It all started with the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as the SNES. For whatever reason, Nintendo and other companies who made games for the system decided to slap the word “Super” onto absolutely everything. As if we weren’t aware that these were new games for a new system!
This funky naming scheme continued into the Nintendo 64 era, where the number “64” was the desired suffix. Rather than come up with original titles, Nintendo and others lazily tagged “64” on the end of them. “Super Mario 64?! What happened to 4-63?!” Part of this was a ploy to one-up the competition, namely Sony’s Playstation, self-touted as a 32-bit machine. Since people are dumb, and think that bigger is better, Nintendo assumed “64” was more important than “32.” Fat lot of good that did them. Word to the wise: the only time you should stick numbers in a game title is if it’s a sequel, or denotes a year.
Finally, here in the GBA age, we’ve got the word “Advance” used as a prefix or as a suffix! Advance Wars. Super Mario Advance. Advance Your Career. Fucking Your Mom in Advance. You get the message. Thankfully, it’s not as prevalent as the “Super” era.
Rounding out all of this garbage is the use of the letter “X”. Starting in the mid-90s and continuing up through today, developers have gone absolutely bugshit with the 24th letter of the alphabet. Often utilized to denote something “extreme” (i.e., targeted at the preteen market), the damn “X” has appeared on everything from sports titles to T&A titles. Back in the day, we had titles such as Mega Man X, but at least that one made sense…”X” was the main character’s name! Of course, people were retarded back then, too; I couldn’t tell you how many vehemently claimed that it was actually “Mega Man 10,” even though the game and manual explicity stated otherwise. Fuckin’ rejects. Today it’s gotten so bad, we even have a damn console with the letter “X” in it…the insidious Xbox. Love it or hate it, the damn “X” is there, and thanks to Microsoft’s considerable influence (read: money), it’s not going anywhere.
Hopefully this trend will eventually subside a bit; with semi-clever names for consoles and the like coming out all the time, maybe game companies will lay off the cliché prefixes and suffixes.
Yeah…and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot. How much do you want to bet tons of crap that comes out for Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld will have “DS” stuck on the end of it?