No one can claim this fall & winter are not going to be good seasons for videogame releases, as there will be plenty of blockbuster titles coming out on every console. Perhaps the game I am the most excited about is Fallout 3. I wasn't really following it until the developer walkthrough that they showed at E3 came out, and now I'm retardedly excited about it. The inclusion of the Fat Boy is what pushed me to the must have section. But after my excitement had settled in for a while, I realized that this was the first time I had been this giddy over a videogame in quite some time.
My next question for myself was why don't I get unquestionably excited over games very often? I know when I was a child a game did one of two things for me. It looked really fun and I absolutely had to have it, or it didn't catch my interest. The problem that plagues us nowadays, especially for those who read and/or write for websites such as Destructoid, is we overanalyze everything. A good example for this is Mega Man 9. Like Fallout 3, I am simply excited about Mega Man 9. But when it was announced, many people wanted to break it down. The fact that it had a woman robot master, whether or not it was good to go back to 8-bit graphics, and how the story was going to fit in the canonical Mega Man plotline.
Another example, personally speaking, is Grand Theft Auto. I was 14 years old when Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, and all I knew was that the game was bliss. You were in an open city, free to do whatever you wanted, or so it seemed. I was too busy enjoying my time in Liberty City to notice all the flaws we would point out today. Fast forward to the current era, and Grand Theft Auto 4 has just come out. Was I excited about Grand Theft Auto 4? Yes. Did I enjoy playing it? Again, I did. But I was too frustrated with the driving controls, micromanagement of friends, and the generic mission setups to lose myself in it.
Now, I'm not saying we should just blindly be happy about videogames, completely overlooking any flaws that are presented. Far from it, as most of us can't buy every game that catches our eye, therefore we have to decide if the games will be worth it. But at the end of the day, videogames are for fun. If you are too busy breaking down and analyzing every detail about the game, I hardly see where there's time to have fun, and if you're not having fun then why play videogames at all?
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I also tend to enjoy the hype buildup :)
just check out the part I wrote about MAG on my clog :)
blog here
I hate what not being able to freely play * weeks ahead of time is doing to me :(
But, does that stop me from being excited? No. There's a game coming for the DS in '09 called Infinity Line. I want to just be able to get a release date, and that's it. I don't want to read reviews and previews, because it's those things that killed Wall-E for me.
For example, fighting games with cheap final bosses. This is bad. Now, if I have to DEFEAT those cheap final bosses to unlock all the characters, it's a dealbreaker. I play fighting games for fun, simulated martial arts, not to play against the end boss fifty million times in the hopes that I get lucky and kill him twice in a row and unlock a character. And then do that again 10 times.
Also, I've ridden the hype machine and gotten burned by it. I remember following the hype up to the release of the Wii, reading several stories a day about it. Most did not have any real information, or had information that was FALSE, but I read it anyway because I wanted it to be true. Then when I saw that the Wii wasn't the rainbows and unicorns console I read about on the Internet, I was brought back down to earth. I told myself I wouldn't get addicted to news about an upcoming product again. It's a waste of time because I should STFUAJPG.
People who've seen hundreds and hundreds of movies can't stand to sit through anything with Brendan Fraser in it.
Music aficionados know that pop music is "just not meant for them".
We seasoned video game players know enough now to be skeptical when it comes to the hype about games. Call it "The Jade Raymond" syndrome.
I know all too well your point also.. Last night I was flipping random youtube vids and watched an old video someone shot while waiting in line outside, in the freezing cold in the hopes for buying a Wii on launch day.. That was deff a case of hype, esp. considering _how many people_ were in line. The camera panned around and there were over 100+ people in that line.. And I dunno about you, but I know of nowhere that offered more than 20-30 wii's that launch day.. Anyone past the first 30 were basically screwed, and the first 10 in line (not necessarily) but many of them probably don't even play, nor have that Wii anymore (either bought it and sold it for eBay purposes, OR it just doesn't get played much by now).
::Sigh::
Now I gotta watch some Ren & Stimpy to happy happy joy joy again.
As of late, however, I only seem to get excited about those quirky SRPG's from Nippon Ichi.
This is a good thing, that the industry is still producing titles that mean something to people. It's perhaps not as common as when you were younger, but that's because of the industry's infatuation with big budget/long development schedules and the lack of creativity due to fear of wasting said budget's on a game nobody wants. It sucks, but as you can see from what I said about RE5 and GoW3 and what you say about Fallout, some developers do indeed make games that you just know will be worth every fucking penny.
They're merely past times for me now, with an occasional binge on a new game or a weekend of TF2 and an RTS of some sort. Also I'm starting to build board games, which is pretty much awesome.
@Ron
Yes. Great game, but not worth getting up early every morning to catch the Dojo update. It's Melee 2.