It was a cold, wet and thoroughly miserable Saturday morning and I'd escaped from my duties as Mr Bag Carrier to my girlfriend's Ms Money Spender long enough to fritter away some time browsing the shelves at the nearest games emporium. As I perused the titles on sale, moving between copies of C&C 3 and XII neither of which I could really afford, I noticed a young man around my age (what do you mean 29 isn't young?) queuing at the counter clutching a copy of 300 March To Glory in his hands. A longer stare confirmed he seemed normal enough, no noticeable eyesight problems or signs of recent mental illness, yet there he was, bold as brass ready to pay real honest money for a copy of one of the worst games recently released. The sight of such needless money wastage troubled me and it was all I could do to resist leaping into the queue and taking the poor man to one side so I could explain to him the error of his ways. Minutes later, however, after resisting said urge and walking slightly bewildered from the shop (gameless, in case you were wondering) having watched the surely ill fated transaction take place despite my best attempts at mind control I was struck by a fact I'd never really considered before, somehow all the bad games, the ones websites and magazines warn gamers about, still actually shift copies despite all the negative press and damming review scores.

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It was something of a revelation to my clearly naive view of the world, having grown up a gamer I've become used to effortlessly avoiding the rubbish. In fact, for me, an essential part of the whole game buying experience is spending ages pouring over as many reviews as I can find trying to glean every last bit of information before eventually parting with my hard earned cash only when I've decided that the game in question really is as good as I hoped it would be. Perhaps foolishly I'd always just assumed everyone else did the same. It's not like new games (let's ignore budget and second-hand titles for this exercise) generally fall into the impulse buy range for most people. At £30 to £40 a title games are hardly cheap especially when compared to other entertainment media such as CDs and DVDs whose relatively inexpensive £7 to £15 price point puts them firmly within the aforementioned impulse buy market, spending two or three times that on a game isn't something you'd do every week unless you had a serious amount of disposable income. Surely that kind of expenditure alone should mean you want to know at least a little about the quality of what you were buying on those rare occasions when you do decide to open your wallet.

It's not like well informed opinion is hard to come by these days, gamers are a particularly technologically savvy bunch and the explosion of the internet in recent years has seen games coverage expand at ever growing rates, the fact that you're here reading this article is proof enough of that. Add into the information pot all the various specialist printed publications and the increased games coverage in the mainstream media not to mention the formidable power of word of mouth and you end up with more than enough easily available content all set to advise Joe Public what's worth buying and, even more importantly, what's not. Yet, despite all that, people clearly still buy rubbish. Taking the example of the PSP title 300 March To Glory mentioned earlier, it garnered a disappointing 40% here at Play.tm and a quick internet search reveals a broad sweep of poor to average scores across the board. So the question that has to be asked is how, with such at-best average reviews, has it still managed to sell even one copy in a marketplace so crowded with far more impressive offerings?

Since it makes sense to assume that if people hear or read broadly negative things about a game then they're less likely to spend money on it, the most obvious excuse for bad games selling is that some gamers simply don't read reviews before purchasing titles, meaning they base their purchasing decisions on other factors. One of the strongest marketing pulls a game can wield (other than reams of glowing Play.tm review quotes of course) is a high profile licence. Be it a blockbuster or a huge star many a poor game has risen up the charts on the back of who appears on the box. We all know the marketing theory behind it and we also probably all claim that it doesn't work on us, yet publishers only keep repeating the process because it continues to guarantee a boost. Clearly someone out there must be letting the side down. While it's easy for me to sound scornful of the gentleman buying the 300 game it's also only fair to say that he could have simply been a huge fan of the original Frank Millar graphic novel and was looking for another dose of that world. Clearly, when it comes to licences, your relationship with the licence can change your view of a game. For example, I'd be much more likely to pick up a previously unknown game on the spur of the moment than I would if the same game had been set in some unknown sci-fi universe. The fact that I may well end up using it as a coaster within a couple of days is neither here or there, it would still have got picked off the shelf and paid for, the marketing would have worked.

Other, potentially far sounder, reasons for purchasing games without reading reviews first are more personal things like brand loyalty (hands up who's going to pre-order 3 before the reviews hit?) and devotion to a particular genre. While there's something to be said for assuming the latest game in your favourite series will be as good if not better than the one before it, this can still be a dangerous game to play, just ask anyone who shelled out for the version of 06 Road To World Cup. There's also the all important eye candy to take into account, if you're buying a game with no prior knowledge then all you have to go on is what's displayed on the box, assuming even the worst games have a PR department worth talking about you can't trust the hyperbole (although I'd probably buy a game on principle if I ever saw blurb that admitted it was all a bit ropey) which only leaves the screenshots. Deep down we're all graphics whores to a degree so if it looks sexy it's automatically a few notches up the purchasing ladder however much we all like to think it's the gameplay that counts.