I had a conversation with a buddy of mine today and we were talking about games that we were hyped about leading up to their release. Like butterflies in your stomach, cant effing wait for it to come out so you can enjoy it.
Obviously, this was brought on by the impending release of Fallout 4, which I am sufficiently hyped about.
There are tons of games out there that you are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna pick that up release day", but I'm talking bigger than that.
For me, those games were Smash Bros. Brawl, Timesplitters Future Perfect, Borderlands, and Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess.
1) Timesplitters Future Perfect, the franchise that came after Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. I loved Timesplitters 2, the first game was great, but 2 was magnificent. I couldn't wait for the 3rd installment to come out. I was in high school at the time, with a Gamestop not more than a few hundred yards away from the school. So on release day, I sprinted to Gamestop so I could pick up my preorder and get back to the school to catch the bus home. The multiplayer lived up to my expectations, even better in most cases, but the story mode was so fantastic in that game. No shooter will ever surpass my love for the Timesplitters franchise, I dont even think Timesplitters Rewind will live it up the same way.
2) Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the lively party fighting game. I loved playing Smash bros on the n64 with my sibling unit, I loved playing Melee with my siblings, friends, and classmates in high school and college. My own personal situation with Smash Bros... My best friend, whom I had known since Kindergarten, passed away shortly before the release of smash bros brawl, I believe shortly after the original summer release window which was pushed back to Spring 2008. He and I would do 2 things over pretty much anything else, Timesplitters and Smash bros. I had looked forward to playing that with him, so it kind of became a bigger thing for me when it came out. It came out right as Spring break started, so I spent that week and a half straight playing that game. My girlfriend, and now wife, didn't appreciate the neglect and at the time had no interest in playing smash bros.
Going back to Timesplitters for a moment, we used to make story missions for each other to beat, which was really fun, but I owned a ps2 and he owned a gamecube. We each had a ps2 and a gamecube memory card, so we could swap systems and play each others stuff, eventually I bought my own gamecube copy. Some point down the line, my nephew pulled out my gamecube memory card while it was saving and it corrupted the entire memory card, partially my fault for buying one of those unreliable 3rd party memory cards with the janky compression and storage. It devastated me.
3)Legend of Zelda Twilight princess, chronologically, this should've been second, but I didnt want to segragate those 2 games. I wanted to play this game so bad and so impatiently, that I didnt want to wait for the gamecube release, so I bought a Wii, mind you those were pretty damned hard to find for a good while after release, and the game so i could play it as soon as possible. I actually thoroughly enjoyed the motion controls, and the entire game altogether, even the thing with the fishing rod and Ganondorf, what a hoot. I had a root canal around the release and spent a lot of time just wanting to do nothing and having trouble sleeping at night, so I played this game almost exclusively at night and played it for probably what was 2 weeks, one of my most fond gaming experiences because, as some of you might know, when you play games at night and in the middle of the night, there are literally no distractions from the outside world. This story was less about the hype, but I was hyped enough that I spent time finding a wii and dropping the dough to get the system and game, it was a system seller for me.
4)Borderlands. Borderlands was a special case. I had been following borderlands from its inception. It originally had a realistic art style and very very strong Mad Max tones. The high level of guns, some misconceptions, or complete misunderstanding on my part. I was thoroughly hyped. I little disappointed when I heard about the art style change, but still very hyped. Couldn't freaking wait. I genuinely believed this could be the game to fill the void left by not having a new Timesplitters game, I think this was around the time we knew one wasnt going to be made, I cant recall. But when that game loaded up and No Rest For The Wicked played, I was hooked. Nothing like anything I had ever played before, and the humor melded well with the art style. For some reason though, my interest in the series went downhill, havent figured it out yet.
There were and are tons of games I've been hyped about, but these had special circumstances, and that's what makes them memorable.
Fallout 4 might be memorable for me because I just bought a house and got a promotion, plus it comes out right as I conveniently have a week vacation.
What games were you guys hyped about leading up to their release?
