Thursday, October 10, 2013

Rethinking and Renaming

The process for coming up with names for things fall into two categories - either the idea just falls out of your head without any effort, or your brain cells form a committee and debate until the pigs come home (they stay out much later than cows). Currently, I'm watching to catch sight of the first little piggy foot coming down the lane while the sky lightens in the east over the sleeping cows.

Because I can't think of what I want to rename this project of mine.

"Back to the Past" seemed good at first, but it doesn't really work. I suppose I took the idea from the old "Back to the Future" movie title, but it worked because of the nonsensical juxtaposition of the words "Back" and "Future". "Back" and "Past" go together just fine. So, I'm going to try "brain jamming" here and see what else I can come up with.

"Retro Gaming Rampage" - This one is a take-off on "Retro City Rampage", a game I keep seeing mentioned on websites lately. I haven't played it yet, so I don't feel any real affinity for the title. It just sounds sort of cool, but the speed I'm playing games at can't be called a "rampage". Plus, my gaming isn't truly "retro". I think I'd need to be in SNES or NES days for that.

"The Wowbagger Project" - I've talked about this name before, taking a reference from one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams. Wowbagger was the alien that had dedicated his immortal existence to insulting every creature in the universe - in alphabetical order. Since I'm planning on playing every game in my collection in that sequence, it has some merit.

"The PS2 Atoz Project" - I rather like this one. In one of my unfinished blogs, I talked about an old Star Trek Original series episode where Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a doomed planet and find that all the citizens have fled (ie, teleported) into the numerous worlds kept cataloged by the master "librarian", Mr. Atoz. This was probably an analogy to people getting "lost in books" and the "importance of libraries" (or my interpretation anyway), and the librarian's name was just "A" to "Z" made into a name, but it came back to me in this day and age for a different reason. The books/worlds in the show were shiny metal discs, very similar in look to our present day CD's and DVD's. But mostly it was this feeling of being able to enter another world just by loading up one these discs. In many ways that's what I think of when I boot up a game - that I'm stepping into a different reality, bounded in ours within the thinness of a DVD.

The title of that episode was "All Our Yesterdays", and it seems appropriate that I rechristen this blog series as "Yesterday's Worlds".

Oh look, here come the little swine now.
















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