When is a game review more interesting than its subject? When there’s hype.
Free Radical, the first-person shooter developer responsible for the original Perfect Dark, the Timesplitters franchise, and GoldenEye 007, are releasing their latest, Haze, this week and it has seen a flurry of coverage in the gaming press and blogosphere. Not because of the game’s release after nearly a year of delays but because it’s getting slammed in western press outlets. Haze isn’t the first marquee Playstation 3 title to see this sort of attention. Factor 5’s much maligned Lair saw the same tar and feathering when it released last August. Lair was a legitimately broken game suffering from an ill-advised decision to implement a purely motion-control interface. Its lambasting by the media became a story in itself because of Factor 5 Julian Eggebrecht’s bombastic response to the criticism. Haze received fairly positive preview coverage in the press late last year when the game was originally supposed to release, preview coverage looking at what was touted to be a close to finished product in need of final polishing. But in the intervening months, as the game has been repeatedly delayed, an air of negativity has surrounded it in news coverage. Is the reason that Haze is getting poor reviews a news story because it’s confirming everyone’s expectations? Is it any different than the downpour of perfect review scores for Grand Theft Auto 4 became a news worthy story?
The real question: does hype, positive or negative, create news where there may not be any?
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