The Cloak of Invisibility

The editors at GameSanity have written up a piece called "The Cloak of Invisibility" that talks about some of the games that had the misfortune of being released alongside BioShock.
So Two Worlds launched last week to . well, pretty much nuthin'. There is a fair amount of activity at the (unofficial) Zuzzex forums, but that was already full of folks before the launch, and new activity is pretty much limited to the release of the XBOX version. For the rest of the world it seems that the game might not even exist. Even in the usual hardcore spots there are threads wondering if the game was delayed again because no one was talking about it!

That is unfortunate. Bioshock is getting loads of attention, and it deserves to have praise heaped on it because it is an excellent game. But there are other games out, and having such a single-minded focus on only Bioshock does a disservice to gamers as well as those games.

This is not the first time that a game has been eclipsed by the release of a more popular game. The original SiN was a pretty darn good game that ceased to exist the moment that Half-Life was released. The anticipation of Half-Life 2 clouded releases for over a year, and decimated games such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Of course, similar to Two Worlds that game had more than its share of technical issues, but in that case it didn't have the benefit of four months of '˜post release beta testing' in Europe. Despite being regarded as one of the better RPG's of this decade, Bloodlines had only managed to sell ~75,000 copies before Troika shut its' doors several months later.

So how did the North American version of Two Worlds turn out? I should have my copy on Monday.