Games Having Too Much Hype.

August 31, 2009

Halo. That's all I have to say to create an uproar amongst a room full of gamers. Just mentioning that particular title stirs up trouble. Some will vouch for it's greatness; others will claim it's the worst game in existence. My opinion? Love it. I love the games, I love the story, I've even read all the books (some of the books I've read more than twice). To me, it's a great series. But it's become incredibly over hyped.

Do you know why everyone claims Halo 3 sucks? Hype. After Halo 2, everyone expected Halo 3 to be this shining symbol of perfection. They expected greatness the likes of which has never been dreamed of. Obviously they were disappointed. You see where I'm getting at here? Everybody gets amped up over a game and others just build and build on the hype to the point where the game has to meet higher expectations than necessary. At that point, if the game is great, but not great enough, people hate it. It didn't live up to the expectations. That's what happened to the Halo series. It was a major success and people started expecting too much out of it. There are other games/game franchises that have experienced this but I'm gonna stick with Halo because I'm more familiar with it than other games.

Personally, my expectations were higher than usual for Halo 3 but not as high as the gaming community in general. It didn't meet ALL of my expectations but it wasn't a disappointment either. My only major hang up with it is the Matchmaking for multilayer. It takes too damn long to find one match. Hell in the time it takes to find ONE match in Halo 3, I could find nearly FIVE matches in Call of Duty 4. And I guess another complaint I have about matchmaking is the people I come across but you can't fault the game for what other people say/do online. Either way, the game wasn't a major disappointment for me.

Are people today expecting too much out of games? I've seen people hate games just because the graphics didn't live up to the level of others. Games don't need to be full of high-end graphics to be great. I mean, look at the NES games, hell even ATARI generation games like Space Invaders. Compared to today's games, they look like the hind end of a Donkey who sat in a pile of ****, but they're still great games (if not great than addicting as hell lol). I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that graphics play a role in the hype of games.

Either way, hype ruins games. Don't get all ansy over sequals of great games because sequals tend to not be as great as the first.

Here's another franchise with too much hype: Guitar Hero. Everyone gets uber excited when the next title is announced but then are disappointed when those high expectations aren't anywhere NEAR met. What more can you expect out of it, huh? What more can you do with a franchise like that? "Oh the new GH sucked because it's too much like the old ones." WELL NO **** SHERLOCK! (crap now I'm just ranting about guitar hero... ****ing A.D.D.)

I'm pretty sure you guys got my point a while ago so I'm just going to end it here. If anyone has something to say about this (preferably something a little more insightful than I could come up with, lol), please speak your thoughts.

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