Tell us all your secrets!

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

A long time ago at a friend's tenth birthday party, my buddy and I took a break from the main bowling event and went to the amusement centre's arcade room to gawk at its brand-spanking-new Mortal Kombat II arcade cabinet. My jaw hit the floor as I watched a photorealistic Kung Fu fighter transform into a dragon and gobble up his enemy's torso (keep in mind, I was nine).

Nowadays, a game hobbyist youth would be unlikely to be as surprised and in awe at seeing a long-anticipated release in action with their own eyes for the first time. The equivalent scenario today would probably be involve a cool scene like the one above being spoiled months in advance, either through a developer's blog or a scoop by the myriad online game enthusiast websites.

Are we becoming too obsessed over the next big thing in the biz, not even taking the time to fully enjoy new releases before the preview of something else gets us revved up about a game that's still sometimes over a year away? And is this is a sustainable way to keep

consumer interest high?

In terms of this online, up-to-the-minute coverage, there almost seems to be no equivalent to the video game hobby. Hollywood has less hobbyist sites devoted to the latest scoops.

Meanwhile, we go on hyping up upcoming titles, poring over every minute of released footage, and dissecting every single hands-on preview impression, until there is almost no sense of wonder or astonishment left when the finished product is in our consoles.

Two recent examples of this that come to mind are Halo 3, Microsoft's juggernaut from last year, and Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess from 2006. Both did extremely well in North America in terms of sales and critical reception, but ask many gamers who are fans of the respective series and you can tell they just were not as excited about these games as they were for their predecessors. Halo 3…well, Halo 3 had Pepsi cans promoting it. That's how strong the hype was. And whereas Nintendo has always been a little more guarded about key titles, they made an exception for Twilight Princess, covering it extensively with monthly previews and interviews.

Both games wound up selling really well, but with the somewhat poorer reception they got among fans, I wonder if we'll be able to say the same about their inevitable sequels in a few years. After all, in Japan, whose trend-setting audience is analyzed by industry experts trying to figure out what will be hot in the remaining world in the near future, Twilight Princess did not do nearly as well as previous Zeldas, to the point where Nintendo's lead designer publicly wondered whether this was a sign the series' gameplay mechanics were in need of a shake-up.

Maybe Zelda does need a bit of a change, but let's also look at stopping the insane amounts of hype and preview coverage on given games. One Canadian designer, Dennis Dyack, has suggested previews need to follow the Hollywood model. Only show gamers or the enthusiast press a practically finished product.

If we were to give developers so much time to almost finish the product and it were not subject to any kind of external review whatsoever practically right before it was off for mass production, who's to say what kind of flaws would get away in the final product? Heaven knows this happens now with all kinds of eyes watching from pre-concept art to store shelf. So let's do something in between instead.

Maybe we need some standardized agreement between developers, publishers and outside media. Show one or two early builds of a game, and then keep it hidden from the public for a while. Bring it out again when it's about halfway complete at shows and exhibitions and listen to what the critical press has to say, then lock it away in your vaults and finish it up, keeping in mind whichever of the suggestions you deem important.

I still don't think this will give younger gamers the thrill of discovering some of the cooler aspects of a game in a finished product. After all, major video game websites are here to stay and they are not going away any time soon, so they need to have something to go on about…and so do columns about video gaming on your local newspaper and its website.