EPTAnother E3 come and gone and as these things go it was aight I guess? I mean, I can’t imagine actually being able to sit through one of these things in person, watching one 3-5 minute clip after another of excessive carnage rendered in the finest graphical technology money can buy and then being expected to cheer at sequels to games I didn’t like. And this goes on for like 5 days? Crazy. Anyway, this year I feel I’ll leave predicting whether or not games are good judging by their trailers alone to the professional speculators and instead rate them by their titles, a process I consider to be approximate in value anyway. Judging a book by it’s cover might seem unfair but give a game a title like ‘Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code’ (it’s on Steam, look it up) and I’d argue you’re begging for trouble. There’s a lot of negative trends that occur in game titles though I can’t imagine anyone could give two fucks for this sort of thing, least not anyone who works in branding, but oh well. It’s E3, it doesn’t deserve respect or intelligence.
Let’s start with the biggest loser of the event and that’s From Software, taking the first and second worst with Metal Wolf Chaos: XD Edition (no, really), and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (no, really). Arguing who wins E3 is kind of a mugs game, I mean No Man’s Sky ‘won’ E3 once and need I go on, but going by the title based metric established above then From Software have definitely fucking lost. Metal Wolf Chaos was already a pretty stupid fucking name, I mean we’re instantly going to think of Metal Gear Solid and one shouldn’t draw that comparison for a goofy game about giant robots (well, ok if you put it like that you should but not really) and adding XD Edition instead of HD or Remastered like all the boring kids do kind of makes me want to hit someone. A friend of mine argues that considering the premise- the US President must battle a revolt led by the Vice President by hopping into a giant mech and blowing shit up wholesale (I like to think Japan has mistaken Harrison Ford’s Air Force One for a documentary)- XD Edition is entirely apropos but then again this friend voted for Tony Abbott so what does he know?
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a lovely example of the biggest bugbear in game titles which is stapling unnecessary words after a colon. There’s nothing wrong with just calling it Sekiro, it’s punchy, distinct, wikipedia tells me it means ‘one armed wolf’ which is cool. Fromsoft originally had Shadows Die Twice as part of the teaser but the publishers, Activision surprisingly, decided it should be part of the title and have fucked it all up. It’s made additionally awkward about there already being a prominent and current game series about an immortal stealth warrior with a supernatural addition of questionable curse status called Middle Earth: Shadow of [Noun], so now it just seems like Activision are plagiarists too. Well fucking done.
Third worst is Hitman 2. Now, giving a sequel a number that’s one larger than before is a naming convention that’s perfectly adequate and would normally not call for greater concern. In this instance however I’m forced to mark it down since there already is a Hitman 2. This is part of the problem with franchise reboots: you start by just calling it the same name as before which leads us to add its release year afterwards (eg DOOM 2016) but when you title it Hitman 2 it’s very clunky. Who wants to say Hitman 2 2018, that’s awful. Now the original Hitman sequel had the full title Hitman 2: Silent Assassin but considering Silent Assassin is a level ranking in the Hitman games this means trying to look up youtube videos for Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is going to find Hitman 2 Silent Assassin Runs and that’s just fucking rude.
Fourth worst I’m awarding to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. You’d think my qualm is with the ‘Odyssey’ bit but considering this is a game set in ancient Greece and you (supposedly) spend a lot of time sailing around picking fights I’ll let it slide. It’s unfortunate that it comes a year after Super Mario Odyssey which makes Ubisoft also seem like plagiarists but I can forgive that. My qualm is, well, the game’s set 450 years before the Assassin’s order is even formed, it’s gone full on RPG mode with dialogue trees, romance options, branching story paths and such, there’s no hidden blades or social stealthing and the game has an emphasis on territory control and large open battles, hardly the place for a stealthy murderer. At this point why even call it Assassin’s Creed? The only things you can add in to make it an Assassin’s Creed is all the extra future/distant past bullshit which never goes anywhere and never matters at all.
Fifth worst I’m awarding to Fallout 76. Now, you may be thinking “oh ho ho ho, where’s installments 5 through 75, eh Bethesda?” and while this may very well be a concern for our great grandchildren some distant day my real gripe is that if you’re going to make a spinoff of a series then use a different naming convention goddammit. Fallout already did this when they made Fallout Tactics (full name Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel which is, sadly, gripe inducing but oh well) or Fallout Shelter. I suppose it wouldn’t be a Bethesda Fallout game if they weren’t fucking up the property somehow, but c’mon guys this is simple shit.
Sixth worst I reckon is Cyberpunk 2077 on the basis that it’s really uncreative to just call a game by its aesthetic setting. That’d be like calling a game set in World War 2, World War 2 (which Call of Duty did last year, no doubt to the derisive scorn of good little boys and girls from across the globe), or titling a game that was basically Warcraft in Space, Starcr- wait hang on.
Seventh is a rather tentative pick but I’m gonna go with Halo: Infinite. I say tentative since infinite is the game subtitle you use when you end a series (see Bioshock Infinite, Hexcells Infinite but sadly not Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare much as we all would hope). Where can you go after you’ve gone infinite? Halo Infinity plus one? I can’t imagine Halo ever truly ending though, at least not while humans are still around, so while I’ve awarded 7th worst I’m fully willing to take it back if this really is the final Halo.
Eighth worst is to be awarded to Wolfenstein: Youngblood. I don’t mind the subtitle being there, it’s accurate to the premise and it’s a rebooted franchise so endless subtitling is begrudgingly required, but what’s irking my jerkin is the lack of consistency with the previous titles. The last Wolfenstein was titled Wolfenstein 2 (which avoided the pitfall Hitman 2 fell into by virtue of there not actually having been a Wolfenstein 2 despite it being the 11th game in the series) and the expansion for the first Wolfenstein was titled Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Clearly this game should be called Wolfenstein 3: The Young Blood but I guess sensibility died over in Machine Games halfway through Wolfenstein 2’s development.
Ninth worst is a toss up between Metro: Exodus and Ghost of Tsushima. I’m not fond of the Metro games not using the incrementally increasing integer standard that the books do, I can’t tell what order to play these games in! Ghost of Tsushima minorly irks me since [Noun] of [Noun] is pretty much the boringest of all the boring game titling tropes. Part of me is happy to see a game about battling feudal Mongolians though since I consider them some of history’s greatest monsters and yet for some reason in video games it’s always the bloody Nazis isn’t it?
Tenth worst is Death Stranding. Not for any particularly good reason I just don’t like Hideo Kojima very much and find the almost cult-like status he holds to be extremely baffling. If literally anyone else released the sorts of trailers this game did they would be laughed out of the room so hard their organs would self destruct out of shame but for some reason it’s ok when he does it? If I may digress for a moment here, I see two eventual outcomes for Death Stranding. One is that it completely flops after Kojima pours far, far too much money into a glorified walking simulator only a few mad people would want to play (a likely scenario, the last thing Kojima worked on was a walking simulator called PT and he’s always loved films more than games). Alternatively, the game just never comes out.
This seems a bit bonkers but hear me out. I think we can all agree Kojima loves himself. You wouldn’t plaster WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HIDEO KOJIMA all over Metal Gear Solid 5 and then name your development studio after yourself if you were the fucking Dalai Lama of game development. And it’s clear he gets off on previewing games, so why bother ever releasing one? I’m picturing a Duke Nukem: Forever scenario but instead of sheer incompetence and mismanagement delaying a game for a solid decade it’s the sheer narcissism of it’s creative lead, no longer fettered by the kind of people who could keep him down. Kojima will continue to enthrall the masses for years as he changes engines, expands the cast until it could stretch across the length of Tasmania and avoids showing any actual fucking gameplay and we’ll continue to smile and humour him. Eventually, Kojima will be fired for having wasted so much of Sony’s money and a dessicated husk of a game will be hacked out by a team of nobodies stapling together whatever bits they can find. Fan base revolts, game flops, Kojima starts again with someone else and the cycle just rolls on until we’re all dead. Either that or it comes out and is an ok game and all but I dunno, all the required ingredients for an auteurs Icarus-like fall from grace are present and we’ll consign Kojima to the dustbin alongside John Romero, Peter Molyneux and that No Man’s Sky dude.
And that’s basically it, all the games listed above will probably be terrible and everything I haven’t mentioned will either be good/great/I forgot to mention them. As scientifically accurate a way to objectively rate games that don’t exist as any you can ever find.
