Ok I put this as a rant. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe I've just had a couple too many cans of Monster and my tongue is trying to escape through my chest cavity. Either way, I better start this. Is it just me or has hype changed a little? I remember when I was a little runt staring at cartridges in my little local games store picking two up and running to mummy and daddy with big teary eyes saying "Please can I have one of these! I was reading a magazine and one of their names was mentioned but this one looks really cool which one can I have?" Sadly I picked the one from the first, yay a week playing Robocop vs Terminator when I was terrified of both as a kid. Hey I never said I was a smart kid alright? Look back to just before the start of this current generation if you heard about a game generally it meant someone else liked it and it was going to be pretty good (not you Daikatana, go away). So you were tempted to buy it just because you knew somewhere in the world someone who wasn't you wanted to play it too and maybe they would be your friend! Or if you want to be a little less pathetic would mean it was good and could give you a sense of joy when you played it. Just to make one point clear before I have a little rant. I'm not saying hype is bad, christ no the hype I've heard and had for Monaco even though some reviewers didn't enjoy it and I can see why has been more than met for me. Still playing it. Same for most of the hyped titles I've been waiting for and playing this past year or so. Having worked in a now dead Blockbuster UK store, I was one of the nice ones who would wipe your late fee, I was able to quite graphically see hype both used amongst friends and used in a corporate light to try and get a bit more cash in those pinging tills. You'd often hear a bunch of people getting really excited about a game and then all rush to the counter to preorder it. This is good hype in my eyes. The kind of hype where people are mutually excited for a title and can't wait to play it and most importantly discuss it together. Then theres bad hype. Nasty horrible hype that spits on your jaffa cakes and rubs its syphilitic genitals on your door handles so no way you can avoid coming into contact with it. The game that summed this up for me was Dead Island. It wasn't a bad game in retrospect. Hell it wasn't exactly a gift from the zombie gods either but during what was a quiet time in that period it did fill a nice gap. But this hype was exploited and almost felt pushed into your face sometimes. I'm talking about the kind of hype built here by using clever trailer editing and placement of advertisements and articles around the internet to build things up. Even sadly looking into the company I used to work for this existed. We were encouraged to upsell Dead Island not on its laurels and ingenius ideas, but on the fact that we only had 4 copies left in my store which meant we were almost telling people that they had to buy it because they were all out. No I'm not kidding. I was so appauled by this I took my own little detour on this and decided to talk to people about Space Marine which came out the same week in the UK. I guess part of this is pester power. Seeing throngs of 14-17 year olds asking mummy and daddy or step mummy or granny to pre order it for them and that they would come get it on Saturday and then almost forcing their friends into pre ordering it at fear of not being able to play with them and being turned into a pariah for playing that game that their friends aren't playing. I was going to also inset a comment here about RE6 hype from TV adverts which were exclusively showing CGI FMV footage and not actual gameplay but if I see another mention of 4.5 I'm going to start posting C-virus to people and then kill them using incredibly painful melee controls. My last example of hype is in my eyes kind of both good and bad. Dark Souls. We all know it, some of us love it, some of us cry at hearing the name of it. Building on the sleeper hit of Demon's Souls and making a bigger and better title with more of what people enjoyed. Letting the community build its own hype while straw feeding them little bits of content and footage intravenously was an inspired move and catapulted it to being one of my and many other peoples favourite title of the time. However near the end of its marketting it kind of hit the rocks. Instead of focusing on its mechanic of having the player learn from their mistakes and become better the tagline "Prepare to Die" was used. Now to fans of the series this is just a little fun joke. But it became a tagline for the title. Turning to people and saying hahahaha you will die! Seems a little... cheap? To me it did anyway. If no-one agrees thats fine by me its just my opinion. But it did smack to me a little of marketting over matter. There are many examples of this, I avoided mentioning A:CM because that seemed a little easy and some people kind of saw it coming. The aforementioned RE6. Mass Effect 3, not false marketting just kind of a story failure at the end the rest of the game I really enjoyed it was my first taste of the Mass Effect universe. Resistance 3 too, hyped to my feeling as a pinnacle of the series bringing it into the new age of FPS and yet still holding onto the same control scheme and more brown than a lavatory at a curry festival. What about you, do you think that titles these days are often being over hyped by savvy marketting, maybe you think other wise and many good games get underhyped?