Stood Up

I rushed through my review of inFAMOUS, even leaving out a planned paragraph talking about the super cool don't-trust-the-media subversion, in order to have it done before today. Because, you see, today I was going to buy [Prototype].

[Actually, you know what, fuck the official stylizations. It's "Infamous" and "Prototype" from now on. It's bad enough I bother to italicize them without throwing in all the fucked up capitalization and extraneous characters publishes seem to feel obligated to include in their titles.]

But, I didn't get to buy Prototype, because, as the fellow at GameStop explained to me, today is the "ship date" and not the "release date".

What the fuck does that mean? The publishers have been saying for weeks now that I could get the game on June 9th, 2009. Well, it's June 9th, 2009, and I don't have a new game.

This is, of course, in contrast to every single other game I've ever tried to buy on launch day. I either got them, or just arrived after they'd sold out. I've never had a game that simply wasn't available on launch day. None of the stores in the area had a copy. None of the stores in the area had even seen a copy.

Can you imagine if movies worked like this? What if "playing now at a theater near you" really meant, "Dude, like, I dunno... the reels are probably in the mail or something. Check back tomorrow."