I am sick and tired of a largely overhyped game forcing its way into my mind and somehow on its way onto my shelf next to my small-but-proud collection of games!

This seemingly random rant comes to you today because of my most recent trip to Gamestop! Yay! You see, I was having a bad day and I needed something that would allow me to blow a thing up or two that was fresh. Now you all know I have pretty high standards, so long story short, I decided to buy the extremely-underhyped Civilization Revolution for the Xbox360.

Now, I didn't have any money to buy this, so I needed to get some money, so obviously it was time to get rid of some hype and one game I didn't want anymore;

The Hype:

Resident Evil 5

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Old Game:

Pokemon Diamond (Tch, I have Platinum now...)

I ended up getting twice the amount I needed to buy my game. First things first, though. Those of you who know my insane almost-fanboy-ish love for the RE franchise would be shocked to see my classification of it as; "Hyped". Here's why:

The Story was mediocre

The Gameplay didn't change

The Voice Acting was shotty at some parts

The Game was criminally short

The Price tag was too high

I should not have pre-ordered it

I beat it in two days

It was horrible

Huge dissapointment

I wanted to be a zombie so Sheva would shoot me

Wesker was a wuss

I bought the versus mode only to find out the data was encrypted on the disk already

The game sucked

It was horrible

It reminded me of Sonic '06

Sorry, those were becoming opinions. Anyway, for some reason that game got onto my shelf. And I was wondering at first, how I bought it in the first place without reading any reviews, and then after reading reviews, I wondered, why does this game suck?

So I have a theory. Let's say, for instance, Mass Effect 2 sucks (Which it had BETTER NOT! This is an EXAMPLE people!) will you still buy it after playing the simply magnificent and gripping first installment?

To be honest, I would.

This is my theory: when a good game is released, its publishers immediately look at two things; sales and fanbase. Since we all know what I mean by sales I'll just go into fanbase; does the game have an affect on the gaming industry and the players in it? If both of these things look positive, it's time for a sequel.

For the fanbase, which is essentially us normal gamers, the company will do as much as it can to make you excited for the game. This can be shown largely through Bungie's Halo 3 launch, it was undeniably the biggest video game launch in history, and I'm not just talking about Sales, lines were formed that were hours long to get the game, people skipped work to play it, Hell it made the news because of that! Reviewers threw perfect scores at it without a second thought, and in the end, what did we get? A mediocre story with decent multiplayer. Oh, and pants-on-head-retarded AI (10 points to whomever caught the reference).

The companies hugely invest in the hope that the fans will instantly fall in love with whatever screenshots of the sequel they release and rumors that their company "accidentally" leaks about the game. This makes a game almost mouth-watering for us gamers, a good example of this would be Super Smash Bros. brawl. Who else went on smashbros.com every weekday to see the update, and always practically praying you would see the, "Challenger Approaching!" banner across the screen? I did.

So, when a game is finally released, it's up to reviewers to tell us if it's good or not. And I'm starting to wonder if it matters, the game is still going to be bought by those who hyped it to no end before its release, and people who just like the box design are going to buy it, too.

Let me ask a simple question, if it got bad reviews, would you buy;

Mass Effect 2?

Bioshock 2?

Halo: ODST?

Pokemon Heart Gold/ Soul Silver?

Final Fantasy XIII?

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 days?

CODMW2?

GoW3?

The Beatles: Rock Band?

All of these games are getting hyped to no end, and generating a bigger fanbase every day. Would it matter to you if they really got bad scores?

Does hype get to reviewers? The first Halo changed shooters forever, in a way that would make 80% of any shooter that came out after that a clone of it, and reviewers would criticize it. But when Halo 3 came out, which changed nothing from the original in terms of gameplay (I mean, seriously, it's the THIRD installment! FIX IT!) it was praised for everything it had, which was essentially nothing different from the other two minus a few new maps and an even worse story.

So, back to my trip to Gamestop, I was asked if I planed to pre-order Halo 3: ODST or COD4MW2, and if I did I would get an extra $25 of my trade-ins put towards them, but I now wonder; why not any other game available to pre-order? Who else can't wait to get Scribblenauts? I asked about that and the clerk gave me a stupid look, I said, "These games are just being overhyped even more by promotions like this, but when games deserving of such a promotion like Scribblenauts comes around, you forget it even exsists." I understand the marketing strategy there, but seriously, who else thinks Batman: Arkham Asylam is not as great as everyone says?

I have fallen for hype too many times in the past, in fact the only time I resisted it was for Too Human, and I don't exactly know how I did, but I asked for a refund on my pre-order.