Halo 3: It's everywhere! It's in my racoon wounds!

I believe it's clear to almost everyone on the planet that on September 25th Halo 3 is being released. Do you know why I feel it safe to assume this? It's because of the retarded amount of advertising surrounding this title. Let's do a short review. We've got Halo 3 Mountain Dew, Slurpee Cups at 7-eleven, Halo 3 Xbox 360, Halo 3 controllers, Halo 3 headset, new toys, 3 different game SKUs including the massive helmet of doom edition, an ability to buy the game anywhere (seriously my 7-eleven is doing a midnight launch), banner ads on every site in the universe, special checkout lines at Walmart, Best Buy midnight launch events and finally a slew of new ads that don't even show gameplay. I mean good god! I'm half expecting to wake up one morning with a sticker on my forehead that says "Your mornings now sponsored by Halo 3!".

I don't usually have an issue with marketing for game titles. I mean Madden goes through an ad campaign every year and I can happily look the other way and ignore it. My issue is that I have to hear or read the words "Halo 3" before I've even had my first cup of coffee in the morning. This shit is absolutely everywhere to the point where every website I visit has a banner ad for the game or some sort of special preorder promotion (Radioshack people! Radioshack!). The marketing blitz for this game has become so massive that it is actually killing any hype that I had remaining for the title. I feel like a bit of marketing can really work in a game's favor, for instance Bioshock. That spot on Spike TV was well planned, timed and executed to actually get me excited to buy the game about 5 days afterwards. This Halo campaign is so massive that it is actually working the opposite way on me. I've had to hear about Halo 3 for like 2 months or maybe more and now all I want is to not hear about it anymore. The marketing made my hype for the game peak weeks ago and now instead of being excited I just want the launch to be over so people will shut the fuck up about it already.

I'm hoping this doesn't become some sort of trend with game marketing. All it accomplishes is whoring out a brand and making everyone so sick of it that even non-gamers want to never hear the name spoken again. Let me leave you with a final thought after this rant: light marketing=good, retarded marketing=shut the fuck up already!