Is the videogame trailer obsolete?

Heartening as it is that XCOM: Enemy Unknown has placed a respectable seventh in the UK all-formats during its first week, I can't help worrying that a portion of that success is owing to false pretences. In case you've missed all our raving on the subject, Enemy Unknown is an extravagantly remorseless strategy game which puts players in charge of an international peace-keeping elite, charged with staving off an alien invasion.

Battles are nail-biting, turn-based affairs where firepower plays a definite fourth fiddle to visibility, squad coordination and cover, and the over-arching strategic narrative is one of cautious expansion punctuated by crippling reversal - a misallocation of resources, a sudden cry for aid from one of your sponsor nations. Victory comes about via preparation and an almost surgical capacity to identify the lesser of two evils. I summed all this up as the "Dark Souls of strategy games" in a preview - there's the same oppressive aura of inevitable destruction that you find in From Software's magnum opus, and the same sense of sweaty, dishevelled triumph when you master the systems and overcome your foe.

That's not the game you'll expect if your knowledge of XCOM begins and ends with 2K's launch trailer, however, because as far as the publisher's video production teams are concerned, Enemy Unknown is Gears of Mission Impossible. Assault troops and Mutons gallop towards one another in real time, drenching chrome furnishings in plasma. Maps erupt in flames like they're covered in magma-filled lawn sprinklers. Men in Archangel suits hurl themselves flamboyantly into the air with painful disregard for questions of positioning and fuel management.

It's oh so very fabulous, and those who take the video at face value will be oh so very annoyed when they get their nervy, attention-deprived hands on the real deal, which responds to show-boating the same way hyenas respond to the odour of wounded antelope. Word to the wise: grouping up in front of the main hatchway is fine when you're the Justice League of America, not so fine when you're a bunch of spongy mortals wearing tinfoil breastplates. The bigger the hadoken, Mr Psychic Trooper, the harder the fall.

Gulfs between promotional videos and the games they ostensibly promote are, of course, nothing new, but at the risk of crystal ball gazing, it feels like we've reached a tipping point, beyond which the videogame trailer as traditionally understood simply doesn't cut the mustard. The problem is partly that videogame makers are experimenting beyond the screen. Nintendo faced embarrassing difficulties, for instance, when it came to promoting the 3DS on Youtube - all supposed gameplay footage is emblazoned with awkward disclaimers, sternly reminding viewers that the display they're using is not, in fact, a parallax barrier, and may God and his lawyers help them should they dare to presume otherwise.

Lest there be too much giggling at Mario's expense, there's trouble on our side of the fence too. The format for most Kinect trailers appears to be as follows: a few seconds of gameplay before the camera pans round to show a nauseatingly smug lifestyler hamming her way through a mockery of the control scheme - rinse and repeat. Lord knows whose attention Microsoft is trying to captivate with this sort of bait-and-switching. Are aspiring models the only people who buy Dance Central?