Gamers With Jobs has a nice look up at the anticipation factor of gaming: the long period before a game comes out where you read every scrap of information, burn every screenshot into the jelly of your cerebellum, count every second until release. The article's writer, Elysium, likens it to waiting for ketchup to spurt out of a glass ketchup bottle.

A poor analogy — there is absolutely nothing as maddening as waiting for the gelatinous crawl of ketchup down the inside of that diner Heinz bottle, to gloop out of its crusty mouth and, ten minutes later, onto your burger. Meanwhile, the drooling over screenshots, the gossiping with fellow fans, the dialogue with developers, the profuse fantasizing about what it is like to actually play your hotly anticipated game... all of that is oodles of fun. Hell, look at Duke Nukem Forever — pre-release anticipation of that game and the ridicule that has resulted from its seven year development cycle is more fun than DNF could ever hope to be.

The article is good, though we think the entire point could have been made in a small percentile of the words actually belabored upon it. Nevertheless, we hear him: it's fun to look forward to games, but unfortunately, the games themselves can almost never live up to the game we make out of waiting for them in our mind. It's like the time you lose your virginity, absolutely positive that you are about to be immersed pelvis deep into a small wormhole leading straight to the raptures of heaven, only to find yourself sighing with a cigarette afterwards, thinking to yourself: "Yeah, that was pretty good... I guess."

The Religion of Release [Gamers With Jobs]