Cheerful Ghost Blog

The Cheerful Ghost Blog is the place to find important site news and allows you to travel back through time to see how the site has evolved and read some of the most important and interesting articles and discussions!

If you love spaceship simulation roguelikes then you’ve played FTL and a big part of what that makes that game amazing is it’s fantastic score by Indie game composer extraordinaire Ben Prunty. Ben has written many other great albums and if you haven’t heard them yet you’re in luck because you can enter Giveaways for 5 of his latest albums: Deep Space Deluxe, Fragments, StarCrawlers, Dead Secret and Cipher! Ben was nice enough to gift us 3 keys for each album so make sure to send him some love on Twitter and check out his Twitch channel where every Saturday at 2pm PST/10pm UTC he makes electronic music live and answers your questions!

https://twitter.com/benprunty/
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I want to thank everyone that voted in this years 2016 Cheerful Ghost Game of the Year Awards. This year Scrypt made us a cool "I Voted" image linked above that you should checkout, print out and stick on your wall if you voted.

This years winners are a very unique mix I am really happy with. I am not sure most sites would have made the choices we all did which is one of the reasons why I think our awards are different.

Triple A Game of the Year: Doom

Runner Up: Overwatch

Indie Game of the Year: No Man's Sky

Runner Up: Stardew Valley

DLC/Update of the Year: No Man's Sky Foundation Update

Runner Up: Hearthstone Whispers of the Old Gods

Mobile Game of the Year: Pokemon Go

Runner... Read All


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I hope everyone has a great New Year in 2017! 2016 was rough for many and my sincere hope is 2017 is much better.

As people are waking up from their celebration festivities what are you all doing? Traditionally I have friends over on New Years and we hang out and watch films and this time we'll be watching the Star Wars cartoon The Great Heep and then Star Wars Rogue 2 to see how well it pairs to the recent Rogue One movie.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Heep


I want to wish everyone a very Happy Holdays and I hope you spend it with amazing people. Some of us will be opening some presents from Santa so if you get anything particularly noteworthy feel free to share it in the comments.


I was able to attend this years Steam Developer Days and had a great time. One big draw of the conference was the talks and Valve has dropped them all on their YouTube page. I linked to one really great talk above by Mike Ambinder on the Psychology of Games I recommend you watch. There are 25 talks available from this years Dev Days so if you are in need of some awesome game talks and have some time, hit the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLckFgM6dUP2ihiMeKHoyIdHvhRSyqwQsp

If you want to read my thoughts on my two days at Steam Developer Days hit the links below.

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Portland Retro Game Expo is a mecca for retro game lovers. This year we had a booth a the convention and ran four NES speedrun and score tournaments. Packie was the overall tournament master by winning two of our contests starting with his blistering 2 minute 04 second Super Mario Brothers 1-4 speedrun. Packie then ended the convention by absolutely demolishing our Dr. Mario score tournament with a score of 334,400! His Dr Mario ability was incredible and i've never really seen anything like his setup and execution of combos. Ben won Papers, Please on Steam for his 1 minute 26 second speedrun of Super Mario Brothers 3 to the first Toad House. Philly won our RC Pro AM... Read All


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Just wanted to wish everyone a very Scary Halloween! Since Halloween falls on a Monday this year I imagine most celebration happened over the weekend but i'm still curious what you all are doing this year? We were going to have a small party but instead we all got sick so we cancelled that and are going to watch the new Ghostbusters later tonight. Also wondering what people have been playing lately? As per normal i've been playing ... Hearthstone. Yeah, I know, not a huge surprise there but I have been continuing my Final Fantasy VI advance game as well as really tearing into Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis.

Stay safe if you are going to be out celebrating or doing... Read All


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Today is Sunday and it's Day 2 of the Portland Retro Gaming Convention! Jon and I are manning the booth, talking to people and right now we have a speed running competition for Super Mario Bros 3! If you are at the convention come stop by!


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Even though i'm more than a couple days late to writing about the second day of Steam Developer Days I wanted to get out my thoughts while they are still nearly fresh in my mind. Spoiler alert, day two was incredible but the drive home from Seattle to Portland that night was precarious as I had to navigate the freak storm that occurred as some remnants of Typhoon Songda hit the west coast. I feel bad for my steering wheel as my clenched fingers strangled it for many tense driving moments but the wheel and I made it home safely.

One of the most interesting parts of the second devs days was Mike Ambinder's talk on The Psychology Of Games. When the talks are released from... Read All


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In 2014 Cheerful Ghost published it's first game Starship Rubicon, an asteroids-esque rogue lite. Working with Wick to take his game to a wider audience was a really fun experience and along the way we hit some fun milestones like releasing the game on Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam. Because of that Cheerful Ghost was asked to attend this years Steam Developer Days and we happily signed up. I wasn't sure what to expect but I figured we'd learn more about what Valve was up to and maybe play some fun games along the way.

It's All About VR Baby!

It might not be too surprising that Valve is focusing heavily on VR and the Vive. The main social area here at Steam Developer... Read All