What turned out to be pure hype?

[Qazimod]

[Scruff]

That Demi Hassabis game (Revolution or something?) that he proudly proclaimed had an "infinite polygon engine" and that you could zoom in from outer space down into your little ex Soviet republic and see the bolts in a lamp post or somesuch.

 

Edit* also too early for Star Citizen?

[Quest]

23 minutes ago, David Kenny said:

Breath of the Wild (although I'm guessing that was a joke)

 

It's just El Spatula doing the dreary anti-Nintendo thing he does in every other thread. 

[Mr. Gerbik]

 

Remember this one 

[Oaf]

Girlfriends.

[SMD]

48 minutes ago, David Kenny said:

These threads always turn into "Games I don't like that other people like". Metal Gear Solid V? Horizon Zero Dawn? Breath of the Wild (although I'm guessing that was a joke). These are three absolute classics. Someone will be along to say Elden Ring in a bit.

 

Horizon Zero Dawn is a classic in how dull games built by committee are. What a waste of money and effort.

[K]

48 minutes ago, David Kenny said:

These threads always turn into "Games I don't like that other people like". Metal Gear Solid V? Horizon Zero Dawn? Breath of the Wild (although I'm guessing that was a joke). These are three absolute classics. Someone will be along to say Elden Ring in a bit.

Exactly! Man, do we really need another thread saying “the following games are erroneously considered to be good”? It feels like the last one was about three weeks ago. It’s not like every thread on here isn’t full of digital Martin Luthers bravely fighting the orthodoxy by saying that Halo is right, get this right, prepare for headfuck because everything you know is about to be turned on its head, right, Halo, are you ready you don’t look ready, are you sitting down because this is big, OK, I don’t care who needs to hear this but I’m going to lay it down for y’all, Halo, right is actually shit. 

[Monkeyspill]

L.A. Noire. I liked the setting and really wanted to like the game but there just wasn’t anything there.

[The Mighty Ash]

Vr headsets and 3DTV.

[phillv85]

Watch Dogs, what a fucking turd that was.

[JamesC]

Surely the all time champion in the 'hype vs reality' stakes is this mofo?

 

[JamesC]

In all seriousness, I think the biggest disappoitment for me was probably the Gamecube.

 

I couldn't wait for it to come out and bought it on the strength of a Rogue Leader demo I saw in the shop.

I did have quite a bit of fun with the cube over its lifetime but I always felt a bit bitter about the small library of games. I can still remember the disappointment, walking through the shelves and shelves of PS2 and XBOX games to the tiny Gamecude section at the back of the shop (with a sales chart of games which had been there for weeks).
It didn't help that many of the hyped titles were worse than what had come before - Mario Sunshine, Double Dash and Blue Storm were all duffers.
Metroid Prime and The Wind Waker sweetened the pill but so many of my games were just ports of PS2 games which hadn't been optimised very well.
 

I reckon the Gamecube is a frontrunner as being the best second-console in history, but if it was the only console you owned, you missed out on so much. 

[LowCostMonkey]

Becoming a grown up. 😔

[Sumire]

7 hours ago, MansizeRooster said:

3D TVs. Thank Christ I didn't bother my arse with one of those.

 

I kept mine when I got my 4k. I love the 3D films.

[Siri]

The Phantom.

 

Funny, considering a lot of people on the forum are now consuming digital stuff via services through diskless consoles.

[dumpster]

My Sony 3DTV with active glasses is absolutely awful. You get ghosting effects and the glasses flicker when you look at a window. The 3D effect isn't that deep, as the 3D itself is designed to be working on a cinema screen.  Shrink that down to 55" and it's just rubbish.

 

However, rip that disk and play the file on a VR Headset using the Bigscreen app and 3D movies look incredible. 

[englishbob]

Elden Rings performance mode

[dumpster]

For hype, how about the launch of the PS2?

 

I remember a fax received when working at Game, the PS2 was going to be utterly revolutionary.  The emotion engine had built in physics for simulations of the behaviour of iron filings. What? 

 

The emotion engine could do a whole list of stuff, I only remember the iron filings but there was loads that it could do, and with hindsight it didn't really mean anything.  But it lead to a pre-order campaign and if you didn't pre-order you didn't get one.  Also PS2 was leading the way by having a high quality DVD player built in.  No-one expected a shitty DVD player that gave a green screen if you tried to use an RGB cable. There seemed so much disappointment in PS2 on day one. We ran videos in store of the launch line up and I remember The Bouncer looked fantastic. It wasn't. My favourite launch game was Gradius3&4, which was reported as selling 16 copies nationally on day one.  

 

But ultimately it was the realisation after about 6 months of pre-order campaigning, that PlayStation 2 was a games console.  There was nothing in that launch line up you couldn't have done on a Dreamcast, a console that famously could not compete with what PS2 was imagined to be. One distributor did a Dreamcast with a bundled DVD player for £100 less than the price of a PS2 and still couldn't sell them.  Although while we're on topic it's probably worth mentioning you can't play with 6 billion other players on a Dreamcast either.

[Mr Do 71]

5 hours ago, footle said:

it would certainly be a more interesting thread than the one we’ve had a hundred times before.

Horizon: Zero Dawn - lots of hype, then, oh dear, BoTW is released a couple of weeks later.

Horizon: Forbidden West - much more hype, then, oh dear…

 

Grand Theft Auto 4 - received as you’d expect, but so bleak, nice animation, hamstrung by Rockstars mission design and without the size, humour or online mode of GTA5.

 

GTA 4 was bloody brilliant, and I had thousand times more fun online (free mode and ranked racing) than I’ve ever had with GTA V.

[El Spatula]

1 hour ago, Quest said:

 

It's just El Spatula doing the dreary anti-Nintendo thing he does in every other thread. 

 

Plenty of other people post the same stupid shit in every other thread. It's predictable as fuck.

[Thor]

Pure hype?  The Getaway.

[Fry Crayola]

Amstrad Action's coverage of Street Fighter II. Columns and pages over several months that promised we'd eventually get to see a game that never turned up at all. The Speccy got a port and I expect the CPC version would have been based on it, but there was no point.

[Mr. Gerbik]

34 minutes ago, Thor said:

Pure hype?  The Getaway.

Ah I remember edge salivating over 100% genuine honest guv in-game screenshots like this one:

 

A PS2 sandbox game

[Harsin]

Evolve

 

Went from the games media breathlessly enthusing about it and picking up pre-release awards left right and centre.

 

 

To be released to an apathetic shrug, selling about as well as Gary Glitter CDs and quickly put in the recycle bin of the collective consciousness. As people quickly realised that the actual gameplay bore little resemblances to PR gonks providing carefully curated experiences to games journos.

[Gotters]

39 minutes ago, Thor said:

Pure hype?  The Getaway.

 

But it did give us 2 seasons and counting of the excellently trash Gangs of London on Sky

 

https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/24/gangs-london-wait-based-game-12605536/

 

trigger warning for fan-persons of Sony hardware, that article contains the words 

 

Gangs Of London, meanwhile, was a much smaller title developed and published by Sony for their equally small and barely remembered PlayStation Portable (PSP)

[KriessG]

1 hour ago, The Mighty Ash said:

Vr headsets and 3DTV.

Games like Astro Bot, Superhot, Beat Saber and more gave me experiences and the wow factor with games I’d not had since a child. VR is only going to get better too. Basically, 1 is nothing like the other.

[Siri]

54 minutes ago, dumpster said:

For hype, how about the launch of the PS2?

 

My thoughts are probably through rose-tinted glasses as it was a Christmas gift, but I thought the launch was great. I loved playing Tekken Tag Tournament and Timesplitters, and I could finally unwrap my copies of Fight Club and The Matrix to watch on it.

 

The period between that Christmas and Zone of the Enders was pretty wank, though. I think I spent most of it playing FFIX, as that also just came out. Backwards compatibility was great during that period of time.

[K]

The launch of the PS2 wasn't the high point of its existence, but within a year, we had GTA 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Rez, Gran Turismo 3, Devil May Cry, Silent Hill 2, Ico, Burnout, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, SSX Tricky and Tony Hawk's 3. Which is as good a lineup as you could ever reasonably expect to have. In fact, I'd argue that 2001 was the best ever year for games given that we also got Halo, Amped, Project Gotham Racing, Civilization 3, Baldur's Gate 2, Max Payne, Advance Wars and Super Monkey Ball, but the PS2 was a huge part of why that was such a great year.

[Timmo]

1 hour ago, englishbob said:

Elden Rings performance mode

PS4 version on a PS5 was undoubtedly the best way to play on console. 

[dumpster]

That's true, and maybe my view is affected by working in games retail at the time.  But back then it felt so hard to build up excitement about what we had in store because PS2 was coming out.  If I remember, back then a DVD player was still going to set you back £200 or so, and PS2 would play DVDs so it was a no brainer.  And the emotion engine! This thing feels emotion! 

 

It felt like the forthcoming PS2 was going to be streets ahead of the competition and to be fair (as stated above) once you had Metal Gear 2 etc you could see it was a decent bit of kit.  But before launch the whole store felt a bit stagnant with people unwilling to invest in anything new because the PS2 was coming, would play DVDs, was 10 times better than anything, it makes the tea, wanks you off, does the dishes, best thing ever....  Pre-order demand was through the roof... And yet there was a lot of great stuff happening that was being overlooked because PlayStation was coming.  And when it launched, it was a box, a controller, and Tekken.  Nothing wrong with that, but the hype had lead some people to believe it would be world changing and it really wasn't... At least not until the Metal Gears etc came along.