There are some titles that have such a hefty marketing spin it leaves us all pretty dazed - which games could never live up to their reputations on release?
Hype is a way of quantifying imagination. The more someone wants to get their hands on something, that something grows in their head until the reality of it pales in comparison to what their imagination has conjured up. In gaming this is a double-edged sword. On one hand it's awesome to go to midnight launches, glue yourself to a live-stream during E3, and bark about the first thing you're gonna do in that game you've been waiting on for seemingly ever. Being excited for what we don't have is perfectly human, and a great way to get in touch with our inner child - with so many real-life responsibilities it's fun to be a little irrational and find yourself unhealthily excited for a new game. Plus, when a game delivers on that hype, the feeling is magical. Getting blown away by Half-Life 2's physics engine, Mario 64's graphics or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's attention to detail are memories gamers hold close to their heart. On the flip-side, hype leads to entitlement. As a game's possibilities grow in your imagination through previews, demos and forum chatter it's easy to form an idea of what a game should and will be, versus what it actually is. As a result, wonderful games can be received negatively for not delivering on those imagined features, or worse, disregarded because they were too different, or not different enough. Look no further than Watch_Dogs for a modern day example. Thus, hype is a fickle beast - it's ruined good games, maligned great ones, and made us buy ones that barely had any right being released in the first place. Throughout gaming's history there have been countless titles irrevocably entangled with this phenomenon we call hype - oftentimes with catastrophic results. Presented in this totally awesome, best-of-all-time, five-out-of-five-star list are ten such games ruined by hype - both positive and negative. Some may be decent games that couldn't deliver on promises, others can be highly anticipated titles that chose to try something different and paid the price, and in one special a case, a game so good and so well received in beta, that too many people tried to play it to the point where the servers crashed and no one could play it at all.
