The Problem With Hype

I know I made a post about a week ago about how totally hyped I am for the new Gauntlet, but getting hyped for something is not a thing I enjoy doing to myself.

You see, if you get hyped for a game and follow its development and look up all the information you can on it then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  If the game that you've finally been waiting for comes out and it ends up sucking great deals of ass, then you are going to feel pretty crushed.  This has happened to me on numerous occasions and maybe that's why I'm a little jaded when it comes to new releases.

On the flip side, if a game comes out and you weren't really expecting much from it but upon playing you realise it's actually really good, then that's a really nice feeling.  That's not to say that you should go around hating on any release that gets any kind of press in the name of avoiding disappointment, but not getting too caught up in the whirlwinds of hype will help soften the blow a little if a game you were hoping to enjoy sucks.

But building excitement for a title is what's done for any entertainment medium, it's how sales are generated.  But for me, when certain games start getting a lot of hype or a lot of praise on release, I instantly start raising eyebrows and it causes me to judge a game a lot more harshly that I would have done previously.

Halo is the best example of this that I ever experienced.  Halo (the first one) was a good game, I enjoyed playing Halo on my friends Xbox when it first came out, it's a well polished FPS experience.  However, Halo got a lot of praise and I mean A LOT of goddamn praise.  It was being given perfect scores and hailed as one of the best games fucking ever made in the history of games.

However during the time of Halo's peak popularity, I couldn't help but find all the praise to be very silly.  I really enjoyed playing it but I had a lot of problems and quite frankly it felt like a massive step back from a lot of the FPS games that I played during my youth.  When faced with a Halo fan I would start to nitpick every little thing because of all the hype it received and in doing that I ended up kind of convincing myself that I didn't like it.  It was only when I got over myself and popped it in again that I realised that is IS a good game, it's just not the 10/10 supergame that everyone made it out to be.

It sounds really petty I know, but if you throw down a 10 I'm going to pull out the magnifying glass.