by Antony M. McCartney

Created on: November 04, 2009

Video game fans are hype machines. Something about being a gamer just automatically makes many people over-enthusiastic. With this in mind, you can imagine that many games get far more credit then they are truly due. But wait, still yet there's the video game critics who many gamers follow as if begging for treats. The thing about most of those critics, is that they rarely in my experience have any useful input whatsoever. When I read that a game is a perfect 10/10, I want to see a game with literally no flaws, a game that is fun from the get go and doesn't let up.

Unfortunately I live in the real world. The world where video games can never be properly judged by a numerical rating system. It looks good in the magazines and on game trailers, but I've never played a game that was listed as a 10/10 that didn't have drawbacks. Why? Because all games have drawbacks.

My first hype slashing victim is one of my personal favorites, Final Fantasy VII (FFVII). I can't tell you how many FFVII fanatics there are out there, posting how great it is on ever site they can find. Well I'm going to burst their bubble today, because FFVII was no ground-breaker. It wasn't even the best Final Fantasy, in fact, almost every other Final Fantasy that was released on the Sony PlayStation was better. All FFVII had going for it was the fact that for most role-playing gamers, it was their first big role-playing game (RPG). As this fact passes into the dust, the reason for it's over-hyped status today is that it's an old favorite of the reviewer, who cannot find the integrity to look at the game objectively.

My next victim is Halo. Halo caught the big wave that was Xbox LAN parties. The Xbox was made for multiplayer first person shooters (FPS), and Halo was made for the Xbox. Microsoft threw as much cash as they could spare to make Halo a hit, they knew that they needed their own 'Mario' or 'Sonic' to make an icon that represents a reason to buy their console. It worked too, many people bought the Xbox with Halo at the forefront of their mind. That is why Halo is so overrated, because people do not want to admit that they bought an Xbox solely for a mediocre shooter that pales greatly in comparison to any major PC shooter at the time.

This next game is really two games, but they are so similar and similarly overrated that I thought they should be mentioned together. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 were both almost the same game, one set in a fantasy magical realm and the other in a radioactive post-apocalyptic world. The gameplay was so similar it hurt, especially since I picked up Fallout 3 because Oblivion had gotten far too boring to play. Oblivion was absurdly short for an RPG with a far less interesting world than it's predecessor which had far better gameplay and story. Fallout was so similar to Oblivion that it almost felt boring from the get go. The story was cliche and and the biggest difference from Oblivion, the guns, had a terrible assisted targeting system that took all the fun out of the FPS aspects of it.

These are just some of the games that got the worst of the undeserved hype, many more exist, and I'm sure many will be made this year. Just as movies and books will always have overrated and underrated titles, so will video games.

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