Cheerful Ghost Blog

Cheerful Ghost Game of the Year Awards 2018: The Winners!

Your votes have been cast, and now it's time to reveal the winners!

Best AAA Game: TIE between Red Dead Redemption 2 and Spider-Man
2018 saw many great games, and many of our nominees were worthy of this award, but these two inched out past the competition.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece, an experience that anyone who's into cinematic, character driven games should not miss. The follow-up to the original Red Dead Redemption (2010) improves upon its predecessor in basically every way imaginable.

Spider-Man is an open-world game with a much tighter focus than RDR2, but adds another dimension (literally). Insomniac took the superhero game formula that Rocksteady... Read All

Cheerful Ghost Radio Episode 46: Looking to 2019 With Cheerful Ghostradamus!

In this Cheerful Ghostradamus episode we’re going to tap into our future telling abilities and make predictions about everything coming in 2019 in gaming! In addition to your hosts' humble predictions, we share some predictions from Will Ball and Greg Woodruff, two awesome users on Cheerful Ghost, as well as the folks from BrothersForgeGaming and Game Dev's Quest.

Bonus, if you start listening to this episode at 11:17:32 PM, the end credits theme will kick in right at midnight. Ring in the New Year with Cheerful Ghost Radio!

BrothersForgeGaming: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMcrNT6_3HXVSjDcOhrO1yg

Game Dev’s Quest: http://airpodcast.com/ http://gamedevsquest.com/

Auld... Read All

Happy Holidays To All Ghosts!

Wanted to send everyone a special Holiday greeting and hope that today is a fun and restful day. As we open our IRL loot boxes please drop what you got from the Holiday Loot Elf in the comments to share!

Pictures get you a bonus accolade!

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 12/25/2018 at 09:07pm

I got some really cool stuff starting with a Nintendo Switch + Mario Kart 8 bundle. Couple Switch games, Annihilation on Blu-ray a coffee grinder, Mario Land on 3DS, Mario Checkers and a Velvet Revover CD(remember those).

http://i.imgur.com/4G8gzKS.jpg

jaelte wrote on 12/25/2018 at 10:31pm

I think they're excited.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 12/26/2018 at 01:19am

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 04:15am

Velvet Revolver, damn, that's a name I'd forgotten long ago.

I got some sweet Vault-Tec socks, a Vault-Tec shirt, and a TLJ Poe Dameron jacket (which is both near-screen accurate, and comfy/functional) from my wife, the full Mission: Impossible movie series on Blu-Ray from a friend, a pretty awesome seat cushion, some albums on vinyl (including a first-run pressing of The White Album) and other odds and ends from family, Tabletop Simulator from Tim, and a mystery game (I think on Switch?) from Jon when it gets here later in the week!

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 12/26/2018 at 04:45am

I got some clothes and a $20 Gamestop Gift card, which means I'm going to turn that into $20 Steam wallet money probably. I have bought myself a few games w/ the Steam sale including Atlas (I'll have to write about that one), Wolfenstein 2, and Command & Conquer 3 & 4 including C&C3 DLC that I did not have.

@Jon I'm jealous, although not the Switch bundle I would choose (I want the Smash Bros. one). It's funny, I thought if I'd save some $ I'd get one, but now that I've saved some I don't know if I want one. LOL BTW Could you please tell me if it uses discs or cartridges? I'm curious to know what physical format Nintendo chose for the Switch. (I've also been having dreams where there's a Nintendo or someone stole mine lol.)

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 05:08am

Greg, it's a tiny cartridge.

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 05:10am

The horsepower it has (though nowhere near the other current gen outings) combined with a disc to spin up would make the battery life abysmal, which is already something I wish was a bit better on the Switch.

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 12/26/2018 at 05:25am

Awesome, good to know. That means the media can't really be scratched or badly dirtied and thus unreadable. However, a tiny cartridge means it could be lost easily. And that is what I'm thinking about when thinking about buying a Switch (that and which game(s) to get first).

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 03:10pm

Here's a good look at the size: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zYQvTSD6HCCw7suXf4ZtkFZMeRY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8023253/20170221_162415.jpg

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 03:12pm

Actually here, this article has a number of comparison shots and, while the one I added above was probably more than enough to let you know how big it is, some of the comparison photo captions are pretty funny

https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/21/14691596/nintendo-switch-cartridge-size-comparison

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 12/26/2018 at 03:37pm

The Switch game carts are really tiny. I’d say the size of a quarter.

Travis, glad to hear you got the Mission Impossible series. It’s univerally great(except 2 but even 2 is fine I’d you like bad movies).

I also got two Steam gifts in Darkest Dungeon and The Duck Talea remake.

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 04:25pm

I thought MI:2 was better than 1, but then 1 was also better than 2.

1 was just ... unsure of what it wanted to be. Campy while trying to be serious, or serious while trying to be campy. And it felt like a lot of important stuff was cut, the plot worked but felt unearned in a way. It just didn't really hold my interest much aside from the campy parts, when they really doubled down on the spy feel.

2 knew what it was all about but at the same time what it was all about wasn't great. It was a consistent tone but a messy plot (and some real misogyny that hasn't aged well). Apparently John Woo's original cut of that movie (as in, the cut that he took to the studio and said "I'm done, here you go") was 3 and a half hours.

So I think I prefer 1 overall, but 2 didn't have the lulls where I kinda checked out like 1 did.

3 was great though. JJ is a natural for that kind of plot. So natural, in fact, that he did the show Alias which is basically Mission Impossible without the masks. I kinda wonder if the studio saw Alias and said, yep, this is what we want for MI:3!

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 12/26/2018 at 08:25pm

I don't think I can look at Mission Impossible 1 objectively. I saw it in the theaters in the 90's, my friends and I were nuts for it and watched it on VHS a lot. We quoted it, not quite as much as other films, but it was a favorite. So I love MI:1. That said, Brian De Palma made a great film but you are right it's a couple styles. I think he wanted to make a dark noir spy movie but by the end it's more actiony and by the time John Wu makes MI:2 it's all 90's crazy motocycle gun fights with Limp Bizkit in the soundtrack. JJ grounds the franchise as a solid action series and I think from there it really picks up a lot. MI:3 is a pretty simple movie compared to the first two, which I think the series needed. Plus it features Philip Seymour Hoffman as the bad guy and I think, to date, he's the best villain in the series.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 12/26/2018 at 08:26pm

If you watch the MI:3 special features JJ gave Tom Cruise Alias on DVD and he watched them all then asked him to do MI:3 which was, I think JJ's first film as a director.

Travis Admin wrote on 12/26/2018 at 09:52pm

OK that makes a ton of sense. Awesome bit of trivia!

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 12/27/2018 at 12:52am

Thanks for the pics, Travis! That is small! I thought they'd be bigger, but you know how technology is.

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The Desktop Games Pack - New Cheerful Ghost BBS Games!

Good morning Ghosts! Today is fairly special as we are launching the Cheerful Ghost BBS 1.4 Update: The Desktop Games Pack! This themed game pack is focused on the old school Desktop Games Packs of yore and specifically harkens to the Microsoft Entertainment Packs of the 90's. These three open source games are pretty special and very addictive so brace yourselves!

2048

Designed by Italian web developer Gabriele Cirulli. The game's objective is to slide numbered tiles on a grid to combine them to create a tile with the number 2048. However, one can continue to play the game after reaching the goal, creating tiles with larger numbers.

2048 has been described as very... Read All

CivClicker Is An Empire Builder In Your Browser And Launches On Cheerful Ghost BBS Today!

Civilization on DOS was the first turn based strategy game I was addicted to. It felt like you could do anything and I used diplomacy, strategic building and nukes to dominate the other civilizations. The turn based strategy genre has a fun history and Civilization is still the king of the crop even now. But what if you wanted that same Civilization flavor but wanted to simplify it a bit? What if you wanted to build an epic Civilization but didn’t want to spend a ton of time learning a complex user interface or build strategy? What if you could play a Civ type game right in your desktop browser or on your phone?

https://cheerfulghost.com/games/civclicker

Well friend... Read All Civilization on DOS was the first turn based strategy game I was addicted to. It felt like you could do anything and I used diplomacy, strategic building and nukes to dominate the other civilizations. The turn based strategy genre has a fun history and Civilization is still the king of the crop even now. But what if you wanted that same Civilization flavor but wanted to simplify it a bit? What if you wanted to build an epic Civilization but didn’t want to spend a ton of time learning a complex user interface or build strategy? What if you could play a Civ type game right in your desktop browser or on your phone?

https://cheerfulghost.com/games/civclicker

Well friend today is an early Christmas because Cheerful Ghost is launching an all new game to our BBS called CivClicker! CivClicker is a empire building idle / clicker game you can play right now in your browser. In CivClicker you start out by collecting resources such as food, wood and stone and use those to structures to house your townsfolk. You can choose what jobs your townsfolk can have such as Farmer(to automatically collect food), Woodcutter(automatically gain wood) and Miner (to automatically gain stone). From there the game branches out pretty deeply by unlocking new structures and giving you the ability to take over neighboring villages and kingdoms. It’s a pretty deep game but simple enough to be accessible to play in your web browser.

One of the most magical parts about CivClicker is that it’s an open source project that was created by David Holley in 2013. David’s original work was later extended by fixing bugs and making the interface work well on mobile devices by Scott Colcord and Luke Nickerson. This open source license allows us the ability to give CivClicker a home on our BBS and you the ability to play it right now. I want to thank David, Scott and Luke for their work as CivClicker is a really special game.

Head over to our BBS and give CivClicker a shot and let me know what you think of it in the comments below!

Your First 15 Minutes In CivClicker

To make the game a bit more accessible I’m going to outline your first steps with the game to help ease you into playing it.

Firstly click the harvest button 20 times and the cut buttons 20 times. This gives you 20 food, some skins as well as 20 wood which allows you the ability to build a hut. You need huts to hire hire villagers to work.

You build a hut click the “idle citizens” drop down and select farmers and click the +1 button. This hires a farmer that will start auto collecting food at a rate of 0.2 every second. If you follow this process (by clicking harvest 20 more times for 20 food per farmer) you can add enough farmers to get 1 food per second and onward and upward.

As you add woodcutters and miners realize that your ability for your farmers to gather food goes down a bit so there is a constant need for farmers for a big village. If people don’t have enough food to eat they get unhappy and die so make sure your village is well fed!

People dying isn’t the worst thing but it requires you to bury them at some point or you might have issues with corpses or zombies…

Those are the basics but if you find anything useful drop it in the comments!

The Portland Retro Game Expo 2018 Retrospective + Gaming Pickups!

Thank you to everyone that stopped by to visit the Cheerful Ghost Booth or played in one of our game tournaments. The Portland Retro Game Expo is my favorite convention and everyone who comes out makes it awesome. I also want to thank Adam Farnsworth for working the booth with me this weekend!

The Winners of This Years Cheerful Ghost Tournaments!

Super Mario Bros. on NES Speed run to Bowser's axe on World 1-4

David Harrison (The Winter Soldier) won this with a blistering time of 2:03.20! Seriously time yourself and stop when you hit Bowsers axe at the end of 1-4. Now do it when people are watching. Good luck!

https://imgur.com/SbpUhjt
https://imgur.com/8C0djTw

Mario Paint... Read All

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 10/24/2018 at 04:34am

I strongly recommend you add Hyrule Warriors to your list of Wii U games to get. It's definitely my favorite! Smash Bros. is a great one to get, too. And yeah, I knew that the zapper doesn't work on modern TVs (aka flat screens). I can't remember how I know that, I just do. LOL

Do you have a Switch? If you don't have one with Breath of the Wild, you can get the game for the Wii U! You should also check out Twilight Princess HD, there's one that comes with a Wolf Link amiibo that works great with BotW. Speaking of amiibos, you should look into collecting them, too. They have a variety of uses, depending on what game you're playing. For instance, the Wolf Link amiibo adds Wolf Link as your companion in BotW. I'm not too sure, but I think you can get Epona by using an amiibo. Other amiibos give random or certain things in the game.

I'll look forward to your Wii U review (hey that rhymes!) and add my "2 cents." Oh, I just remembered Mario Kart 8 is pretty good, too! I never thought the Wii U was a bad system, but it didn't sell as wildly as the Wii.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 10/24/2018 at 04:46am

> I strongly recommend you add Hyrule Warriors to your list of Wii U games to get. It's definitely my favorite!

Done. You've talked about it so much, surprised it's not already there. Which system, 3DS or Wii U?

> And yeah, I knew that the zapper doesn't work on modern TVs (aka flat screens). I can't remember how I know that, I just do. LOL

So we used a flat CRT screen so the shots registered most of the time. It's just that 20% didn't so it made for a terrible tournament game

> Do you have a Switch? If you don't have one with Breath of the Wild, you can get the game for the Wii U!

Not yet, but I plan on getting one for Christmas and want to save getting Breath of the Wild for the Switch.

> You should also check out Twilight Princess HD

It's totally on my Wii U pickups list. I didn't see it at the expo or i'd have bought it.

> I'll look forward to your Wii U review (hey that rhymes!) and add my "2 cents." Oh, I just remembered Mario Kart 8 is pretty good, too! I never thought the Wii U was a bad system, but it didn't sell as wildly as the Wii.

There are a lot of games I want to get ONLY on the Switch that are available for both systems. Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8, New Super Mario Bros Wii U & Luigi U. Sometimes I don't mind having dupes on multiple systems but in the case of the Wii U and Switch i'd rather get the Switch version. I'm focusing on Wii UI games you can't get anywhere else but the Wii U.

Will_Ball Game Mod Super Member wrote on 10/24/2018 at 04:50pm

It was a lot of fun! I am after all Marvel games (including bad and meh games), so I picked up a bunch of Marvel games. I also got Altered Beast for the Genesis, Donkey Konga 2 and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat for the GameCube and finally Q-Bert and Mickey Mousecapade for the NES.

As always I was overwhelmed by the number of vendors and goods on the expo floor, but it was still a lot of fun.

The best panels IMHO were the ones done by Ben Heckendorn. He is a really good speaker.

The biggest meh of the expo was the Intellivision Amico. They did not have any actual hardware or games to show, but announced a 10-10-2020 release date. The price point of $149 - $179 seems under-priced for the hardware that they want to ship. Plus I am not a fan of digital only games. I was not impressed and walked out of the talk.

On the other hand, I was really impressed with the CollectorVision Phoenix (https://collectorvision.com/shop/colecovision/colecovision-hd-system/). Not only did they have a working console there, they had actual games running on the thing. This FPGA console will run CollecoVision and Atari 2600 games. They mentioned that the code will be open source so people will be able to expand on it. It was a really impressive piece of hardware.

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 10/24/2018 at 05:19pm

I haven't tried Hyrule Warriors on the 3DS, but I know that it only works well on the "New 3DS," not the model before that.

I didn't realize so many games were for both systems and I think Hyrule Warriors is among them. I wouldn't really recommend getting duplicates either.

AdamPFarnsworth wrote on 10/24/2018 at 11:33pm

I just realized there's only a 4-hundredths of a second difference in the winning time of SMB AND F-Zero :)

Will_Ball Game Mod Super Member wrote on 10/25/2018 at 01:52am

I am surprised I didn’t get special mention as fastest to game over!

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Save The Last Iceberg Today On Cheerful Ghost Games BBS!

Today we're launching a new game on the Cheerful Ghost Games BBS called Iceberg 2 Wrath of Don by Taylor Buchheit. If that name rings a bell it's because Taylor is 50% of the Game Devs Podcast, a local Podcast all about Indie game development. Taylor and I have been talking about the games he's been making and Iceberg 2 seemed like a good fit to include on our BBS lineup. It's a fun top down arcade styled game that harkens back to Robotron as you try to save an Iceberg from global climate change.

Find Iceberg 2 Wrath of Don at our Games BBS Link below or click the "Games" tab at the top of the page. We think Open Source is pretty awesome and as such Taylor was cool... Read All

The Video Game Site Webring Is Now Live!

When I launched Cheerful Ghost in 2012 I built something that solved a problem I had. It wasn’t easy to collect all the games you owned in one digital list that you could share and write about. You could write on Facebook but none of that sticks around, Twitter isn’t a great place for conversations and no one cares if you start up yet another game blog. To me Cheerful Ghost set out to bring the discussion with my friends to one place where we could talk about the games we loved. Over time we started The Cheerful Ghost Roundtable that later became the Cheerful Ghost Radio Podcast, we published Starship Rubicon on Steam and this year launched the Cheerful Ghost Games... Read All When I launched Cheerful Ghost in 2012 I built something that solved a problem I had. It wasn’t easy to collect all the games you owned in one digital list that you could share and write about. You could write on Facebook but none of that sticks around, Twitter isn’t a great place for conversations and no one cares if you start up yet another game blog. To me Cheerful Ghost set out to bring the discussion with my friends to one place where we could talk about the games we loved. Over time we started The Cheerful Ghost Roundtable that later became the Cheerful Ghost Radio Podcast, we published Starship Rubicon on Steam and this year launched the Cheerful Ghost Games BBS. Recently I got the itch to create something new and I’m excited to launch The Video Game Site Webring!

As I was reading The SNES Omnibus by Brett Weiss I noticed that he included a lot of great game quotes from sites i'd never heard of. As an independent game site creator I realized that a tool to help discover independent and lesser known sites would be useful to the larger game community. In a couple days I hacked out a prototype and started collecting a list of game sites. I decided to model the base website on old 90's Webrings and Stumbleupon. The final site is what we are launching today and you can find it at http://vgw.io.

The Video Game Site Webring makes discovering new video game sites fun by randomly taking you site in our list. Over time we plan on adding even more games to the list and if you know of any, let us know. The Video Game Site Webring aims at making the discovery of niche gaming sites easy and fun. We’re purposefully NOT including the top gaming sites like IGN and Kotaku because we feel these sites get enough attention. The goal of VGW is to give focus to smaller site and have these site link to VGW so we can all benefit from the increase in visibility. Part of the launch today is to give attention to these sites but over time I’ll reach out to these sites and see if they can all link to the VGW to help give everybody a boost. This is the core tenant of a webring and I hope, over time, VGW catches on. Also bringing back old stuff from the 90’s like Webrings is pretty cool too.

On last important thing but the Video Game Site Webring is that it is entirely open source and available for anyone to look at and modify on GitHub. I felt this was an important part of this project so everyone could see the source code and know how it worked and change it if they wanted. Cheerful Ghost has benefited from Open Source and it’s cool to create new projects that might be useful to others too.

I want to thank Travis for helping on this project and Brett Weiss for writing The SNES Omnibus which was a big inspiration for this project.

http://vgw.io/

My review of the SNES Omnibus by Brett Weiss

https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/3829/hop-aboard-the-snes-omnibus-for-a-fun-ride-around-video-game-land

View the VGW source code on GitHub

https://github.com/jdodson/vgswebring

Play Crescent Loom On Cheerful Ghost Games BBS Today!

When we originally launched the Cheerful Ghost Games BBS we let you know that more games would be coming that you could play. Today is a good day because we’re launching the ability for everyone to play Crescent Loom right here on Cheerful Ghost in your browser. Crescent Loom is a game created by Wick, the developer of Starship Rubicon (a game Cheerful Ghost published) and according to Wick Crescent Loom is a game about creating life. Knit bones, stitch muscles, and weave neurons into a biologically-realistic simple creature.

You can find Crescent Loom by clicking the Games link about and selecting it or hitting the link below. I encourage everyone to give Crescent... Read All

Want To Know More About The History of The BBS and Cheerful Ghost Games?

Download this podcast.

Game Dev's Quest is a cool local Oregon Podcast about game development and I was part of their most recent show. In this episode I talked about my history of BBS's and the launch of our new games BBS. If you wanted a deep dive of the games we launched and my absolute love for the retro days of BBS past this is a must listen! I've embedded the audio podcast above but I recommend heading over to Airpodcast to listen below or, even better, subscribing to Game Dev's Quest on the Podcast client of your choice.

"Jon Dodson is back to talk about launching the Cheerful Ghost BBS! We discuss what a Bulletin Board System is, its history, and why we are still interested in them... Read All