RPG FPS 3D Adventure what?
This stems from a discussion I was having with Jeremy about naming conventions of games. It just occured to me suddenly that many of the "standard" names used to describe a game are so ludicrously out of date or innacurate it's ludicrous.
The cause of this? The new Resident Evil 4 game. Considering the sheer change in the way in which the game operates it means the term survival horror no longer applies. My personal opinion was that it's nearer Zombie Pwnage 5000.
http://media.rawice.com/features/146.jpg
Zombies being distinctly pwned
The term survival horror in itself is somewhat misleading. Let's take the dictionary definitions of each:
Survival : The act or process of surviving
Horror : An intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear
So what we have is literally survivng a painful feeling of fear. Taking this logic into account you could call many games "Survival Horror", but perhaps my favourite is Pacman. Yes you're surviving. Yes you feel a painful feeling of fear (when you're so near that Hi-Score mark) when those Ghosts flax you within one of those claustrophobic tunnels. Yet there's no zombies, no mutants, and no massive corporations. There are ghosts however.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/prod...mco-pacman.jpg
A terrifying glimpse of the future, where evil overules the land and the common populace is downtrodden. Only one man can save us. PacMan!
Then there's everyone's favourite beary-weirdy genre, RPGs. If you don't like RPGs then chances are you've accidentally found this page on Google. Now go away. For the rest of us I'm sure you're more than aware of the term RPG meaning "Role Playing Game". You have a role, you play it, and it's a game. Let's see that might include Half Life, Sonic, Doom, Mavis Davis Typing Tutor, Galaga, Splinter Cell, Max Payne. And what else? O yeah, Crazy Frog Racing.
http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/ima...9006_68478.jpg
Crazy Frog Racing - Truly an RPG by it's very defintion
Now onto FPS's's's, or First Person Shooters. These would be games where you are in the first person perspective (the same perspective as, say, a brain eating maggot attempting to feast on your eyes). The otherside of this is third person shooters (the same perspective as a startled passer-by as your eyes explode). Note the lack of capitalisation. That's because there's no such thing as a TPS. Think about it, when was the last time anyone used the term TPS ever? That's right, never (NB. Please ignore those last two uses of the term TPS. And that one). They're usually just called bog-standard "Shooters" or "Action" games. Action of course being The state or process of acting or doing. Besides any Pet Rock Simulators that may have come out, there's a whole load of Action in any game.
http://photos.yafro.com/pics3/i/2006...01050_full.jpg
Virtual Rock - A game of Epicly Boring Proportions
Of course lest we forget the naming conventions of geek and magazine publication. The -'em-up suffix. Shorthand for "them up", it was originally concieved by a Japanese company to describe their latest game, taking the Metallica Album "Kill 'Em All", engrishing it, and coming up with Shoot-'Em-Up. So far, so alright. But it's when this affix is used on other "genres" that problems arise. I've seen Build-'Em-Ups, Swim-'Em-Ups, Farm-'Em-Ups, Parachute-'Em-Ups, Paris-Shoot-'Em-Ups, Paris-Hilton-Shoot-'Em-Ups and perhaps my personal favourite Sex-'Em-Up. Just to clarify what these titles mean is to do an action towards a certain thing. So you would be building somehting, swimming at something, farming something, parachuting at something, shooting Parisians, shooting Paris Hilton(s) and sexing things. Kinky.
http://www.geocities.com/jaapsch/puz...s/rackemup.jpg
The world's first Rack-'Em-Up. Rack anything, even racks themselves!
Then comes a naming convention so stupid and silly that they had to shorthand it down because people kept spitting on it in the streets. I speak of course of MMOG's, or MMORPG's. Standing for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (or previously Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. The acronym doesn't seem so bad now does it?), these usually include games involving large numbers of people on the same server in a persistent world. But surely something better than "Massively" could have been coined? I think PMOG's, Persistant Multiplayer Online Games would be much better, and a lot less silly. Heck, let's cut the crap and just call them GWALOP's, i.e. Games With A Lot Of Players. Then again the whole GWALOP's might not applied to everygame of this type. Just look at Star Wars Galaxies.
http://static.flickr.com/3/2953077_96ad707c6d_m.jpg
Chewie no! Don't install the combat upgrade!
And this isn't even include many other names, such as Simulators (I once wrote a program that retyped everything you typed back, doesn't make it a Simulator), Stragedy (Tactics outside of the likes of C&C? Never! I just use a crowbar in HL), Adventure (going for a pint of milk classifies as an Adventure, but I sure wouldn't want a game out of it) and Fighting (I'll be honest I don't have a joke for this one). Maybe when we get around to sorting ourselves out and stop trying to classify games with titles that make no sense will we finally stop being so ridiculed and looked down upon by the rest of society. Until then I'm off to play my favourite GWALOP, GW. TTFN.
