Hollywood and the music industry are well known for star-studded launches, but without the pull of celebrity to rely on, the games industry has to get a bit more "creative" when it's putting on a press event. Whether you're giving the assembled journalists a sense of the game by doing something horrible to them, letting them fire a machine gun or simply hiring some girls to prance around in spandex, the most important thing is to be memorable. And these seven events GamesRadar writers attended certainly managed that...

Above: Just what we expected to see at the Backyard Wrestling press event - a man having his face stapled

The game
Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home

The place
Los Angeles, California

The theme
The WWE? Wimps.

The vibe
Some LA types make their mortgage payments by renting out their luxury houses to events companies on the weekend, and that's what happened here. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the owner that the wrestling in this case was going to be "extreme" - so it must have come as a slight shock when "Madman" Pondo started stapling dollar bills to his opponent's face and took a diving header into a trash can full of fluorescent light tubes. Obviously Eidos had some porn stars and midgets on hand to liven up the proceedings, but the climax - a run-in from the Insane Clown Posse - was ruined by the hapless homeowner squealing at everyone not to cheer "too loud."

The effect
Everyone went away excited about barbed-wire baseball bats to the groin and ended up disappointed when, six months later, the game turned out to be awful. Sometimes, you shouldn't set expectations too high.