One: 2

Could someone explain what the hell happened to video game titles? What the fuck is a “Horizon: Zero Dawn” or a “Bravely Default”? Or “Kingdom Hearts: 218/2 Days > Destiny Divide = Fart” or whatever. Do they leave this up to a random number generator? What is the reason for this? How does this get past all of the people in corporate and all of the people who are paid to make sure you don't have a stupid-sounding brand?

Another one: Games in a long-running franchise that have the exact same title as the first game in the series, so talking about it is prefaced with confusion.

“Hey, have you played Doom?” 

“Yeah, I remember that game when I was a kid.” 

“No, not DOOM Doom. The new Doom. The one that’s also called Doom but came out more recently than the other game that’s called Doom.” 

Sonic the Hedgehog. Tomb Raider. Thief. Mortal Kombat. That’s like if the next big JRPG were called “Final Fantasy 2″. People get paid millions of dollars to come up with names for these products, and everyone apparently forgot that subtitles are a thing?


You know what the new Spider-Man reboot is called? “Spider-Man: Homecoming”. See, they put another word in there to distinguish it from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, as a small courtesy to anyone who tries to talk about this shit. Especially in an age where word-of-mouth social media regurgitation-as-free advertising is so important.


This reminds me: there’s an old PSX-era EA game I played a demo of called “One”. And I always thought, man, what are they gonna call the sequel?

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Final Bosses

I "collect" Final Boss tracks from video games. Either physically, or just listening to it over and over. Until it essentially becomes a piece of the life I've lived, listening to video game music instead of becoming a productive member of society.

I believe, with the exception of a strong opening or conclusion, the final boss of a game should be the best part of that game. Ideally, everything should be leading up to that moment, every trick you've learned, every weapon and ability you've mastered should be acquired in service of that inevitable confrontation. It should be what 90% of the game is preparing you for. A final boss ought to be the biggest challenge, and part of the biggest payoff.

Via mariowiki.com

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Kingdom Hearts: Galvatron

Yes, it has come to my attention that Leonard Nimoy played the main antagonist in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. This pleases me. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising, because these games have always had excellent casting. The pinnacle for me being Christopher Lee in the second game. He helped give a functionally retarded plot some much needed dignity.

Now, Nimoy's no Christopher Lee, but I've always had a fondness for his collective body of work, and not just Star Trek either. I especially like the odd voice acting roles he's done, like that old asshole from "The Halloween Tree". And who could forget the narration from "Seaman"? I'm even considering seeing the third Transformers movie because of his presence there as the voice of "Sentinel Prime". Even though I am well aware of how hellish an evening like that sounds.

And that's not the only surprise with Birth By Sleep. I knew that they had based a wise, old mentor character off of Hironobu Sakaguchi, former big-wig at the developer "Square-Enix". He pulled that company out of near-bankruptcy in the 80's and his flagship franchise is one of the few things keeping this shambling corpse of a company upright. And they named his tribute character "Eraqus", an anagram of "Square".

I knew that.

What I didn't know was that they got Mark Hamill to do his voice(1:05 in.)