Two games recently have taken hold of my attention, and both of them have squandered it. I could have been one of those guys who gets excited at the very mention of it and preorders a copy at the first opportunity possible, but instead they push me away into that area no developer wants to put its potential customers in.

What are these games, and what have they done so wrong?Rage, and Dead Island.

Rage caught my interests a long time ago with promising a looking engine and in depth videos of iD’s authoring tools. Then the gameplay videos came and it promised to be everything Borderlands had but better. Dead Island revealed itself more recently with an incredible artistic trailer, enough to get anybody to at least investigate it later even if it turned out to be ‘just another zombie game’.

Rage fell first with a proper trailer a few months back, the trailer itself started well: The asteroid Apophis impacted the Earth setting up the post-apocalyptic world in a slightly different way. Some cool gameplay things are shown, then just as you think the trailer is over, when I was thinking something along the lines of “Damn, this looks good”, they completely ruin it by showing you a 20 meter tall mutant thing roaring at the camera.

I haven’t followed the Dead Island media at all other than the initial trailer, my impression was all right though it probably wasn’t for me but I’d check it out at release time to see if it had anything going for it. Someone linked me to the image below and shattered my view of Dead Island as a fresh artistic take on the zombie apocalypse and sent it hurtling into that dead zone of games which seem to think 6 meter tall mutants/zombies are cool and acceptable.

Is it so wrong of me to want sensible monsters to fight rather than the incredibly unimaginative and very stale “Oversized Human”? Will developers and even filmmakers ever grow out of this immature drivel producing style?