Dear Future Gamer,

In FG29 you replied to the letter 'Believe the Hype?' with the following sentence: "Despite appearances to the contrary sometimes, the last thing we, or indeed any other Future Publishing magazine want to do is create a massive hype around a game that you can't go out and buy".

How can you possibly justify this? I have only read two Future publications: The Official UK PlayStation Magazine and Future Gamer. But the one thing that has really ticked me off is the over-hyping of Driver.

Don't get me wrong - I think Driver will be a fantastic game, when it is released in June (about the 25th, I believe?). PSM ran its first piece, a preview, in the March 1999 issue, available around February 20. I have no problem with that; that's what previews are for. Then, the game was reviewed in the April 1999 issue and a demo put on the CD - still three months before Driver was due to be released.

Okay, so in true Microsoft style, the release date has probably slipped. My point is, how can PSM possibly have given Driver a fair review? Presumably, the review was written about one month before it was published, and so, it must have been based on a fairly late beta. The demo itself said "Loading times to be optimised," ie. at the time of publication of the demo, the game was not finished.

Loading time is an important issue to game reviews - indeed, Cool Boarders 3 was marked down in PSM40 because "its many interludes for disc access are enough to irritate". How could the reviewers of Driver possibly have known whether this was not the case for Driver too, given that they may not have had a final copy of the game? Interesting, the latest issue of PSM promises a new demo next month, presumably with optimised load times...

It is only in the last month (May) that I have noticed other magazine's covers announcing reviews of Driver. It looks like the game will be a winner, despite the over-hyping. I'm just fed up with scanning through the game index section of PSM for the last two issues (three if you include the review), and finding Driver there, getting 9/10, but not being able to buy it for months.

Enough ranting - at least FG hasn't reviewed the game yet!!

Zak Beck

FG: It's not an ideal situation Zak, but I stand by what I said. As for reviewing unfinished games, this does sometimes happen, but only with the software house's approval. They give a game to a magazine for review but point out the small areas of code that need tidying up before the game is mastered. If a game has all the gameplay elements in there then it's usually deemed reviewable. This is such a dynamic industry though, with so many factors governing a game's release date, that there is bound to be the odd hiccup. Again though, magazines (including Future Gamer) are loathe to over-hype a game too early because it can annoy readers and that can reflect on the magazine.