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Video games are a massive industry now, and because of that, games publishers hire huge PR agencies and advertising companies to sell a game or console, and hype is one of the main weapons in their armoury.
With Christmas now approaching quicker than Linford Christie on jet-propelled rocket-skates, the big Christmas gaming hype machine has been in overdrive for the past few weeks. Every time you turn on the TV or open a newspaper you’re being exposed to all the advertising hype for things you want and things you don’t.
I don’t mind a bit of hype as it can add excitement and anticipation to a big game/film etc, just so long as the end product that’s being hyped up ends up being really good.
However, with all this hype flying around for various games at the present time, the actual quality of some of those games seems to be ignored. This brings me onto my prime example: The Getaway.
Hype has astronomical influences in the world of video games. We’ve all been sucked in by hype at some point over the years, some more than others (i.e. the people who keep buying FIFA games every six months because “the adverts look cool”, even though the footage in the ads is taken from a high-end super computer), and The Getaway is another sad case of too much hype which has masked a poor game.
Rumoured to have cost millions of pounds and been 4 or so years in development, this “game” has been hyped up quite a bit, with TV, newspaper and magazine ads, and plenty of word-of-mouth hype from eager gamers. I hadn’t really paid much attention to all the publicity and propaganda, but from what I had read in these forums, seen in magazines and at the Playstation Experience, I thought it looked/sounded like a pretty decent game. However, I thought wrong.
The Getaway is without a doubt the biggest steaming pile of gaming bum juice I have played this year, made even worse by the fact it was a hyped up as a potential AAA title and lorded over by many blinded zealots. It’s got some ridiculously high scores, even though it’s terrible. However, despite being a naff game riddled with a high amount of frustrating gameplay flaws, all the hype has paid off for Sony, as the game stormed straight into the coveted number 1 slot in both the All Format and PS2 charts. This is where all the hype came in to play.
How a bad game has got all these great reviews beats me, all I know is that at the end of the day, I am a consumer, and as such I want to hear the truth from reviews. I don’t want recycled PR propaganda from the official magazines. I want to know, honestly, if a game is good or bad. I want an opinion not a hyped advert.
Lucky for me, I got The Getaway free on a GAD (thanks SR…I think ;), but I would be highly disappointed had I bought the game from the glowing reviews only to discover its blatant badness.
Would you like it if Jonathan Ross (or Paul Ross) gave Battlefield Earth 10/10 saying it was “the best sci-fi action adventure since Star Wars” but you wasted your money on seeing it and found it to be crap? No, you’d want to know if it is any good, not just hype.
Whenever you write a review, you are signing an invisible oath to tell the truth about the game you are reviewing. I have posted an honest review of The Getaway as I feel I owe it to a potential customer to tell the truth in a review, it’s the difference between getting a decent game or wasting money on a crap one. You never know, someone might actually use those reviews as a guideline as to what to buy, and with the average customer score of 9/10, it appears The Getaway is a very great game, which is far from the truth, so they might end up wasting their money on a poor game.
Some of those who have reviewed The Getaway on here might really like the game, and of course they’re entitled to their opinion, but to give the game 9 or 10 out of 10 is just blindly giving in to the hype and not telling the consumer the awful flaws it has, which is disappointing. Sure, it has some good features and the expansive London backdrop is OK (plus I’m sure all the kids who got their parents to buy the game for them love the swearing), but the poor camera, awful sluggish controls, dull graphics, patchy AI, poor vehicle handling, weird running up stairs animation etc just made the game really very poor, so why all the high scores?!
Hype certainly has a lot to answer for in this matter. Sony, or any other PR heavy games company, could release ‘Horse Manure: The Game’, “an epic stallion dung based adventure set in the land of pooh”, they would hype it up to blind gaming zealots, release super computer mock-up screenshots to hide the terrible graphics of the actual game, perhaps put in plenty of gratuitous swearing, make the word of mouth hype spread, the official magazines would give near top marks as always, and they’d get to number 1. All this thanks to the hype.
At the end of the day, if we consistently let poor games like The Getaway, Harry Potter, FIFA 98, 99, 00, 01, 02, 03, etc, get hype and therefore high sales, it will just further encourage developers/publishers to make second rate games, hype them up and get guaranteed sale success.
Lets have a bit of honesty in reviews, and not just hype. It doesn’t hurt to tell the truth, if a big, highly anticipated game is bad, lets swallow our pride/anticipation/vain hope it’s good, and tell it like it is and not fall for all the stupid hype that gets shoved down our throats.
With Christmas now approaching quicker than Linford Christie on jet-propelled rocket-skates, the big Christmas gaming hype machine has been in overdrive for the past few weeks. Every time you turn on the TV or open a newspaper you’re being exposed to all the advertising hype for things you want and things you don’t.
I don’t mind a bit of hype as it can add excitement and anticipation to a big game/film etc, just so long as the end product that’s being hyped up ends up being really good.
However, with all this hype flying around for various games at the present time, the actual quality of some of those games seems to be ignored. This brings me onto my prime example: The Getaway.
Hype has astronomical influences in the world of video games. We’ve all been sucked in by hype at some point over the years, some more than others (i.e. the people who keep buying FIFA games every six months because “the adverts look cool”, even though the footage in the ads is taken from a high-end super computer), and The Getaway is another sad case of too much hype which has masked a poor game.
Rumoured to have cost millions of pounds and been 4 or so years in development, this “game” has been hyped up quite a bit, with TV, newspaper and magazine ads, and plenty of word-of-mouth hype from eager gamers. I hadn’t really paid much attention to all the publicity and propaganda, but from what I had read in these forums, seen in magazines and at the Playstation Experience, I thought it looked/sounded like a pretty decent game. However, I thought wrong.
The Getaway is without a doubt the biggest steaming pile of gaming bum juice I have played this year, made even worse by the fact it was a hyped up as a potential AAA title and lorded over by many blinded zealots. It’s got some ridiculously high scores, even though it’s terrible. However, despite being a naff game riddled with a high amount of frustrating gameplay flaws, all the hype has paid off for Sony, as the game stormed straight into the coveted number 1 slot in both the All Format and PS2 charts. This is where all the hype came in to play.
How a bad game has got all these great reviews beats me, all I know is that at the end of the day, I am a consumer, and as such I want to hear the truth from reviews. I don’t want recycled PR propaganda from the official magazines. I want to know, honestly, if a game is good or bad. I want an opinion not a hyped advert.
Lucky for me, I got The Getaway free on a GAD (thanks SR…I think ;), but I would be highly disappointed had I bought the game from the glowing reviews only to discover its blatant badness.
Would you like it if Jonathan Ross (or Paul Ross) gave Battlefield Earth 10/10 saying it was “the best sci-fi action adventure since Star Wars” but you wasted your money on seeing it and found it to be crap? No, you’d want to know if it is any good, not just hype.
Whenever you write a review, you are signing an invisible oath to tell the truth about the game you are reviewing. I have posted an honest review of The Getaway as I feel I owe it to a potential customer to tell the truth in a review, it’s the difference between getting a decent game or wasting money on a crap one. You never know, someone might actually use those reviews as a guideline as to what to buy, and with the average customer score of 9/10, it appears The Getaway is a very great game, which is far from the truth, so they might end up wasting their money on a poor game.
Some of those who have reviewed The Getaway on here might really like the game, and of course they’re entitled to their opinion, but to give the game 9 or 10 out of 10 is just blindly giving in to the hype and not telling the consumer the awful flaws it has, which is disappointing. Sure, it has some good features and the expansive London backdrop is OK (plus I’m sure all the kids who got their parents to buy the game for them love the swearing), but the poor camera, awful sluggish controls, dull graphics, patchy AI, poor vehicle handling, weird running up stairs animation etc just made the game really very poor, so why all the high scores?!
Hype certainly has a lot to answer for in this matter. Sony, or any other PR heavy games company, could release ‘Horse Manure: The Game’, “an epic stallion dung based adventure set in the land of pooh”, they would hype it up to blind gaming zealots, release super computer mock-up screenshots to hide the terrible graphics of the actual game, perhaps put in plenty of gratuitous swearing, make the word of mouth hype spread, the official magazines would give near top marks as always, and they’d get to number 1. All this thanks to the hype.
At the end of the day, if we consistently let poor games like The Getaway, Harry Potter, FIFA 98, 99, 00, 01, 02, 03, etc, get hype and therefore high sales, it will just further encourage developers/publishers to make second rate games, hype them up and get guaranteed sale success.
Lets have a bit of honesty in reviews, and not just hype. It doesn’t hurt to tell the truth, if a big, highly anticipated game is bad, lets swallow our pride/anticipation/vain hope it’s good, and tell it like it is and not fall for all the stupid hype that gets shoved down our throats.
Totoro wrote:
> It was more the customer reviews on here I was thinking of. Although
> we see lots of hype in the magazines, many of the customer reviews
> sadly don't tell of the games obvious shortcomings.
> As I said in the main post, the customer review writers are all
> entitled to their opinions of course, but I just can't believe that so
> many have deemed The Getaway as such a great game when it's not. Maybe
> they think that by giving the game a low score it would lower the
> chances of Special Reserve giving them a GAD for their review as
> they'd prefer 'sale making reviews'.
It's possible, but the age old addage of "One man's heaven is another man's hell" applies here. Hell we've all been there, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the universe to actually get some enjoyment out of Clayfighter 63 1/3on the N64. Everyone else hated it but I found it fun for a short time. Personally, I think The Getaway's a great game, it's certainly not without it's flaws but it's still great fun to play.
> It was more the customer reviews on here I was thinking of. Although
> we see lots of hype in the magazines, many of the customer reviews
> sadly don't tell of the games obvious shortcomings.
> As I said in the main post, the customer review writers are all
> entitled to their opinions of course, but I just can't believe that so
> many have deemed The Getaway as such a great game when it's not. Maybe
> they think that by giving the game a low score it would lower the
> chances of Special Reserve giving them a GAD for their review as
> they'd prefer 'sale making reviews'.
It's possible, but the age old addage of "One man's heaven is another man's hell" applies here. Hell we've all been there, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the universe to actually get some enjoyment out of Clayfighter 63 1/3on the N64. Everyone else hated it but I found it fun for a short time. Personally, I think The Getaway's a great game, it's certainly not without it's flaws but it's still great fun to play.
RastaBillySkank wrote:
> The reason why you can't trust company or official magazines/sites
> reviews is because they have the obligation to hype up the product to
> make a sale.
It was more the customer reviews on here I was thinking of. Although we see lots of hype in the magazines, many of the customer reviews sadly don't tell of the games obvious shortcomings.
As I said in the main post, the customer review writers are all entitled to their opinions of course, but I just can't believe that so many have deemed The Getaway as such a great game when it's not. Maybe they think that by giving the game a low score it would lower the chances of Special Reserve giving them a GAD for their review as they'd prefer 'sale making reviews'.
I just think that many reviewers have got caught up in the hype for the big game and haven't really noticed that it's below par.
Blinded by hype methinks.
> The reason why you can't trust company or official magazines/sites
> reviews is because they have the obligation to hype up the product to
> make a sale.
It was more the customer reviews on here I was thinking of. Although we see lots of hype in the magazines, many of the customer reviews sadly don't tell of the games obvious shortcomings.
As I said in the main post, the customer review writers are all entitled to their opinions of course, but I just can't believe that so many have deemed The Getaway as such a great game when it's not. Maybe they think that by giving the game a low score it would lower the chances of Special Reserve giving them a GAD for their review as they'd prefer 'sale making reviews'.
I just think that many reviewers have got caught up in the hype for the big game and haven't really noticed that it's below par.
Blinded by hype methinks.
RastaBillySkank wrote:
> company
should have been developing/publishing company (IE the games designer or publisher)
> company
should have been developing/publishing company (IE the games designer or publisher)
The reason why you can't trust company or official magazines/sites reviews is because they have the obligation to hype up the product to make a sale.
Good post.
Good post.
erm, The Getaway IS a great game, and shouldnt only be my opinion, but yours too.
Hype is our friend, but can downgrade stuff sometimes.
Ah i love hype gives me butterflies.
Video games are a massive industry now, and because of that, games publishers hire huge PR agencies and advertising companies to sell a game or console, and hype is one of the main weapons in their armoury.
With Christmas now approaching quicker than Linford Christie on jet-propelled rocket-skates, the big Christmas gaming hype machine has been in overdrive for the past few weeks. Every time you turn on the TV or open a newspaper you’re being exposed to all the advertising hype for things you want and things you don’t.
I don’t mind a bit of hype as it can add excitement and anticipation to a big game/film etc, just so long as the end product that’s being hyped up ends up being really good.
However, with all this hype flying around for various games at the present time, the actual quality of some of those games seems to be ignored. This brings me onto my prime example: The Getaway.
Hype has astronomical influences in the world of video games. We’ve all been sucked in by hype at some point over the years, some more than others (i.e. the people who keep buying FIFA games every six months because “the adverts look cool”, even though the footage in the ads is taken from a high-end super computer), and The Getaway is another sad case of too much hype which has masked a poor game.
Rumoured to have cost millions of pounds and been 4 or so years in development, this “game” has been hyped up quite a bit, with TV, newspaper and magazine ads, and plenty of word-of-mouth hype from eager gamers. I hadn’t really paid much attention to all the publicity and propaganda, but from what I had read in these forums, seen in magazines and at the Playstation Experience, I thought it looked/sounded like a pretty decent game. However, I thought wrong.
The Getaway is without a doubt the biggest steaming pile of gaming bum juice I have played this year, made even worse by the fact it was a hyped up as a potential AAA title and lorded over by many blinded zealots. It’s got some ridiculously high scores, even though it’s terrible. However, despite being a naff game riddled with a high amount of frustrating gameplay flaws, all the hype has paid off for Sony, as the game stormed straight into the coveted number 1 slot in both the All Format and PS2 charts. This is where all the hype came in to play.
How a bad game has got all these great reviews beats me, all I know is that at the end of the day, I am a consumer, and as such I want to hear the truth from reviews. I don’t want recycled PR propaganda from the official magazines. I want to know, honestly, if a game is good or bad. I want an opinion not a hyped advert.
Lucky for me, I got The Getaway free on a GAD (thanks SR…I think ;), but I would be highly disappointed had I bought the game from the glowing reviews only to discover its blatant badness.
Would you like it if Jonathan Ross (or Paul Ross) gave Battlefield Earth 10/10 saying it was “the best sci-fi action adventure since Star Wars” but you wasted your money on seeing it and found it to be crap? No, you’d want to know if it is any good, not just hype.
Whenever you write a review, you are signing an invisible oath to tell the truth about the game you are reviewing. I have posted an honest review of The Getaway as I feel I owe it to a potential customer to tell the truth in a review, it’s the difference between getting a decent game or wasting money on a crap one. You never know, someone might actually use those reviews as a guideline as to what to buy, and with the average customer score of 9/10, it appears The Getaway is a very great game, which is far from the truth, so they might end up wasting their money on a poor game.
Some of those who have reviewed The Getaway on here might really like the game, and of course they’re entitled to their opinion, but to give the game 9 or 10 out of 10 is just blindly giving in to the hype and not telling the consumer the awful flaws it has, which is disappointing. Sure, it has some good features and the expansive London backdrop is OK (plus I’m sure all the kids who got their parents to buy the game for them love the swearing), but the poor camera, awful sluggish controls, dull graphics, patchy AI, poor vehicle handling, weird running up stairs animation etc just made the game really very poor, so why all the high scores?!
Hype certainly has a lot to answer for in this matter. Sony, or any other PR heavy games company, could release ‘Horse Manure: The Game’, “an epic stallion dung based adventure set in the land of pooh”, they would hype it up to blind gaming zealots, release super computer mock-up screenshots to hide the terrible graphics of the actual game, perhaps put in plenty of gratuitous swearing, make the word of mouth hype spread, the official magazines would give near top marks as always, and they’d get to number 1. All this thanks to the hype.
At the end of the day, if we consistently let poor games like The Getaway, Harry Potter, FIFA 98, 99, 00, 01, 02, 03, etc, get hype and therefore high sales, it will just further encourage developers/publishers to make second rate games, hype them up and get guaranteed sale success.
Lets have a bit of honesty in reviews, and not just hype. It doesn’t hurt to tell the truth, if a big, highly anticipated game is bad, lets swallow our pride/anticipation/vain hope it’s good, and tell it like it is and not fall for all the stupid hype that gets shoved down our throats.
With Christmas now approaching quicker than Linford Christie on jet-propelled rocket-skates, the big Christmas gaming hype machine has been in overdrive for the past few weeks. Every time you turn on the TV or open a newspaper you’re being exposed to all the advertising hype for things you want and things you don’t.
I don’t mind a bit of hype as it can add excitement and anticipation to a big game/film etc, just so long as the end product that’s being hyped up ends up being really good.
However, with all this hype flying around for various games at the present time, the actual quality of some of those games seems to be ignored. This brings me onto my prime example: The Getaway.
Hype has astronomical influences in the world of video games. We’ve all been sucked in by hype at some point over the years, some more than others (i.e. the people who keep buying FIFA games every six months because “the adverts look cool”, even though the footage in the ads is taken from a high-end super computer), and The Getaway is another sad case of too much hype which has masked a poor game.
Rumoured to have cost millions of pounds and been 4 or so years in development, this “game” has been hyped up quite a bit, with TV, newspaper and magazine ads, and plenty of word-of-mouth hype from eager gamers. I hadn’t really paid much attention to all the publicity and propaganda, but from what I had read in these forums, seen in magazines and at the Playstation Experience, I thought it looked/sounded like a pretty decent game. However, I thought wrong.
The Getaway is without a doubt the biggest steaming pile of gaming bum juice I have played this year, made even worse by the fact it was a hyped up as a potential AAA title and lorded over by many blinded zealots. It’s got some ridiculously high scores, even though it’s terrible. However, despite being a naff game riddled with a high amount of frustrating gameplay flaws, all the hype has paid off for Sony, as the game stormed straight into the coveted number 1 slot in both the All Format and PS2 charts. This is where all the hype came in to play.
How a bad game has got all these great reviews beats me, all I know is that at the end of the day, I am a consumer, and as such I want to hear the truth from reviews. I don’t want recycled PR propaganda from the official magazines. I want to know, honestly, if a game is good or bad. I want an opinion not a hyped advert.
Lucky for me, I got The Getaway free on a GAD (thanks SR…I think ;), but I would be highly disappointed had I bought the game from the glowing reviews only to discover its blatant badness.
Would you like it if Jonathan Ross (or Paul Ross) gave Battlefield Earth 10/10 saying it was “the best sci-fi action adventure since Star Wars” but you wasted your money on seeing it and found it to be crap? No, you’d want to know if it is any good, not just hype.
Whenever you write a review, you are signing an invisible oath to tell the truth about the game you are reviewing. I have posted an honest review of The Getaway as I feel I owe it to a potential customer to tell the truth in a review, it’s the difference between getting a decent game or wasting money on a crap one. You never know, someone might actually use those reviews as a guideline as to what to buy, and with the average customer score of 9/10, it appears The Getaway is a very great game, which is far from the truth, so they might end up wasting their money on a poor game.
Some of those who have reviewed The Getaway on here might really like the game, and of course they’re entitled to their opinion, but to give the game 9 or 10 out of 10 is just blindly giving in to the hype and not telling the consumer the awful flaws it has, which is disappointing. Sure, it has some good features and the expansive London backdrop is OK (plus I’m sure all the kids who got their parents to buy the game for them love the swearing), but the poor camera, awful sluggish controls, dull graphics, patchy AI, poor vehicle handling, weird running up stairs animation etc just made the game really very poor, so why all the high scores?!
Hype certainly has a lot to answer for in this matter. Sony, or any other PR heavy games company, could release ‘Horse Manure: The Game’, “an epic stallion dung based adventure set in the land of pooh”, they would hype it up to blind gaming zealots, release super computer mock-up screenshots to hide the terrible graphics of the actual game, perhaps put in plenty of gratuitous swearing, make the word of mouth hype spread, the official magazines would give near top marks as always, and they’d get to number 1. All this thanks to the hype.
At the end of the day, if we consistently let poor games like The Getaway, Harry Potter, FIFA 98, 99, 00, 01, 02, 03, etc, get hype and therefore high sales, it will just further encourage developers/publishers to make second rate games, hype them up and get guaranteed sale success.
Lets have a bit of honesty in reviews, and not just hype. It doesn’t hurt to tell the truth, if a big, highly anticipated game is bad, lets swallow our pride/anticipation/vain hope it’s good, and tell it like it is and not fall for all the stupid hype that gets shoved down our throats.