Pleasant surprises for some can lead to disappointments for others.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/blog/35245
SteamWorld Dig and Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale are two games I played post-hype, and I think that colored my opinion on both. After hearing positive buzz on the recently released 3DS eShop games for what felt like an eternity, I finally played through both last week, finishing each one within a day or two of beginning it. Now, neither game is long, but I still romped through each game with expediency. I stole time away from breaks during work to play another 10 minutes of Friday Monsters. I played 15 minutes of SteamWorld Dig before the movies last weekend. Both are scenarios where I usually don’t play games, but I was compelled each time to play Friday Monsters and SteamWorld Dig.
The weird thing is, I've come away from both games not totally getting the hype. Friday Monsters was cute, but not the transcendental Ghibli-esque experience it was trumpeted to be. SteamWorld Dig was a cool 2D platformer with a pleasant Metroid-esque progression, but I felt like I spent half of it digging monotonously in caves. I waited too long to play them, I fear. I was taken in by the hype, so unless they were second comings of Super Metroid (or even Mutant Mudds), my destiny was to be disappointed.
Mutant Mudds was like the reverse of that for me. I loved the demo I played at a table in a food court at E3 2011, but after espousing positive thoughts about Renegade Kid’s 2D debut for six months, I was kind of terrified it was going to suck. When I first started playing Mutant Mudds for review shortly before it came out in early 2012, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was going to tragically disappoint me. Thankfully, it didn’t disappoint, and then, like our own Daan Koopman did for SteamWorld Dig, I started shouting how freaking awesome Mutant Mudds was from the Nintendo World Report rooftops.
And I’m sure there is a reader or three here that felt that same mild disappointment with Mutant Mudds that I felt with SteamWorld Dig and Friday Monsters. It’s just a really peculiar feeling, and it’s kind of funny that a few recent games have swung far the other way for me because of my lack of personal hype. I think Pikmin 3 is working so well for me because I wasn’t previously a huge fan of those games before, so my hype level was lower.
What games have you played after all the hoopla that either delivered on the promise or fell short?