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Posted on April 10, 2012, CJ Miozzi The 10 Most Annoying Video Game Titles

Notch’s recent reveal of the new sci-fi game he’s working on, the awkwardly titled 0×10c, had the internet perplexed over the title’s pronunciation, and led us to reflect on other games with clumsy names. Sometimes, they’re difficult to pronounce. Other times, they’re difficult to spell. At all times, they’re a nuisance to deal with.

Last year, we examined games with hilariously stupid names; this time, we’ll delve into the most annoying video game titles. While tempted by the idea of writing the single phrase, “Every JRPG ever,” we assembled this top 10 list.

Oh, and in case you missed it, check out our handy flowchart: Game Front’s Gratuitous Guide To Naming Your Video Game.

Let us know what game titles annoy you by dropping a comment, below!

10. Street Fighter X Tekken

If you’d never heard of this game before, you’d naturally believe it was pronounced “Street Fighter Ex Tekken,” and you’d naturally be wrong. Because the game is a crossover between two popular fighting game franchises, it’s actually pronounced “Street Fighter Cross Tekken.”

Apparently, no one at Capcom realized that the English language already has a letter associated with the symbol “X.”

9. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

ROAR!

Apart from being cumbersome and redundant, this title is awkward for its use of the word “Bearers,” which, when pronounced out loud, sounds awfully similar to “Bears,” forcing the speaker to enunciate the “-ers” in an unnatural manner.

8. Demon’s Souls

What’s most painstaking about this name is the fact that Demon Souls would have served perfectly well. But no — let’s obfuscate this title with an unnecessary possessive and jam in as many “S” sounds as possible.

Not only is this title difficult to pronounce due to the awkward pause required to prevent the two words from running together and sounding like Demon Souls, it also takes a moment of reflection to recall where to put that apostrophe. Is it Demons’ Souls, a game about demons and their souls, or Demon’s Souls, a game about one demon with… many… souls… somehow… As with most dumb titles, you just have to remember it’s the least logical answer.

A similarly annoying title is Knights Contract, which, while easy to pronounce, lacks any form of grammatical coherence and appears to have had its apostrophe stolen by Demon’s Souls.

7. 0×10c

This is just a nightmare.

At first glance, you’d think this title is pronounced “Zero times ten to the power of cee,” or “Zero times ten to the cee.” Dig a little deeper and you realize this title is actually hexadecimal. 0×10 is the number 16, while the letter “c” corresponds to the number 12. So this is, in fact, 16 to the power of 12, or 281,474,976,712,644 — the year in which the game takes place.

So is the title pronounced “Sixteen to the power of twelve?” Of course not! Why reward clever people?

Developer Notch confirmed via Twitter that the title is pronounced “Ten to the cee.” Given no one will ever bother writing the letter “c” in superscript, this pronunciation manages to be less intuitive than the “X” in Street Fighter X Tekken.

6. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II — Retribution

Colon? Check. Em-dash? Check. Roman numeral? Check. Number large enough to require a comma? Check.

I love the Warhammer franchise, but there seems to be some competition amongst its developers over the years to see who can deploy the most subtitles and punctuation in a single release.

Also, I’m just going to lay this out: roman numerals are pretentious and annoying. Developers use them to lend an air of sophistication and a certain epic quality to their games, but there’s a reason we don’t use roman numerals anymore: brevity, a concept lost on the Warhammer folks.