Overshadowed gems
In the gaming world, nothing gets a game exposed quite like hype. Hype is what is born out of all those polished tidbits of in game footage, cutscenes and even just the knowledge that the game comes from some cult background, such as the sequel to a long forgotten classic. While there are titles definitely worthy of the self promotion they receive, there’s more than a fair share of hyped titles that end up flopping harder than a fish out of water (can you say, “Daikatana“?).
This seems very unfair to all those games that should be exemplary titles but end up passing under most people’s radars unnoticed just because there wasn’t a sufficient budget for promotion to get it exposed to the number of gamers they deserved. A perfect example of this has to be Psychonauts. Being the ‘poster child’ of under appreciated games with both weak promotion and bad timing to blame, Psychonauts was a game that had all the makings of a classic, but instead turned into a commercial disaster as it rewarded their developers, Majesco, with nothing but huge amounts of losses and ended in their resignation from the “big budget console game marketplace”. Of course, not many games that weren’t hyped did as badly as Psychonauts, but it serves as a good example.
What rattles me most is the way certain gamers deal with this sort of thing. Instead of actually looking for new games to keep their experience as varied as possible, all they do is lap up whatever morsels of information about their favourite anticipated game get put out into the public and pimp them to all their friends, acting as though it is or will be the best thing that’s ever happened to the gaming community.
In spite of all this, however, it should be noted that the current lineup of games being strongly hyped have great potential at proving their worth. The first of these was BioShock, which literally got perfect scores across multiple review sites – hopefully the rest of the big companies will follow the same trend as they release their entrants into the fray.
Interesting that you posted this only a day after I found a pretty funny review on Psychonauts (“A game where you get to set squirrels on fire cannot be criticized. It’s against the law or something.”). I really gotta get me that game, but I’ll wait till my computer isn’t spurting and dying before so.
I know a few other games that simply did not get the attention they deserve for a number of reasons. One off the top of my head (that I probably told you about numerous times already) is Planescape: Torment. I’m not entirely sure why it bombed, but maybe it had to do with its sophisticated style of dynamic narrative surpassing its somewhat flawed combat system (which was no problem considering you could avoid every single fight in the whole game with the exception of maybe 4 or so, and you got a lot more experience simply by being intelligent in your dialogues and investigations). I guess most gamers still think Diablo is an RPG. I want to chainsaw those people. In the face. (I don’t hate Diablo, by the way. I find it much fun. But it’s not an RPG)