If you people were really my friends you would support my desire to play Haze before I die!

Giantbomb has long prided itself on being a friendly and welcoming community among all the hostile, toxic, places on the Internet and in gaming in general. And for the past this is true. People here tend to have a more mature and kind outlook on things than in many other online locations and try to disagree and debate things respectfully, focusing on arguing about ideas and not falling into ad hominem attacks.

But there is a dark undercurrent beneath the apparently benevolent atmosphere that has been cultivated for so long. And that is that this so-called community of friends and compatriots has never supported me in wanting to play the mediocre 2008 PlayStation 3 FPS game Haze.

Before we delve into this failure of the community I would like to discuss my history with the game Haze, which we all know was created by the former Free Radical, makers of the TimeSplitters games, for the Sony PlayStation 3. I have none. I didn't get a PlayStation 3 until 2010, 2 years after the Haze craze came and went, and when I did get it I didn't end up playing it very much, preferring to play multiplats on the Xbox 360 because I like the controller better. I did enjoy games like Uncharted and inFamous, as well as some downloadable games, HD versions of PS2 games like Sands of Time and Jak & Daxter, and games with exclusive content (like Mortal Kombat 9, which had Kratos) but I wasn't going to go back to play a mediocre FPS from 2 years earlier when I hadn't gotten to so much of the better parts of the library. I've still never played a Motorstorm game.

Nobody I know has played Haze and at this point I doubt many of my friends and acquaintances even remember it exists. It is not precisely lost to history but it is profoundly inconsequential, part of the disappointing early PS3 that let 360 dominate for much of that generation. It's memorable mostly because it was so disappointing given the hype cycle. Haze was yet another Halo killer and a game that was supposed to help the PS3 recover from its slow start and it just came out, was disappointing, and vanished.

But that's also why I want to play it. I have a strange attraction to these oddball flop games. I've played Balan Wonderworld, Inversion, even Fuse, a game so generic I struggle to remember much about it even though I finished the campaign less than three years ago. There's something interesting about a game made by professionals with sufficient budget that isn't broken or doesn't have some massive flaw but just kind of never comes together and is much less than the sum of its parts. You can often see how with just a few better decisions or stand out features it could have been something special instead of just...nothing.

So why haven't I played Haze? Besides the fact that you haven't supported me? Well I don't have a copy because it's not on PSN and I never saw it cheap enough to buy. These days you can get a "refreshed" copy for under $20, but that's physical so it takes up space AND my PS3's disc drive is dying so I've been trying to only play disc based games that are actually worth playing. Additionally there are no trophies, and while I'm perfectly happy to play games without trophy support that's less true for mediocre games.

It's hard to justify spending money on a physical copy of an old game and straining my disc drive just to play something I know I won't like very much, when I still have a huge backlog of better games. I just beat Killzone 2 and I have the third game in that trilogy (as well as the PSP and Vita games), and the entire Resistance trilogy unplayed. Haze is only 6.5 hours long but that's 6.5 hours I could spent getting further in the Yakuza series, or finally mopping up my last endings in Nier, or getting back to Halo, where I've never even touched Infinite. All of those are also games that wouldn't cost me anything to play right now. It's hard to justify Haze under those circumstances.

That's where support would come in, but I haven't found any. Instead when I say "I should waste less money on games" people say "sounds good" instead of "well obviously there's an exception for Haze." When I say "I want to spend my game time on things I meaningfully enjoy instead of slop" they say "that's reasonable" instead of "but what if that slop was Haze? Wouldn't that be better?"

Even worse, this community keeps reminding me of better games that I could be playing instead, and distracting me. Whether it's long running series about indie games or just threads on the latest and greatest, there's a constant drumbeat of discourse around games that are not Haze that keeps me from focusing on what really matters. Haze. A game that it seems like I may never play.

It's a toxic dynamic and it's important to call it out. This website is infested with Haze haters and underminers, and I blame all of you for my past and future failures!