Dead Pixels has 41 chronicles

1. If You Don't Buy This Game, You'll Probably Kill Yourself
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Jul 01 2009

   If You Don't Buy This Game, You'll Probably Kill Yourself
   
   Dead Pixels
   By Ryan M. Eft
   6-29-2009
   
   On November the tenth of the year two-thousand and nine, the video game industry will release one last game and then shut down forever, content to rest, satisfied at having done the work it was put here for. If we are unlucky, the cosmos will sense this, and bring itself to an end, imploding into infinite shards and wiping out all existence.
   
   Of course, what actually happens on that day is that Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to a pretty good game, releases. But if you listen to the hype, the advertisers and the projected dominant sales numbers, you might well think that the apocalypse of pure molten joy described above is accurate.
   
   You may remember times when this has happened before. When a game accrued so much anticipation that it transcended existence and morphed into something else altogether, a beast we will call The Abominable Hypeman. Sure, game companies these days still produce games, but hype has become the real stock-in-trade of the industry. Whenever a major release is announced (and often before it is announced, when it exists only in the realm of hope and speculation), websites go into countdown mode. Mammoth sites like IGN inevitably post as many words as they can get out of every single tiny sliver of information, real or imagined. “Call of Duty might have green in the box art”. “Square says Final Fantasy will have swords”.
   
   In addition to that, any release north of Barbie Horse Adventures 3: Adventures with Horses receives at least four pages of coverage in one of numerous gaming publications. Here, every screenshot is deeply analyzed, every word spoken by the developer studied for what was and was not said. By the time the game releases, there’s no point in playing it, because there isn’t a single thing we don’t know about it.
   
   It didn’t always used to be like this, and at the risk of coming across as a codger, let me take you back to the good ol’ days, before Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid, when I was a wee gaming lad. Those were times when even major releases (a new Mario or Zelda was far away the biggest event) were barely heard from until on shelves. Sure, there was still hype, but not of the loud, obnoxious, overbearing kind we get today. The result was quite nice. By the time, say, Super Mario World or Sonic and Knuckles hit consoles, what we didn’t know about it still outweighed what we did. As a result, turning on a game back then was still an experience in discovery. You never knew what you were going to find around the next corner, because it wasn’t printed everywhere and some other places besides. I distinctly recall being surprised, in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past to find myself in the Dark World. Being as it was already as large if not larger than the original Zelda, I had naturally assumed the Light World was all there was. These days, the Dark World would have featured prominently in the advertising.
   
   I mention FF7 and MGS up above, but for me, the first title I can remember having it’s socks hyped off was The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. It had an epic TV commercial that played on Channel 1 (do schools still have that?) in my homeroom back in the ancient days of ’98. It was certainly the most anticipated video game on the planet at that point. But that was kind of okay, because OoT was not just on the cusp of a new technology in gaming, it was leading the way. 3D was a new thing, and simple movement in those dimensions was far from perfected. One of the most revolutionary names in gaming taking on one of the youngest and most revolutionary inventions in gaming? Yeah, I’d say that was worth a little hype.
   
   In those days that kind of attention was a rare thing. That, of course, was before gaming really went mainstream. Now, every game is hyped to suffocation before release. Some, such as Grand Theft Auto, earn their wings and then some. But a lot don’t, and there we come to my main problem with modern game hype. Those games that don’t live up to the legends around them aren’t necessarily bad. Indeed, they are often good games that are perceived as poor because the attention given to them prior to release was something no mortal game could live up to.
   
   I consider a few titles to be poster boys for this phenomena. Fable 2 comes to mind, as it was a fun little fantasy romp of which too much world-changing was expected. Another item, of course, is the Wii itself. The Little Machine that Apparently Couldn’t was pushed as being the thing to revolutionize gaming. The real change brought, however, has been moving casual gaming from the computer to the Wiimote.
   
   Ultimately, though, the growing hype concerns me primarily because it detracts from our ability to enjoy a game on merits it creates. So here’s a little experiment: find a game that sounds good, but that you don’t know much about yet. Keep up with the important details before release, but other than that, avoid the hype machine. Don’t track down every little article about which way heads will fly when cut off from an eastern position. And just…wait*.
   
   I know this is hard for us. We’ve gotten accustomed, we gamers, to impatience. And the websites and magazines feed that impatience. But I think anyone who chooses to relearn patience will feel, when their game actually hits, what I felt the first time I stepped into the Dark World. And that’s worth any amount of patience.
   
   *What am I doing this with, you might ask? Final Fantasy XIII. I cannot avoid staring at pictures, because they’re purty, but I’m avoiding the slow trickle of character and plot details and intending to let the game surprise me by itself, like FF used to do. We’ll see how it turns out.

   
   

   ---

   Send To A Friend

Dead Pixels has 2 comment s on this chronicle.

1. MrBigJeezy
   Posted On Jun 30 2009

   On an unrelated note, Bioshock 2 is going to be the greatest game since Pong.
   
   Oh wait.... ahhh, oh well.

2. JackDaniels624
   Posted On Jun 29 2009

   Hype is getting way out of control! Honestly I never did search for every minute detail about a game, in fact the first Modern Warfare I knew nothing about until my friend brought it over! As for the second I've only seen a few screen shots and watched it on E3, but nothing else. IMO hype can ruin games completely, so I avoid getting hyped if at all possible, and just enjoy it when it comes out.
   
   Oh and I could rant for litterally hours about mainstream stuff...Honestly while I do enjoy Halo and Call of Duty, I don't need to hear every single person talk about how awesome it is years after it comes out! Play something else!!!