Jennacide said:
shrekfan246 said:
Many, many indie games. Probably more than I could bother to actually mention.
Going for the bigger targets, then...
With no prior knowledge of the franchises?
Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Sins of a Solar Empire, Crysis, Far Cry, The Witcher, Demon's/Dark Souls, any numbered Final Fantasy, Resonance of Fate, Okami, Devil May Cry, Brutal Legend, Mass Effect, Sleeping Dogs, Prototype, inFamous, Killzone, Just Cause 2, any game named after a mascot such as Sonic or Mario, Halo, BlazBlue...
Of course, that's being a little disingenuous. But really, to a complete outsider of the gaming industry, none of these names alone would really convey what the games themselves are actually about.
Half the games you just mentioned have perfectly fine titles that are pulled from the game. OP's question was about titles that have literally nothing to do with the game. (Though Half-life sort of does, but whatever) Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Dark Souls, Okami, Mass Effect, Prototype and Halo all make perfect sense, and who doesn't know who Mario or Sonic are these days?
And it's not like this issue is only a gaming one. How many movies or books have titles that make no sense as to what you are reading?
That's why I said it's being disingenuous... and mentioned twice that I'm talking about the names of video games in reference to people who have no knowledge of their franchises...
If you knew nothing about the game, series, company, movie, or following, what would you think when you heard the name
Silent Hill? Probably not "foggy haunted town filled by a person's tortured self-conscious".
Prototype conjures up images of machines more than a virus that mutates a person into a bio-weapon. I wouldn't think
Halo is a first-person shooter where you control a space marine and kill aliens. And who are the super Mario brothers? Why are they suddenly new? Why is the sequel still new, and why is there another sequel titled with a 'U' instead? What the hell does "mass effect" mean? I'm no biochemist or physicist.
Do you see what I mean? We don't question it because we've spent so much time engaged in the gaming industry that it just makes sense to us now. "
Okami, oh yeah, that's Amaterasu-omikami, the character you control in a game about a wolf!"
Even think about
Metroid or
The Legend of Zelda. What is a metroid? Outside of the context of the game, it has no meaning.
The Legend of Zelda? The actual legends are almost always about the Hero of Time.
When you take them along with the context of the games they're about, sure, the names can sometimes make sense. But without that context, what images come to your mind first when you hear those words?
To cherry pick an example here, take
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. That brings to mind exactly what it contains inside when you read its name: Military warfare, likely filled with tons of guns and explosions.
Anybody would probably be able to suppose that much, just from the name alone. You can't do that with
Halo or
Prototype or
Dark Souls. We just don't question it because it's so ingrained in the social unconscious by now that finding someone who hasn't at least heard of
Halo is a surprise in itself. But seriously, find somebody who doesn't play video games, tell them there's a game called
Dark Souls, and ask what they think it's about. I doubt they'll say "brutal fantasy action-RPG set in a hostile, lonely world".
