How to Title Your Stupid Sequel Pages PREV 1 2 | |
OK, lets try. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Prince of Persia, the cartoony one with nothing in common with SoT, doesn't count :P) So does Ubisoft get a cookie for that one? I just want them to stop using "RE-somerandomjunk" as subtitle, especially if it doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the game. | |
I think ShipSailer is a good name for a WarFighter sequel. | |
I agree that it's at least unambiguous which game you're talking about, but Jedi Outcast having the title "Jedi Knight II" doesn't lead you to believe that it's the third game in a continuous series. It's just silly. | |
Reach totally doesn't count. | |
Should I flag you for your rude comment? Okay, poor choice in words. But Square Enix is the only game developer that tries to be weird, different, outrageously colorful, while most games are just 'dark' gray or brown, or just go for goofy silliness. Everyone else is going for the same old, same old sci-fi, fantasy,or modern warfare shooters, and Square is the only group that takes a chance on something weird, like, adding a car engine on a sword. Do you know any other games that would do that? | |
I thought Halo 4 was a good title for the game, as it reminded potential buyers that they would be returning to the gameplay style of Halo 3, rather than continuing the innovations introduced in Halo: Reach. If they'd decided to make a game more similar to Reach, perhaps they would have called the game Halo: Requiem, or even Halo: Infinity, which I think is the name of the Spartan Ops campaign. | |
This right here is why I stopped caring about Assassin's Creed. And now I know that there are way more unimportant garbage games in the series than I have even been able to keep track of. The sad thing is that I really like a lot of the game play, but hate the story and characters. This unfortunately means that any new IP that comes out that attempts to present similar gameplay but without the horribly mangled and unimportant story will be met with Ubisofts legal team instead of being praised as succeeding where Ubisoft has failed. Captcha: Carbon-Copy (creepy) | |
are you sure you want to establish some nazi regime kind of rulebook regarding game developement? go and play black mesa and rethink your "genius" idea. not all reboots and remakes are bad. | |
Good read. One thought on game sequel naming, as opposed to other media, is in it's association with computer software does lend to game.exe v2.0 I guess that's kinda an old outlook, but it is relevant as far as the incremental mechanical additions and improvements (assuming they ARE improvements), perticularly to games like Halo, Mario, CoD, whatever. That said, there's no accounting for narrative in that angle, which is really the fleshy context and body of presentation around the bones of gameplay. Also the main contention of the article. | |
then you wouldn't have many wonderful things as far as the titles, meh *shrugs* | |
Unfortunately, you've only gotten the silver medal for finding naming idiocy. I win the gold. While it may be confusing that Most Wanted 2005 and 2012 are both titled the same thing in the same gen, EA Sports takes the big victory in stupidity. This gen there are two FIFA Street games on the Xbox 360: Where's part 2 you ask? Damned EA. PS. While I've always been an advocate of creative naming without numbers, it does get harder to keep track of where any title is in the order of things. This is why people refer to things like Gabriel Knight 3. The numbers are for the file systems in our heads. | |
Another benefit to not using numbers is avoiding region-inconsistent numbering. The most famous example of this is Final Fantasy (where, until recently, Japanese IV was American II and Japanese VI was American III -- to this day, when someone says "Final Fantasy III", it's still not immediately clear which game they're talking about), but it also applies to the Clock Tower and King's Field series. In both of those cases, the first game was not released outside of Japan, but the second game and onward were. So the game called "King's Field" in America is the game called "King's Field II" in Japan, different from both the game called "King's Field" in Japan (which was not released in America) and the game called "King's Field II" in America (which is called "King's Field III" in Japan). The Clock Tower series has a similar situation, and if each game had its own title then nothing would have needed to be changed and we could have avoided all this confusion. | |
For whatever reason, when this article is still loading, and most of the assets are missing, for a few seconds (for me at least) it looks like this. At first I thought that that was in fact the entire article as intended by Yahtzee, and my response was pretty much "Yeah, that sounds right". | |
I played and it is was awesome. But it was a free fan remake made with love, not a cynical attempt at rebooting a franchise and messing it up to "broaden the audience". No i do't think anyone should be killed but i do think that reboots should be banned. | |
Who could? That's the one where he shoots a guy with a colossal harpoon gun. No one could forget that. | |
Despite the numbers, that's sort of a James Bond or Halo thing as well. I prefer to think that Final Fantasy is actually the story of Cid (just as the Star Wars movies is the story of two droids, or Mass Effect is the story of weird gravity powers). | |
And Jim Carrey as Axel Rose. | |
That's hilarious. You must post this EVERYWHERE. | |
My personal hated "sequel" title - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, who's sequel is called "The Wolverine" Mainly cause marketing people don't know how to do spin-off franchises, as it seems to be a relatively new-ish thing, sorta. What are we going to do for the Bourne sequels, now that there's Bourne Legacy (which has no Bourne in it?), Bourne Legacy 2: The Bourne Reckoning? | |
I think the elder scrolls series does naming ok. Underneath the game is named the elder scrolls I,II,III etc. But it is advertised as, Morrowind, oblivion, skyrim and so on | |
This article could be summed up with 'Back in my day'. I agree of course with most of it, even if I'm not totally familiar with most pop culture before the 2000's. Although I can't say it bothers me really. | |
This was great! I really enjoyed it...but trust me as someone who actually still likes some of the Sonic games: No, you wouldn't want to play Sonic 2006. | |
After playing Dragon Age: Origins, I was really looking forward to playing the original Dragon Age. Then they managed to take things to the next level with Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening. Just thank god Activision didn't go the same way with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 3: Black Ops 2. | |
Well, it is the fourth game with the Master Chief, if you count "Combat Evolved" and "Combat Evolved Anniversarry" as the same game (as the latter is just a remake) while ODST, Reach and Wars were Spin-Offs starring other characters. So, if you see it that way, Halo 4 is a very justified name. Granted, they COULD have named it something different (as it's a new trilogy entirely) like "Halo: Prometheans" and the two sequels "Halo: Prometheans 2" and "Halo: Prometheans 3", respectively. But they decided not to and called it simply Halo 4. No Subtitle-nonsense, just a plain number. And yes, it is a sequel - so having SOME knowledge of the previous game is kind of expected. Which Yathzee didn't have because he didn't bother to pay much attention to the story from what I could gather from any of the previous Halo Reviews. Your fault, pal, don't blame the game for it. | |
I'm all in favor of unique titles, like Dirty Harry movies. | |
Yeah, I have to go with AVGN when it comes to this matter. I like numbers. If you want to be creative, make the body of work itself interesting, not the title. If you want to be fancy, have it in Roman numerals. I really can't stand it when titles go with subtitles, or reboot names to sound original. There has to be some form of connection that lets the audience know which title they're about to watch/read and in which chronological order it came in. There has only been a few exceptions that I've let slide. Bond is one of them, one reason being that I can never imagine them all being in chronological order or having continuity considering there's been like 6 bonds within 50 years. And the idea that all those movies are in continuity of each other makes my head hurt. Now take Harry Potter for an example. I'm no fucking Y-gen millennial, I'm an X-gen, so I have no fucking clue where to begin with this series because when the first book came out I was too old to get into it (well, you're never too old, but I was told this was originally a children's series, so I never bothered till I was told different) and by that time the movies came out and I started noticing them, I had no fucking clue where to begin since none of them were numbered. And what is there like 10 of them? I don't know, because they're not numbered! One of the is about some Asgard, Ashhard, something prisoner right? I don't know because the series is expecting me to know about weird names in the movies, and I'm a complete outsider on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, google schoogle. I've already lost interest again just thinking about how chronologically confused I am about them all. Another has been giving subtitles for trilogies, and as long as they don't have stupid names. Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rinds, and Star Wars movies come to mind. When there's only three titles it's easier to remember which came before which. And as for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dooms sake (given the fact that it's a prequel) it was probably a good choice that it wasn't called Indy 2 because that would have been confusing. Now I mentioned stupid subtitles, and I think I don't need to explain myself on that part. If the subtitles stars with re- and ends with -tion, it sucks and the guy that came up with it needs to die. | |
I've always found the Legacy of Kain series naming to be frenetic, especially given how the first games subtitle is the name for the series as a whole. | |
I'd think to relate them to the plot or lack thereof. Each game has something that stands out about it from the rest. FF12 could be Final Fantasy: Hugh Hefner's Odyssey. FF8 FF13 | |
Well Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, while not being true sequels, are spiritual predecessors/successors of each other with a unique naming scheme. I like their naming system, and would certainly like to see others do the same. The Elder Scrolls does it alright. No one refers to them using number, and very rarely are they even referred to using "The Elder Scrolls." The vast majority of references just use the location name (barring Arena and Oblivion). So while the full name is, for example, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it is commonly referred to using just Skyrim, taking the number issue out of it. Edit: For larger series, like Halo and Star Wars, it is justified in having the universe name in the title, but it still should have something besides just a number for main releases. Everyone knows what you mean when you say Knights of the Old Republic, for example, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic works well. Halo: Reach works well. Halo 3: ODST, however, sounds like an expansion of Halo 3 and not a full-blown game. | |
Fun fact: A New Hope (the first one, episode 4) was originally released as Star Wars, without any number or sub-name. The sequel, Empire Strikes Back, was the first that had a sub-name and a number. Still, the sub-name is generally used way more amongst fans than the series number, just like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is generally called Oblivion pr TES: Oblivion and almost never called The Elder Scrolls IV. | |
I like numbers in titles. Numbers are great. They are straight forward and easy to understand. It annoys me to no end when I see stuff like this: Blackwell Convergence or Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus in my Steam library and then have no idea in what order those games are supposed to be played, which means I have to make a trip to Wikipedia to find it out. With some plain old good numbers, I wouldn't have that problem. Given how every game gets turned into a franchise with at least half a dozen titles and spin-offs on multiple platform, handhelds, phones and tablets some good old numbers can help a lot in keeping track of what is available and how it fits together. | |
This article is amusing considering Microsoft made Bungie tag the "Combat Evolved" subtitle onto the end of the original Halo because they didn't think it would sell by just being called "Halo." How times have changed. | |
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Disagree.
I don't like convoluted "subtitled" sequels with no number as I can never remember where that game falls in the series (eg. Is AC: Brotherhood or Revelations older? In which order is KH: 358/2, KH: Chain of Memories and KH: Birth by Sleep?). By putting a number (like most movie and game franchises do) I know exactly where the game falls.
Why complicate matters unecessarily?
If you must do subtitles, at the very least, put the number (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves; Xenosaga 2: Jenseits von Gut und Bose; etc...)
Note: Still despise the new captchas. I don't give three shits about Courtyard Marriott and refuse to answer any questions about it.