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I've resurrected this old area of the site for two reasons. It's mostly a small glossary of various video game terms. The second reason is that I have a bad habit of using unfamiliar slang including a few that I just made up myself. This area is still under construction and I apologize in advance for spelling errors, mistakes and just out-and-out stupidity. This is meant only as a quick 'oh, THAT'S what that means!' resource. Links to much better sites (many of which are referenced for the more technical bits here) are included at the bottom.
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1-up - One extra life.
1 Hit Wonder - (see One Hit Wonder)
Action RPG - In short, these are action games with a lot of elements borrowed from Role-Playing games. Things like character statistics, puzzles, dialogue and equipped items are standard in modern action games, but they were very rare in the early days of games. Titles like Adventure and The Legend of Zelda are some of the earliest that involved maps, keys and lots of footwork. After Zelda's success, many other companies borrowed it's style which gave birth to the term Zelda Clone. That's a bit rude, so they were usually called Action RPG games. Another variation of these games play just like an RPG, but then switch to an action game engine during enemy encounters (like Actraiser). Other Action RPGs include Gauntlet, Golden Axe Warrior, Cadash and Beyond Oasis.
Area - A section of gameplay. Many times, area is used as a sub-section of a level or stage (like Level 1 Area 2 or Level 1-2), but some games use the term just like Level or Section. Area is often used to describe places on maps as well.
Auto Scroll - When the play area automatically moves in some direction without any control by the player. This is more common in shooters, but appears in side-scrollers like Altered Beast. Sometimes, auto scrolling is specific to certain levels of a game. Examples include the underwater sections of the 2-D Mario games, the A.P.C. scenes in Capcom's Alien vs. Predator and the chase scenes in Alien Storm.
Beat-em-up - This offshoot of the side-scrolling platform game is all about the combat and less about jumping or puzzles. Technos of Japan were the early pioneers of this genre with Downtown Kunio Kun games and Double Dragon. This genre causes quite a bit of confusion because of how close beat-em-ups and regular side-scrollers are. For the purpose of this site, the term 'beat-em-up' refers to games were close quarters combat is far more important than all other gaming elements. Other beat-em-ups include the Final Fight, Streets of Rage, the Rushing Beat Saga and the TMNT arcade games.
Bomberhea - One of the possible negative side-effects of picking up the skull icon in a Bomberman game. This one makes lose control of all bodily bomb-dropping functions and forces you to poop out your maximum number of bombs all at once. Usually all you can do is run around defecating deadly bombs all over the board until the effects wear off or you trap yourself with your own bombs and get blown up real good.
Boss
Bonus
Coin-Op - Coin-op, short for 'Coin Operated', is another name for an arcade game.
Cheap - Any tactic in a game that causes unavoidable damage. In fighting games, cheapness can be used by both human players and the computer controlled opponents. In nearly every other game genre, it refers to the game itself resorting to both intentional dirty tricks programmers add to make the game more difficult or unintentional programming errors that punish the game player.
CPS/CPS-1 - Capcom Play System was Capcom's arcade machine board standard of Capcom starting in 1988. It has a resolution of 384 x 224. Examples include Captain Commando, Final Fight, Fogotten Worlds, Magic Sword, Mercs, Mega Man: the Power Battle and Street Fighter 2.
CPS-2 - Capcom Play System 2 was Capcom's arcade machine standard starting in 1999. Games include Alien vs. Predator, Battle Circuit, Darkstalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel vs. Capcom, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, MSH vs. Street Fighter, the Street Fighter Alpha series and Super Street Fighter series.
CPS-3 - Capcom Play System was the arcade hardware standard for only a few titles. Titles include Street Figther III, Warzard/Red Earth and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
Drones - These are the enemies of a game that are not a boss. Drones usually appear in large groups. Think of them like Stormtroopers, Hydra agents, Cobra Vipers or those floppy guys that the Power Rangers beat up by the hundreds. They're the cannon fodder that the enemy throws at you to wear you down by sheer numbers. In a few games (especially beat-em-ups), an enemy can appear as a boss first, then reappear later as a drone enemy. Sometimes, the sprites of a drone enemy are palette-swapped or slightly-altered to create a boss (like Abigail from Final Fight or the Shadow Dancer from the Revenge of Shinobi).
Emulator - A program written on one machine to mimic the inner workings of another machine.
Experience Points - Often called 'EXP.' in games, these points gained that usually go towards enhancing the character in some way once they reach certain milestones. These points are usually given during combat although most turn-based RPG's give them to players after the combat scene is over. Usually, the stronger the enemy, the more exp. you get from defeating them.
Headswap - To create an enemy with a slightly different look while saving precious memory space in the game, extra sprite tiles can be made of alternate heads of characters. Some examples include The Lee Brothers and various Abobos in Double Dragon, various drones and Andore/Abigail in Final Fight, the female ninja and karate fighters in The Punisher arcade game and Ryu & Ken from the Street Fighter games.
Hack and Slash - This is the nickname for most action games that feature more sword fighting than exploration, but usually have a decent amount of platform jumping. Most straddle the line between platformer and a beat-em-up. Games like Golden Axe, King of Dragons and Legend (by Seika for the SNES) are prime examples of this. On a side note, Rick Norton and Douglas Bild were renamed Hack and Slash for Brawl Brothers (the U.S. version of Rushing Beat Ran), a beat-em-up where players use few (if any) edged weapons. Don't even try to make sense of it.
kunoichi
A female ninja
level
1.) A section of a game which can also be called a stage. In some games, levels are broken into parts that are often called areas.
2.) Indicates the power of a character, a character's ability, etc. Higher levels are usually gained from points, experience points, completing tasks or obtaining items or power-ups.
M.U.G.E.N. - A fighting game created by Elecbyte that allows for nearly limitless customization, including character and stage creation, number of CPU opponents, select screen layout, etc. Most fan-programmed characters are conversions of pre-existing game characters, but there are many others that have been made from edited sprites, hand-drawn sprites, created from 3-D models and even a few live-action characters. MUGEN creator sites often have sprite edits that are done either just for fun or as potential future projects. Some people outside the MUGEN community started calling the sprite edits Mugens, despite the fact that most of the places clearly label them as sprites. Yeah, I don't get that either. Just go with it.
mugens - A nonsensical term that refers to many things. It usually refers to items that can be used in a M.U.G.E.N. game such as characters or backgrounds. Sometimes it refers a complete M.U.G.E.N. game. For some reason, some people call sprites and sprite edits as mugens because some developers also have sprites and sprite edits on their sites. This makes absolutely no sense because you can't just stick the .gif and .png files into any M.U.G.E.N. and expect them to work.
One hit wonder - Any action game in which player characters die with one hit. While most early games killed the character upon touching almost anything other than the background, most mid-80's platform games began to incorporate lifebars, hit points or methods to gain extra hits. The 'One Hit Wonder' term is usually said to mock game that shun that life-extending standard. Note that this doesn't apply to shooters, where characters are usually hit by things that would probably kill them in one hit. You know, like missiles or landing in an alligator's mouth.
Password - A group of letters, numbers or images given by a game for a specific purpose. Most passwords let players return to a later part of a game without having to play through the earlier parts again. Using password systems allowed game makers to let players save their place in a game without using battery backup. This reduced the cost of manufacturing the game. Nintendo introduced passwords with Metroid and Kid Icarus for the NES. After Memory Cards became standard for video game consoles, the password features were no longer neccessary and seem to have disappeared one system generation after the Memory Card's birth.
Palette - The set of colors used by a piece of graphic data. For most 2-D games, the palettes also have an extra color for the transparent areas that aren't drawn onto the screen. With most fan-made sprites or sprite edits, that transparency color is something odd that would never appear in the sprite like a neon pink or neon green. The number of colors in a sprite is determined by the power of a system. While the classic Commodore 64 has sprites with 4 colors, most Super NES and CPS-2 games feature 16 color palettes. In some games, sprites are layered over each other to cheat that color limit. Wolverine's claws in Capcom's X-Men: Children of the Atom are an example of this.
Palette Swap - These are characters who use the same graphics as another character, but are colored differently. Good examples of this are Billy and Jimmy Lee from Double Dragon, the Lin Kuei ninja from Mortal Kombat and even the Ghost Monsters from Pac-Man. This was one of the many methods that saved precious memory space in the early days.
Platformer - This genre of game ruled the much of the mid and late 1980's with a white gloved fist thanks to one of it's earliest ancestors: Donkey Kong. Before that, most character-based games didn't even have floors, but depended on navigating mazes. With the success of Donkey Kong, many other platform games began to appear like Lode Runner. Most platform games feature lots of jumping from platform to platform and usually end with reaching the exit of the level or defeating a boss. Some of the most famous platforming series include Lode Runner, Donkey Kong, the Super Mario games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Megaman and Castlevania.
Power-Up - An item obtained during the game that has a positive effect for the player. Effects include enhancements like temporary invincibility, automatic rapid-fire and upgraded attacks or jumping power. These items can appear in many places in a game such as being dropped from defeated enemies, destroyed background elements or provided by friendly characters. Famous examples of the power-up include Pac-Man's power pellets, the Magic Mushrooms in the Super Mario games and the running shoes from Sonic the Hedgehog.
Resolution - The image size of the game that is usually described as 'width x height' in the number of pixels. Some arcade machines put out a higher resoultion than the monitor. Some arcade games (including Capcom's CPS-series games) are processed wider horizontally than the arcade monitors are and this gives the games a lot of having higher details. That's also why Capcom sprites images look 'fat' when displayed at their normal resolution (384) instead of the monitor width (320).
Scroll - To scroll is to move the screen. That doesn't seem like much now, but most games before the mid 1980's were just a screen that didn't move at all.
shinobi shozoku - The well-known, baggy jumpsuit ninja uniform that wasn't worn by the original ninja of the past but by the performers/stagehands who played as ninja in ancient Japanese plays. These have now become what we know of as the standard ninja uniform.
Sidbilly - What I call any male character added to a game to replace a female character. Example: Sid and Billy replace Poison and Roxy in the SNES version of Final Fight.
Side-scroller - Although this would seem to describe any game that scrolls to the side, this term is mostly used to describe platformers and beat-em-ups where the player scrolls the screen in the desired direction by walking that way.
Sprite - The simple answer to this would be to call it a frame of pixel-drawn animation. In most older game systems and engines (especially gaming consoles), each sprite is broken down into a group of smaller squares. Those smaller squares have many benefits, including the use of less memory. Another bonus is the ability to change small parts of characters like a head or the back of a jacket just by having a few extra squares with alternate parts. In some games, sprites are layered over each other for various reasons. In games like Cadash or Magic Sword where equipped items are seen on the sprites, these items have their own sprites that are layered over the main character. This is much more practical than redrawing the sprites for every possible weapon and armor combination. For most console systems, sprites are limited to a limited number of colors called a palette that can be manipulated. Due to the high number of MUGEN sites that display sprite galleries, some people mistakenly call sprites “Mugens”.
Sprite Edit - An existing sprite that has been modified or edited. When done by the original company, it's usually to give an alternate outfit to a character (like Chun-Li in Street Fighter Alpha). Usually, these are fan creations that use pre-existing sprites to show what a character may look like in a particular game's drawing style. Sometimes they're modified for the purpose of fan and tribute games as well.
Stage - Much like the term level, this is usually a section of a game. Sometimes, stages are divided into areas. Almost all fighting games and versus mode menus refer to all of their backgrounds as stages because not all forms of gameplay there lead to a final battle and most of the backgrounds have names instead of numbers.
Storyboard - Item for M.U.G.E.N. that can serve as an introduction or ending for either characters or entire games.
Tile - A block of graphic data used in a game. Frames of object animation and backgrounds are made up of arranged tiles. The best thing about using tiles is that you can use them over and over again for different things, especially with backgrounds. It also allows for the easy customization of sprites by just making alternate tiles for extra heads (see headswap), clothing or weapons. Such examples save a lot of memory space in the game for more important things. Also, the programmers saved a lot of precious memory space by not having to use up the space that would've been taken up by large, open areas in some sprites (like characters with their legs spread far apart.
Top-down - This is a viewpoint that has you looking down at the playfield. In most other art forms, it's called a bird's eye view. Top-down shooters usually scroll vertically (up and down instead of right and left), but not always. The viewpoint is mostly used in shooters (Commando, Ikari Warriors, Mercs, Gain Ground, Axelay and Gun.Smoke) and certain styles of action RPG's (Legend of Zelda and Golden Axe Warrior) but is sometimes used for beat-em-ups like Capcom's Avenger.
Zelda Clone - All major hits inspire their own wave of similar games that range between complete rip-offs to games that are great in their own right. Nintendo's 'The Legend Of Zelda' was such a smash hit that other companies were rushing to copy every element of that game. These 'clones' featured the same top-down viewpoint, labyrinths, maps, and so on. Many of these games were poorly made and have been forgotten by most people. The more well-done examples, like Golden Axe Warrior for the Sega Master System, get a bit more respect, even if they aren't as widely recognised as the Legend of Zelda. Oddly enough, Zelda II plays NOTHING like the Legend of Zelda, but inspired another imitator in the Golden Axe series called “Ax Battler”.
External Info sources and references:
CPS-2 Shock
System 16
Vidgame.net