faster section with drums. In the game it would often shift between the two styles when you entered or ended combat, but here I’ve just worked both into the same song.

The result: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Button Masher: UNATCO Office Party”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Project Button Masher: The 7th GethPrevious Post
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26 comments

 

Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP4: Alyx is Cranky

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Feb 11, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 70 comments
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Link (YouTube)

Things I noticed:

  • At 4:20, when Josh put the crosshair right on the tripmine, and the auto-aim “helped” by bending the bullets into the soldier. I have to say this kind of thing drives me crazy. Boo.
  • Am I the only one who did the see-saw puzzle the “right” way? I distinctly remember not having enough weight in the room to hold down that pipe, but apparently I’m the only member of the cast to solve it by supporting it. So… I have no idea.
  • At 16:30, the title for this episode was nearly, “Alyx is so Metal”. So you were going to get a pun either way.
  • At 19:30: I really agree. The antlion queens aren’t a very fun enemy. They’re pretty the bog-standard FPS damage sponge with a huge melee attack. I’ve never enjoyed fighting one. Maybe if their stun animation lasted longer, or if you could reliably sidestep them matador-style. But as it stands, these fights feel incredibly random and chaotic. (In a bad way.)

I really do love covering these games.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP3: Combombies! Previous Post
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70 comments

 

Experienced Points: Graphics Are Sometimes Hard

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 10, 2015

Filed under: Column 47 comments
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As luck would have it, a bunch of people all sent in related questions at once, so this week I’ll answer three different questions about graphics programming.

I don’t have much to add to the column, so instead I want to whine that STRAFE isn’t going to meet its Kickstarter goals, and that makes me really sad.

A couple of weeks ago on the Diecast I was talking about combining modern lighting with retro-90’s low-fi graphics. I’ve actually dabbled in that idea myself. I’m sort of obsessed with it. But work will begin again on Good Robot very soon, and I expect that will keep me busy enough. I just don’t have time to work on mixing lighting models with anachronistic graphics styles. Having STRAFE was going to be the next best thing.

Ah well. Maybe in six months.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Experienced Points: What Is the Future of Video Game Journalism?Previous Post
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47 comments

 

Diecast #92: Nintenduh, Evolve, Life is Strange

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 9, 2015

Filed under: Diecast 138 comments
Diecast #91: MailbagPrevious Post
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January is over, and suddenly there’s gaming news again! And it’s all bad! Just the way we like it!

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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, and Rutskarn.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #92: Nintenduh, Evolve, Life is Strange”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Diecast #91: MailbagPrevious Post
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138 comments

 

New Site Theme

By Shamus Posted Sunday Feb 8, 2015

Filed under: Notices 132 comments
Merry ChristmasPrevious Post
Next PostHangout March 29

Nine and a half years. That’s how old this blog is. And since day one, I’ve always used a theme where the text was 600 pixels wide. At first I used a stock theme. Then I got into coding my own theme. But the column width stayed the same. Partly this was because I didn’t want to disrupt the layout of old posts where images floated to the left or right. Partly it was because mobiles were getting popular and I wanted my site to be readable on a mobile without (shudder) horizontal scrolling.

But the day has finally come. The old small-image posts now represent a tiny percent of the site content, and I’m okay if they look stupid. Mobiles now have 1080p resolution, so we have more pixels to work withI have no idea how anyone is supposed to read text that small, but apparently people do it all the time. Dang kids.. So the blog is getting a little wider, which will hopefully waste less screen space on the 3-meter jumobotron monitor you’re probably using.

Over the years I wasn’t diligent about documenting the appearance of the site. For the record, this is what the site looked like yesterday. And for those of you reading this in the future, here is what it looked like after the change.

Changing the theme is pretty disruptive. This is a big, complicated site with deep archives and lots of features. Let me know what I broke.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Merry ChristmasPrevious Post
Next PostHangout March 29

132 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

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The No Politics Rule

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Best. Plot Twist. Ever.

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Object-Oriented Debate

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Trusting the System

How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?

 

If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?

Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?

 

Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction

Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.

 

Fixing Match 3

For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.

 

Bowlercoaster

Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.