In the words of the title character's father from comic series "Calvin and Hobbes," sometimes the anticipation of having something is better than actually having the thing. This is especially true in the world of gaming, in which AAA companies and indie developers cleverly market their releases to build anticipation among both the general public and the gaming community. Often, these releases, unfortunately, are accompanied by delays to a future release date. The intent of delays is to allow more time for the developer to polish up the game and make it better. However, this often unusually ends up hurting the reputation of the game and leads to multiple, and well-deserved, criticisms of the game upon release.

Recently, this has been a much-discussed topic in the gaming community lately. Over the past couple of years, Mega Man clone "Mighty No. 9" received a lot of attention, both for how it looked in trailers and its multiple delays. After several of these delays, the public began to doubt if the game was ever going to be released. Despite the apologies of the developer, the game released to negative to mixed reviews because of its boring gameplay and uninteresting atmosphere. The highly publicized "No Man's Sky" received enormously high pre-release reception because of its open-universe concept. Unfortunately, it was delayed, and released to mixed reception because of repetitive nature. Now, it seems that pre-release fan favorites such as "The Last Guardian," "Final Fantasy XV" and "The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild" have all been delayed as well.

While negative response would be natural to such situations, many go overboard with this sentiment. When delays were announced for some of the above titles, there was an overwhelming amount of negative reactions across the web. In addition, the developers occasionally received death threats from some of these fans.

This is why it's difficult to associate oneself with the modern gaming community. Everyone jumps all over a new game that looks amazing and hail it as the next greatest video game of all time (a topic which would be lovely to discuss but will be discussed another time.) But as soon as the slightest amount of bad news appears such as a delay or a new/removed feature, the fans immediately trash it. A more proper response would be to look at the situation objectively, calmly and to observe how the circumstances surrounding the game will effect. Also, you know the old saying: "Patience is a virtue." Gamers are some of the most impatient fans of anything around. Whenever something bad happens, the collective reaction makes us look immature to the rest of humanity. Learning patience would benefit us greatly in that we would be a more pleasing group of people to join and enjoy games with.

Have a great week and game on!