Idle Thumbs 109: Prepare for the Jelly

[Twig]

As for the naming thing... you know, I fully agree with the assessment that Gunpoint has an immediacy and appeal that The Swapper doesn't. And yet, I also think Gunpoint is incredibly uninteresting as a name. It feels like a dime-a-dozen name, that conjures up images of ten thousand shooting galleries and FPS's. The Swapper, on the other hand, tickles me, because it's jarring and surprising and it makes my mind wonder what it could mean. That's really valuable for a science fiction experience that asks you to enter with an open mind. So, I understand the argument from a market place reality (no way that 'The Swapper' gets any attention), but for me personally I think it's the other way around.

I agree with this completely. When I first heard someone talking about "Gunpoint" I figured it was just another FPS that I might play some day. The Swapper at least interests me, personally, because it makes me wonder what the hell it's going to be about. Of course, at this point, I know what both of them are about, but first impression of both, based entirely on name? The Swapper is so much more intriguing.

 

At the time, technology was not advanced enough to create a super detailed and sophisticated world, so many of these aspects were developed to work around those limitations. Then they got set in stone by tradition. Having those same self-imposed work-arounds nowadays, when there is no need for them at all, is such a jarring experience.

Man, especially when Chrono Trigger, a game almost universally loved even by people who don't like the genre managed to get all of those things RIGHT. On a fucking Super Nintendo.

 

But, you know, cities are really hard to build, so Final Fantasy XIII.

 

):

 

I'm speaking as a person who used to love, love, love JRPGs, here. I'm so sick of them. I want them to do something new, something special. I'm told by friends that Xenoblade is probably the best modern example, and I own a Wii, so I want to be optimistic and give it a shot... but I just can't make myself buy into it again. I'm sure I'd enjoy it on a certain level, though, because I still secretly enjoy JRPGs despite my hatred for them.

[tegan]

I'm speaking as a person who used to love, love, love JRPGs, here. I'm so sick of them. I want them to do something new, something special. I'm told by friends that Xenoblade is probably the best modern example, and I own a Wii, so I want to be optimistic and give it a shot... but I just can't make myself buy into it again. I'm sure I'd enjoy it on a certain level, though, because I still secretly enjoy JRPGs despite my hatred for them.

 

You would love Xenoblade. Seriously. It's the only time I've ever had an emergent gameplay moment in a JRPG; when a small, underleveled monster that I hadn't bothered to kill earlier got chased halfway across the area by a level 99 T-Rex thing and led it straight to where I was.

[Problem Machine]

Personally I don't find either name engaging, but I find The Swapper at best slightly off-putting and Gunpoint at worst slightly generic. The Swapper, to me, tends to conjure images of tile matching games and possibly lurid sex acts. Gunpoint doesn't stick in my mind very well because it doesn't say much about the game, but it doesn't gross me out slightly like The Swapper does. I'm not sure I understand the great admiration the thumbs have for the name, though.

[tegan]

I can only mentally say "The Swapper" using the Ed Wynn voice.

[Roderick]

The QWOPper.

[Badfinger]

I find crouching/prone to be pretty much essential, but the last two FPS games I spent any amount of time playing were Battlefield and DayZ. The ability to change your profile, remain unseen, or to take cover behind either low cover or partially destroyed cover is mandatory.

[SecretAsianMan]

Sean's story of TF2 fight club made me laugh so hard because my friends and I used to do exactly that. We had all sorts of rules such as no spies or medics, or if you win you can choose to keep fighting or go to the back of the line but you don't get to heal. We did dumb things like all soldier battles in the skybox so the only way to do damage is with a direct rocket hit, or American Gladiator style gauntlets. I love playing TF2 but sometimes goofing off is fun.

Edit: One of our sky battles

[Zeusthecat]

Sean's story of TF2 fight club made me laugh so hard because my friends and I used to do exactly that. We had all sorts of rules such as no spies or medics, or if you win you can choose to keep fighting or go to the back of the line but you don't get to heal. We did dumb things like all soldier battles in the skybox so the only way to do damage is with a direct rocket hit, or American Gladiator style gauntlets. I love playing TF2 but sometimes goofing off is fun.

Edit: One of our sky battles

 

I thoroughly enjoyed that.

[Chris]

Personally I don't find either name engaging, but I find The Swapper at best slightly off-putting and Gunpoint at worst slightly generic. The Swapper, to me, tends to conjure images of tile matching games and possibly lurid sex acts. Gunpoint doesn't stick in my mind very well because it doesn't say much about the game, but it doesn't gross me out slightly like The Swapper does. I'm not sure I understand the great admiration the thumbs have for the name, though.

 

Gunpoint isn't one of the all-time great names of a thing, but it's concise, rolls off the tongue easily, and is essentially appropriate to the game in my opinion—I mean, very few game names ACTUALLY achieve those three basic things. I agree with your thoughts on "The Swapper," which sounds either like a totally different kind of game, or something unpalatable, like shorthand for a shitty joke on a bro-oriented morning show.

[Gormongous]

To me, The Swapper evokes notes of a plaid flat cap, a shed, rust, and a junk collection. I think this is the fate of any "-er" word I don't commonly use. Though Gunpoint isn't really a tour-de-force for me either, Torchlight definitely is. I might just like the use of compound-noun titles with multiple meanings. They're simply more evocative somehow.

[osmosisch]

The QWOPper.

MuthaQWOPa

[Coods]

MuthaQWOPa

 

The booty swapper. 

 

I'm sorry

[tegan]

Swappers 64: only on N

[miffy495]

I can only mentally say "The Swapper" using the Ed Wynn voice.

 

I was about to say something along those lines. You and I are kindred spirits, Tegan.

[Problem Machine]

Torchlight is good. Speaking as someone who's been trying for like half a year to come up with a good title for a game because CCP stole the one I wanted, this is a topic I find pretty fascinating. I actually wrote a piece about titling a couple of months ago which turned out pretty good I think.

[TheLastBaron]

I just quickly scrolled through my Steam library and of the games in there I think my favorite title is Portal.  I like short titles that are actually relevant to the game, so Stacking I also like as a title (and as a game), but something like Proteus doesn't really do much for me.

[Dez]

The Swapper always reminds me of The Zapper. Specifically, in that zany tone that Jake used when he mentioned The Zapper on some past cast. Maybe I listen to too much Thumbs.

[tegan]

 just quickly scrolled through my Steam library and of the games in there I think my favorite title is Portal.  I like short titles that are actually relevant to the game, so Stacking I also like as a title (and as a game), but something like Proteus doesn't really do much for me.

 

Every time the Thumbs talk about Proteus, I always hear it as "Parodius" due to glottal stop shenanigans. Since I didn't actually know about Proteus for the longest time, I kept wondering why they were getting so much insight from that Konami shmup with the Moai heads.

 

I was about to say something along those lines. You and I are kindred spirits, Tegan.

 

 

SACRED BOND.

[Hermie]

Regarding TF2 melee: On the server I used to play on, they had a mod that forced melee only whenever a round got to sudden death. This was a lot of fun, as it always started with a huge wave of people meeting in the middle of the map, running ahead to try and strike, then back off to avoid damage themself, almost like some sort of jousting. It would then break off into smaller groups circle-strafing around eachother, until finally one side had only had one or two people left, that needed to be hunted down. 

[sclpls]

Personally I don't find either name engaging, but I find The Swapper at best slightly off-putting and Gunpoint at worst slightly generic. The Swapper, to me, tends to conjure images of tile matching games and possibly lurid sex acts. Gunpoint doesn't stick in my mind very well because it doesn't say much about the game, but it doesn't gross me out slightly like The Swapper does. I'm not sure I understand the great admiration the thumbs have for the name, though.

 

Count me in as another person that found both names uninteresting. That's okay though, I just looked through my Steam collection, and I didn't find more than one or two game titles that seemed particularly memorable. Ron Gilbert made a blog post a long time ago that he thought publishers worry too much about game names, and for evidence he pointed out how stupid the name Gameboy is, and how it nonetheless was an incredibly successful product. I think there is a lot to that. Phillip K. Dick comes to mind as someone who seemed to have a knack for coming up with terrible titles, but that hasn't hurt his reputation as one of the great science fiction writers.

[BarshSmash]

I love the term 'genre ossification' and totally agree with Chris' thoughtful nuancing. I have a history of disliking JRPG's for much the same reasons, though my emphasis was always on figuring out how it came to be that the genre incorporates all those weird elements (random battles against invisible enemies, overblown storylines, seperate battle arenas). I see those as coming from the founding days of the genre, when Japan got heavily influenced by the western Wizardry series. At the time, technology was not advanced enough to create a super detailed and sophisticated world, so many of these aspects were developed to work around those limitations. Then they got set in stone by tradition. Having those same self-imposed work-arounds nowadays, when there is no need for them at all, is such a jarring experience.

 

This is why FF XII is one of my favorites. They dumped the random battles and separate battle arenas. Story line qualities will be subjective, but I liked that too. It was more political and felt less "save the world from the super-evil that wants to destroy it" as they tend to be.

 

But I hear a lot of people disliked XII exactly because of these changes. I've heard it called too MMO-like, but that could just be from die-hard FF turn-based combat fans. Was really hoping they'd continue down this route, but instead we got the separate battle arena loads back, save the world from super-evil story, and they turned the combat into a rhythm game puzzle =(

[Brannigan]

Well, ff 12 had almost exactly the same combat system as ff 11, the mmo. I was able to go from having played 11, to beating a boss for my sister without ever touching 12 because it was the same thing. I never actually played through 12 because it really felt like playing 11 and by that point I was sick of that.

[SecretAsianMan]

Regarding TF2 melee: On the server I used to play on, they had a mod that forced melee only whenever a round got to sudden death. This was a lot of fun, as it always started with a huge wave of people meeting in the middle of the map, running ahead to try and strike, then back off to avoid damage themself, almost like some sort of jousting. It would then break off into smaller groups circle-strafing around eachother, until finally one side had only had one or two people left, that needed to be hunted down. 

 

I used to play on servers like that too.  When it became melee only, the entire strategy changed.  It was actually kind of fun because the rarely used melee weapons suddenly became useful and interesting tactics arose that you'd never see otherwise.

[coaxmetal]

The discussion about naming things at the end of the cast reminded me of the old programmer joke: "There are 2 hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors"

 

Naming something when programming is certainly a very differnt kind of problem than naming a creative work, but it is still kinda hard. The name of a function/type/object/class/variable is obviously descriptive -- it refers to what the thing is, but it is also often prescriptive since a name is one of the first things you write down when making a new file/class/etc.

 

Anyway I think about naming things a lot. Also one of my favorite names for a thing is "Roadside Picnic", the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that the STALKER games take inspiration from. Also that's just a really good book.

[plasticflesh]

Gateways on Steam and XBLIG is a great Portal-like Braid-like side-scroller platforming with a metroid-like contiguous world layout with ability gates. The main gimmick is the crazy split-screen rendering of entering the next portal.  

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