Saturday, October 15, 2011

Bathroom Monologue: Bad Videogame Titles

I first noticed it in iD games. "Doom." "Quake." And now, "Rage." All monosyllabic ominous titles that aren’t particularly applicable to or necessarily used in the games themselves. There's never a quake. And Doom happens on Mars. There's nothing to doom. It's not until Doom 2 that it hits earth, at which point you save the universe from a threat that nobody calls "doom."

It extended beyond iD. Around the tenth entry, you knew it wasn’t the Final Fantasy. Battlefield 3 seemed to feature almost no actual battlefields. At no point did the Raccoon City Police going from door to door, checking folks off.

"Resident Todd? Good to see you.”

“Resident Jemma? Your hair looks lovely today.”

“Resident Evil? Oh shit!”

I'm not asking for high literature. Just competency in game titles. "Legend of Zelda" will do. You always live a legend and eventually meet a dame named 'Zelda.' So it works. “Assassin’s Creed?” The assassins’ guild has a creed in those games. The bar is so low that literalism will do. Elevate things.

Here’s what should happen. You know what Ubisoft should do? Make a sequel to Prince of Persia called Democracy of Arabia. It’d be a revolution in literal titling. "This Fall, the only game featuring truly free movement."

2 comments:

  1. It is totally your fault that Shel and I started laughing half-way through this and are still giggling, but no one else will get the joke.

    The last line is entertaining, but the in-joke is better because so unexpected.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not sure I understand your frustration here, especially as I don't play vid games - and I certainly don't get the in-joke that the comment above is taking about. However for reasons I do not understand this did make me laugh. ^__^

    ReplyDelete

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