This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Editor's note: Suriel's article on midnight launches provides a nice counterpoint to an article we ran the other week. Have you found yourself getting overexcited about a game like Suriel did? -Brett
I really, really have to use the restroom. Too bad I'm at a midnight launch for Super Smash Bros. Brawl and can't exactly hop out of my place in line. The Brawl tournament going on while the clock ticks closer to 12 a.m. is entertainment enough to distract me, though. The collective adrenaline of a massive crowd watching two people playing a game through a piece of glass while waiting outside on a cold March night — I live in Nebraska, after all — also helps.
The previous two months have been filled with such soul-crushing anxiety about the impending release of the game that I've hardly been able to focus on anything. Every time I cross off a day on my calendar, my anxiety worsens: I know I'm still X number of days away from playing the game. So having to do a little dance to hold it in tonight is a small price to pay for seeing the game in action for the first time.
I lose my second match in the tournament, but my brother manages to make it to the final round, a feat which earns him the first copy of the game at the store (the other guy was busy getting a trophy). We take our game home, I use the facility, and we get down to playing through Brawl's single-player mode. We reach the end of it before the end of the day. After messing around in multiplayer for a couple of days, we move on.
“Really?" I ask myself in the weeks that follow. "You've been a mindless idiot for the last couple of months for a game you only played for a week?” The only response I can muster is that I felt the deflation of my excitement so rapidly that I was hated myself for being unable contain myself the way I did. I thought about the game most of the time I was awake, and sometimes when I slept.
This experience was the last time I got truly excited for a game. In retrospect, Brawl wasn't exactly the best game to lose my mind over, and since then, I've developed a calmer approach to game launches.
Or perhaps my overinflated anticipation for Brawl killed my ability to wait for anything with bated breath. I've certainly tried to rile up excitement for games since then — such as when I skipped a day of school to play Fallout 3 and wound up only playing about five hours of it — but I haven't been able to replicate how I felt with Brawl. That kind of bothers me, since I feel like wasted that excitement, Brawl being the less-than-stellar game it is and all.
I loathe midnight launches now. The last one I attended was for Mass Effect 2, but I only went because No More Heroes 2, the game I actually wanted, came out on the same day. So this week, while my brother was waiting around for StarCraft 2 at a nearby GameStop, I was watching the latter half of American Psycho with a couple of friends. I didn't need a special collector's edition, and I planned to buy the game online anyway.
One of these is standing in my room. I wasn't the one who bought it, though. I swear.
I've been waiting for Starcraft 2 since I beat the original almost 10 years ago. I played custom matches online for almost a year straight, and I'd eaten up any kind of complimentary fiction along the way. For all intents and purposes, I should've been as rabid for the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time as I was for Brawl.
But even after I'd paid for the game online, I played a single mission, then played some Super Mario Galaxy 2, listened to some podcasts, and read a book. I wasn't eager to devour the game as much as I thought I would. I definitely enjoyed it, but I just couldn't get into the mindset to sit down and play it for hours on end.
I don't think I'm jaded. I still love games enough to make them my main hobby, and I'm usually the kind of person to find fun in games even when they don't deserve it. I can certainly tell you that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a ton of fun.
I think my experience with Brawl was a good thing. I want to play Dead Space 2 and a bunch of other games coming out as much as the next guy, but I can wait. Maybe it's because I play more games in general and don't really a need a single game to come out and keep me busy. Maybe it's because I've learned to keep my expectations in check enough to where I don't so excited for a game that I lose my perspective anymore.
Whatever the reason, I'm content to let the games come to me. I'm going to take StarCraft 2 nice and slow, and maybe I'll enjoy it more that way.
