In 1995, it was the Pay-Per-View event of the summer. Mike Tyson, who hadn't fought in three years found a challenger in a hungry (that's the type of adjective you use to describe boxers, right?) Massachusetts fighter named Peter McNeeley. I remember it being hyped for months, and aside from not being a boxing fan in the least, got wrapped up in it.

Fans of the sport will remember how it ended. After two knockdowns in the first round, McNeeley's corner man threw in the towel, and it was all over. Tyson went on to continue his career of, "being an asshole," while after a humorous Pizza Hut commercial, McNeeley returned to Massachusetts with a huge pillowcase of cash upon which to set his bruised ego. It is hard to say he, "lost."

At the time, my understanding of boxing was limited to what I had learned in, "Mike Tyson's Punch Out!" I've never seen all the Rocky movies, and am almost certain I've never seen a single one in its entirety. Since 95, my highest level of enthusiasm for boxing came just recently when both, "Fight Night Round 4" and a remake of, "Punch Out!" came to the modern generation of video game consoles.

What's the point? The point is that hyping a fight raises expectations, and is good for the medium as a whole. It is an interesting proposition to suggest that what is commonly referred to as, 'The Console Wars" may be more effective in raising the collective consciousness of the medium, than it is destructive to objective enthusiast journalism.

Let's take, "inFamous" (Tyson) and, "Prototype" (McNeeley), for instance. In hindsight, inFamous is the superior game, but Prototype sold like crazy. Sure, it was multi-platform, while inFamous is a PS3 exclusive, but it has damning flaws like a difficulty that seemed more like punishment than a challenge, poor draw distance, and graphics that don't exactly match up with this generation's quality. Still, Prototype defenders are well within their right to defend it. Conceptually, it was interesting, and the game play held up enough that with patience, you could trudge through it and come out on the other side, happy.

Would it have sold as well, as a new IP, had there not been a bit of console loyalty? Again, yes, Prototype was multi-platform, but seemed to have been unofficially adopted by the 360 owners. Sure, they dumped a ton of money into endemic advertising. Prototype's developers gave rousing, impassioned interviews about their game. However, you can't discount that when most people heard one game mentioned, even if it was subconscious, they thought of the other. The open-world superhero-ish games were pitted against one another in the public arena, and the result was consciousness raising for the two games, even if individuals had already made up their mind which side they were on.

When two games are spotlighted in this way, the winner get's the honor of being the winner, while a larger audience get's to critically observe what was wrong with the loser to make it such (including the developers), which can aid in how future games by that team are crafted. Video games stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's why when a mechanic works (autosave, regenerating health, cover mechanics, you name it) it becomes the conventional wisdom that all games in that genre adopt what works, and scraps what doesn't. When the stakes are lower, one or both games often fade into obscurity, and whatever made them great or terrible is forgotten in the ocean of electronic entertainment.

We, as gamers, benefit from taking sides pertaining to either consoles, or similar games on the same console. There are reasons why people like Don King and Flavor Flav exist. Hype works, and like they say, "there's no such thing as bad press."

Video game journalism (if you're so inclined to use such a phrase) can't be as biased to the extent they are claimed to be, because there is a million and a half people who want their jobs, and the very position keeps them objective. Fans, however, should not only feel free, but actively seek out an irrational bias toward games, because such emphatic hyperbole makes their case sound exciting, and perhaps someone who otherwise wasn't interested, may become interested. Maybe they'll become invested in the battle. Someone who otherwise would have watched the games pass by unnoticed.

This is all food for thought, and I don't claim to know if fanboyism (note that this is the first time I've used such a word in this blog post) helps or hurts, but it seems to me like it isn't entirely negative. With that, I'll leave you with...

Cave Story coming to WiiWare is totally better than Shadow Complex coming to Xbox Live.
Just trying to help.