My daughter, age 9, is an avid videogamer. We often play together. The more seriously a game takes itself, though, the less seriously she takes the game. She is especially fond of giving monsters and characters from adventure/horror games demeaning nicknames.
From Silent Hill:
Air Screamers/Night Flutters are “Flappy the Pterodactyl.”
Grey Children are “Casper the Stabby Ghost.”
From Silent Hill 3:
Pendulums are “Buzzy the Wonder Bug.”
Slurpers are “Half-Assed Missionaries.”
From Silent Hill Origins:
Carrions are “Killer Kows.”
From Final Fantasy X:
Auron is “Winky.”
Tidus is “Douchebag.”
From** Final Fantasy Crisis Core**:
Sephiroth is “the hair guy.”
Zak is “Doofus.”
In survival horror games, she cracks me up to the point of not being able to play by reading the dialog in a “Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel” voice. This weekend, I think I’ll get her take on Final Fantasy XIII when I pick up my copy.
OT, but we had to play the Mass Effect mission where you have to kill Wrex, 3 times until we finally figured out how to finish the mission without killing him, our 4 year old could not bear to see him dead and cried so pitifully we tried again and again to save him.
So many Wing Commander fans called the unnamed PC “Bluehair” that when Wing Commander II came out and the PC was given a name, Origin called him Blair as a tribute.
When I played FFVIII with the neighborhood kid around, Ifrit was too hard for him to say so he got nicknamed ‘Fritter’. I know now that the pronunciation is different, but hey, cute nickname for a massive fire summon.
Back before games had voice acting, we had a devil of a time figuring out exactly how you pronounced certain characters’ names. The one that still trips me up once in a while is “Guybrush,” the protagonist of the Monkey Island games, which my friends and I first played in elementary school. One of my friends happened to learn that “Guy” is a real name, pronounced “Ghee.” Full of youthful naivete, he naturally made the assumption that “Guybrush” was, therefore, similarly pronounced “Ghee-brush,” and made a point of saying it that way from then on.
Even now, after two-plus fully voice-acted Monkey Island games (not to mention the fully-VAed “special edition” of the original “Secret of Monkey Island”), I still catch myself thinking of the character as “Gheebrush Threepwood.”
Animal Crossing is my dad’s favorite game. Each day, there are a few spots in town where you can dig up items. He calls them his ‘diggy ups’. My brother and I found this so hilarious that we call any digging in any video game a ‘diggy up’ now.
The first time my husband and I played this, we were immediately annoyed at Quistis, who was constantly explaining crap to us. I very quickly renamed her cristie, which is Québecois profanity (based upon the name Christ). We ended up having to start the game over because we failed to pay attention and got our asses kicked in the final battle because we had no skills or talents or magic orbs or whatever the gameplay was for that game.
Due to the resemblance, I have renamed the character in Mass Effect “Tomas Plekanec”, which cracks my husband up every time I ask if he’s succeeding in saving the world.
There are others, I’m sure. I lose patience with video games rather easily, and spend a lot of time mocking them.
Back when I played Grand Theft Auto Vice City, I always used to call Hilary (the getaway driver)… well it really isn’t family friendly, let’s just say I called him BFF, which by the way did NOT stand for Best Friend Forever. Damn, beating him in a race was hard.
My daughter continues to crack me up. She’s been fooling around with Elder Scrolls IV, where her favorite activity is stealing horses. It never gets old that she gallops away wordlessly singing “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” in a perfect imitation of Wall-E whilst the Imperial Guardsmen are in hot pursuit.
I always rename the explorer unit most 4X games give you at the start of the game “Sir Dooptidoo” (or “USS Dooptidoo” if it’s a spaceship). Because their entire purpose is to merrily jaunt, completely unarmed, into the fog of war. Their fate is always to either die at the hands of random barbarians or making contact with some genocidal neighbour who’ll send their head back home in a basket.
Way back in the 80s when “Castlevania” first came out and we didn’t know the name of the protagonist (later on we found out his name was Simon Belmont --there were several various Belmonts over the run of the game IIRC) I started calling him “Foster.” I have absolutely no idea why–he just looked like a “Foster” to me, I guess.
