Most Overhyped
The biggest caveat in being swept up in the gaming hype cycle is that sometimes you just can’t help but feel a bit disappointed about your latest purchase. Drank a bit much of the Kool-aid, so to speak. Two such culprits immediately spring to mind in 2008. Both of these games went down the well trodden path of having their respective hype machines going for a bit longer than they should have been running. The first had a painstakingly long drip-feed of information every day for a half a year, nourishing its rabid fanbase consistently but eventually leading to an mostly unsurprising game. The other was heralded as the next big thing in gaming every year for the past five years, dazzling everyone with its high concept game play in spite of its continually slow development time. Both of the games had extremely high expectations; and even though those expectations were met on the retail shelves, something about both of them just didn’t sit right with me and I almost felt cheated out of good gaming experiences. Ultimately, the reason that I opted not to declare Super Smash Brothers Brawl as the most overhyped game of 2008 is this: Super Smash Brothers Brawl I can see myself playing with friends in the future. I cannot see myself playing Spore again at all.
Spore was supposed to be one of the most high concept and advanced games ever made; every decision you made had a consequence later on in the evolution. When I finally got my hands on it, I found out that was somewhat true. But I just could not get over the fact that the difficulty was just not there – Spore unfortunately played like a very dumbed down collection of minigames. If I wanted to play an RTS game, I would go and play an RTS game. I would not play Spore in its place.
I will freely admit that the Spore Creature Creator is an exceptionally powerful tool and that it’s still interesting to see what the Spore community is able to make. I’m definitely proud of the Mr. Saturn species that I was eventually able to grow and evolve from its meager roots as a single celled organism. However, the Creature Creator is only a small component of Spore – its just not enough to sustain my interest in the game that was supposed to be the apex of all god games.
