E3 would be so much easier to process if every game was named as honestly as Wizard With A Gun
He's got a shooter
I've not yet watched the trailer for Wizard With A Gun, announced during last night's Devolver Digital stream at E3. But I bet you my entire house I can tell you what's in it. If I guess wrong, I'll email you my house. If I guess right, you have to read the rest of this post. Deal? Sorry, too slow. Reading the word "deal" counted as agreeing to the deal, I'm afraid, so let's play.
I'm guessing the trailer will feature a Wizard, who possesses a gun. Here's the trailer. Let's see if I am correct, or if I have ruined my family's life by promising to email their house to loads of strangers.
Phew. I was sweating for a bit there, since the trailer's first thirty seconds depicted a trio of wizards, but all conspicuously unarmed, and in various states of peril. One even had a gun pointed at them! But then schlink, out slid the bladdy glock, didn't it? And from there, it was bullets all the way home. Yes, I know. The most accurate title for the game would have been Wizards With Guns. Well done you. But alas, I have just phoned my lawyer (who also has a gun, I should warn you), and she says my home is safe.
Anyway, the point is, I'll never forget the name of Wizard With A Gun. In months to come, when wondering about how work's coming along on all the games announced this summer, I won't be saying, "Ooh, that one with the gun wizards... what was it called again?" before googling "gun wizrard devolver gam" and being informed it was called Musketmages Of Blasteroonia: Ordeal Of The Bloodlords. Nope, I shall still be saying, "Lol, how good a name is Wizard With A Gun?"
I dread to think how many hours I could have saved over the years if only all developers were so forthright in slapping the game name saveloy on the chip-shop counter. How calm and orderly my mental map of PC gaming might be, if its contents were so self-explanatory. Certainly, the summer announce season, with its week-long bombardment of reveals, would be drastically easier to keep track of if every developer was forced to title games with the bluntest possible summary of their contents.
Rainbow Six Extraction, for example, (a game whose name I literally just had to check because I couldn't remember what ominous noun had replaced 'Quarantine' in its original title), would now be called "Very Competent Soldiers Killing Slime Men". Sorry, my bad - Tom Clancy's Very Competent Soldiers Killing Slime Men.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 (which I always have to retype from Jurassic Park Evolution because the words 'Jurassic Park' were tattooed on my brain when I was nine years old) would be going out of the window too. Parks, after all, cannot undergo the process of biological evolution. It would now be called "Keep The Dinosaurs Inside The Fences, For The Second Time". You'd know exactly what you'd be getting with that one, eh?
Watch Dogs Legion's Bloodline DLC would need a lot of work, unless the DLC just happens to feature an eerie, omnnipresent filament of gore, i.e. an actual blood line, left behind your character like a snail's trail. Going by the plot description, it sounds like it's about looking for a load of robots. And obviously, since there isn't a single dog in the game, let alone any Romans, the basic Watch Dogs: Legion moniker would have to go too.
The whole package, I suggest, could be renamed "Computer Cockneys Look For A Load Of Robots". And let's face it, that's just a much better name. It explains the plot of the game, there's not a colon in sight, and it's got human appeal. Who wouldn't want to step into the big, binman's shoes of a Computer cockney? So come on, Ubisoft. It's not too late to do the right thing. Make all of our lives a little easier, and give us the Computer Cockneys.