There is one singular building block that all game publishers view as tantamount to success. It is not good Q/A practices, it is not good version control, nor is it proper coding standards. It is publicity, marketing, and hype. As we all know, hype has almost nothing to do with the actual work needed to create a good game. But it can make the difference between shipping junk and shipping junk that sells 400,000 copies in the first week.

Thus, I present my list of the games that are far too overhyped for their own good.
#1
Spore
While likely to become a seminal game, and one of the most original experiences yet seen in videogaming, it’s unlikely that Spore will offer gameplay that is compelling and long-lived enough to capture people the same way that The Sims did. My colleague agrees. With initial estimates of evolution gameplay weighing in at around 10 hours, it looks like flying around the galaxy is the heart of the game. Sure, that’ll be fun, but will it keep you addicted? I’d bet against that. Spore will not be another SimCity.
#2
Second Life
Want to see a virtual world where fun and games are built by inexperienced and creative people every day? Try playing some custom Warcraft III games. Want to watch a bunch of furries sit lifeless in front of slot machines for 15 hours at a time? Try Second Life. As a technology demo and collaborative virtual world, certainly Second Life is fascinating and filled with all manner of odd and unusual persons/places/things. But as a game, Second Life might as well be IRC: every day, thousands of people play Star Trek, Vampire, and D&D games over IRC. That doesn’t make IRC a game. [GG’s editor, of course, begs to differ. – WJA]
#3
Whatever’s Next for Kingdom Hearts
A lengthy game that blended old-skool button mashing action with modern cross-media licensing deals. The power in this game came from the cross-breeding of two of the best loved IP’s in the business. A marketing team just rubbed their filthy hands together until this beast-spawn was birthed forth. Many players get weepy-eyed over this type of game, reminiscing about the loss of innocence and so forth. There was never any innocence here. Rather, there was simply a lashing together of known working gameplay elements, puzzles, and properties. This happens all the time in Hollywood: take a standard movie genre (zombie picture), add in elements from other popular movies (romantic comedy), stir until ready for serving: Shaun of the Dead. Certainly, I loved Shaun of the Dead. But is it as good as the Godfather, or The Big Lebowski? Hell no. And neither, too, is Kingdom Hearts as good as the best Final Fantasy, or the best Disney film. Sure, I played the hell out of the first one, but is there really a need for sequels?
#4
Anything on the Nintendo Wii
Ground breaking controls, or not, there is very little on the Wii that makes all the hyperactive excitement really relevant. Witness the origins of the analog stick. Mario 64 made beautiful use of the device, but most everything that arrived for the system in the first year was sub-par and did not use the input method to its full effect. Witness the Wii: a system just aching for final-gen games. As much as we all love Wii sports, the underlying mechanics and interactions are still rough and unsatisfying. It’s all a cheap trick to keep you engaged in Game n’ Watch type-gameplay. Zelda aside, there’s nothing else coming for the Wii that will be considered a classic any time soon.
#5
Halo 3
Halo was the Jesus of games: bringing existing philosophical ideals to the unwashed masses. Until it arrived, most of its enthusiasts hadn’t experienced multiplayer FPS action. Hardcore fans will tell you that Marathon did everything Halo 1 did, 8 years before Halo did it. Halo 2 just added the online element. Great presentation, extremely high production values. What could Halo 3 possibly bring to the table that isn’t here already? Bungie, like any good design house, runs an evolutionary process around each game, until it builds a new property, then repeats the process all over again. This has, traditionally, only allowed for two versions of each game, with the addition of a pseudo-third later on. Thus, Bungie has never pushed a franchise to a full third installment. Marathon Infinity, it’s previous third, was merely a shell of a campaign coupled with oodles of tools and fan-made content aimed at allowing people to build new gameplay and maps. Myth 3 was not even made by Bungie. Halo 3? Unless Bungie includes some serious editing tools, there’s no room to add anything supremely new to the mix. Look for Halo 2.5 rather than Halo 3.
#6
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusades
Another dose of methadone for the addicted masses. Or is it morphine? Or heroin? When you get right down to it, Burning Crusades is just another entry-point into the addiction. With more loot, more instances, more races, more territory to explore, you’d think there would be something here that broke the monotony. The constant, agonizing monotony of pushing “1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 1, 5, 3, 6″ and then clicking a few times. What good are new races when you have to grind through 60 levels of boring repetitive crap to get to the new stuff?
#7
Command & Conquer 3
Yeah, it’s not out yet, but as we all know by now: C&C sucks, Red Alert refines what’s broken a year later.
#8
Quake Anything
Does anyone actually play Quake anymore? With Unreal Tournament making mod’ers lives easier, and Half-Life 2 sucking all the air out of the FPS room, poor lonely Quake just can’t find a way to innovate or provide new gameplay hooks. Too bad, as it is the original, and still the best at the death match.
#9
Anything played on a phone
Real games aren’t played on phones. At this year’s GDC, numerous developers pit their mobile phone games against one another in a rowdy smack-down where the audience drunkenly applauded the games they felt were most innovative. There were no clear winners, though the judges on stage did pick their personal favorites. Unfortunately, the only true innovation at the event was a bluetooth analog thumb stick used to play games on a phone. If that’s what passes for innovation in the phone space, just write off the whole fricking industry as a money-sucking hole of opportunistic marketers, and forget about looking for any real gameplay. After all, these games are sold by name alone, through the convoluted sales channels of our nation’s largest telecommunications bureaucracies. Even if a mobile phone game appeared that had a lick of fun to it, it’d be lost under mountains of variation between handsets, carriers, and regions.
Of course, that isn’t to say that mobile publishers aren’t making oodles of cash anyway…
#10
Metal Gear Solid 4
Don’t get me wrong: I know this game will sell millions of copies. But for Christ’s sake, will you stop with all the talking and let me play the game, Kojima-san? If you thought previous Metal Gear Solid’s were long-winded and filled with endless dialog, just how much talking do you think Konami will cram into a Blu-Ray? Expect endlessly boring diatribes about the Iraq war and president Bush, thinly veiled as metaphors about Snake’s childhood.
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