Nearly every major game release is preceded by the public release of tangible evidence of the developer's progress with the product. This comes in the form of game demos, videos and screenshots. When the game in question is a first-person shooter, there's usually little doubt about what the game will look like when you play it. Even with the fancy angles depicted in videos and screenshots, you'll almost always get a look at what the game looks like in action.

Now, when I say in action, I don't mean "in-engine." Sure, the Company of Heroes trailers are "in-engine," but do you ever actually get an idea of what playing the game will be like? Only on an extremely rare occasion will you see the cursor and HUD that's actually controlling the action happening on the battlefield.

I like a good cinematic trailer as much as the next guy, regardless of the inability to reproduce such vistas in real gameplay, but when a game comes out and I haven't even seen the GUI, it makes me think that the designers don't really want you to focus on that part of the game. This is the "graphical user interface" we're talking about here. Sure, all the pretty stuff goes on in the 3D battlefield below, but you can't get to the game at all if you can't interact with it in the first place.

Don't take this as some cockeyed plea to game PR specialists to release screens of the "options" menu of their upcoming game. Sure, that stuff is important to some degree, but if I don't have to deal with it during the actual gameplay, it can be overlooked, especially for pre-release photos. Hiding the entire HUD from me in an RTS "gameplay video" doesn't give me confidence in the playability of the final product. When I watch a gameplay video, I want to see the game being played. What I don't want to see it some doctored-up version of what the game looks like.

I believe that there has been a recent exception to this trend of hiding the RTS GUI, in the form of Joint Task Force. In at least one of the videos shown here on GameSpot the GUI can be clearly seen, which gives me a lot of confidence that the visuals demonstrated can actually be recreated in the course of playing the game. Games like choose to use exclusively demo-recorded and cinematically organized footage to demonstrate their engine (see "Company of Heroes Gameplay Demonstration). I do like the Company of Heroes game engine, from what they've shown me so far, but do I think I'll like the game? I don't have a clue, because I haven't seen what the game actually looks like yet, unless Company of Heroes is going to claim you can interface with the game entirely telepathically.

So even though a major appeal in a modern RTS may be its graphics, as they are in almost any game to come out nowadays, I think the only way for potential players - and therefore customers - to accurately judge the game experience is to give them the real game experience, which only seems to come in the form of demos anymore. Demos are becoming rare as well, but that's another issue entirely.