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The ultimate pressure feature. Players have to complete the task at hand, be it defeating opponents or cutting the right wire, in the allotted time.
Games that give the player only a limited amount of time to choose whether to continue or not. This concept is most often seen in arcade titles and their home ports.
Typically found in fighting games, combos are a series of strung-together moves.
Greatest hits is a general term for re-releases of games which have sold a certain number of copies, as part of a program managed by the console manufacturer.
SNK fighting games are notorious for boss fights of ludicrous difficulty. Common symptoms of SNK Boss Syndrome include absurdly high attack priority, overpowered special attacks, and AIs that read button inputs. Though it's most common in SNK games, the syndrome has also appeared in games by other companies.
A powerful release of energy. This energy is usually expelled in all directions very quickly, typically giving off orange or red flames.
Featured mainly in fighting games, special attacks usually require more than just pressing a button to activate. They are usually unique or at least varied between characters.
Voice Acting is the art of providing voices for characters in games, television shows, films, radio programs, and other forms of media.
A flawless victory is a victory in which the winning player has incurred no loss of health, or in other uses, like Unreal Tournament III or Fury, no points scored against the winning team.
The title of a game is a year, or has a year in it. Normally used for sports game and other annual titles, but also used to designate when a game takes place rather than the year released.
Button Mashing is a term used to describe gameplay where certain skills can be only realized explicitly through mashing buttons, a reckless player trying to get results or when the game rewards the player(s) who bash buttons the fastest. The latter example is common in Party Games.
Games that include real photography on the game's cover.
A digital distribution platform that focuses on providing DRM-free computer games, both old and new.
Characters controlled by the game for players to interact with, as opposed to player characters which are controlled by whomever is playing the game.
"Hand to hand. It is the basis of all combat." -Gray Fox
AI Bots are computer-controlled game characters that substitute for characters that are otherwise typically played by a human, and are most commonly found in multiplayer games.
A digital distribution service owned by Valve Corporation. Originally created to distribute Valve's own games, Steam has since become the de facto standard for digital distribution of PC games.
Digitized sprites, popularized in the early 90s, were a form of graphics that used footage of real actors, Stop-motion frames of a figure/clay model or 3D renders of characters that were then made digital and put into the game.
Red Book is a set of specifications for audio CDs. For games it refers to early CD-ROM titles with background music recorded and played back as audio tracks, instead of being generated by the hardware. Its called Redbook Audio because the book that lays out all the specifications has a red cover.
Also known as the "Sega Titan Video", the ST-V is a mid-'90s cartridge-based arcade system by Sega. As it is based on the Sega Saturn hardware, many of the games released were quickly ported to that home system.
Sometimes one playable character just isn't enough.
Primarily found in fighting or sports games, the versus screen typically masks the load time of an upcoming matchup. Sometimes codes may be entered here that will affect the game.
A fighting game archetype where characters with a significant similarity in fighting style to Street Fighter's Ryu & Ken.
Whether it's Super Scaler or Mode 7, growing and shrinking sprites/textures is a concept often used in sprite-based games. It was a popular technique used to create three-dimensional games with sprites, mostly during the 16-bit to early 32-bit eras. Sprite-scaling was an early form of 3D texture-mapping.
Trophies are an incentive-based system for the completion of various objective in PS3, Vita, and PS4 titles.
FMVs are pre-rendered videos used in place of real-time graphics. Using FMV was an attempt to make videogames look "more like movies", sometimes with CGI animation and others with live-action actors speaking directly to players. The downside is that FMV requires a lot of disk space, and live-action FMV in particular can look terrible by comparison.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, commonly refers to the programmed behaviors of NPCs in a game, whether it's the fact that a soldier takes cover behind a wall in Gears of War, or that townspeople cheer upon your arrival to their village in Fable.
Almost a common thing in Fighting Games where player 2 or 1 inserts the coins, pressing start or entering the online lobby when the player 1 or 2 is playing arcade mode or training mode in modern days.
A game that takes gameplay mechanics, characters, or story elements from an existing series in a separate and different direction, sometimes changing genres along the way.
The last boss you face in a game, usually representing the final climax of the game.
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