It looks an awful lot like the fine folks at Insomniac are pulling out all the stops for the hype-machine supporting Resistance 2.

The magazine GamePro recently featured a series of ambiguous ads, exorting readers to “enlist for military service” over at getawarjob.com. This is essentially a signup for one of those newfangled Augmented Reality Games (ARG). You give ‘em your deets and they’ll bombard you with fun puzzles and hints to play with leading up to the release of the game in November. Rumour has it that the company putting this together is the same one that created the infamous “ilovebees” Halo viral marketing campaign.

The NeoGAFfers have already started to decipher the first pieces – there’s a phone number you can call (which plays a message; you can download here), and there was a hidden code in one of the pictures which resulted in a URL:

http://projectabraham.com/

At that website, you’ll see a short Flash video that might be from Hale’s POV as he enters a hospital after being infected with the Chimeran virus… hey, is that Starbuck? Why yes, yes it is. The morse code at the end of the video translates to “BLACKOUT”. What does it mean? I have no idea. But it’s kind of fun if you like this sort of web-based scavenger hunt.

(Oh lookie here, the next piece: projectabraham.com/blackout. Duh.)

The one thing that is clear from all of this is that Insomniac intends to elevate the Resistance brand into the upper echelon of first-person shooters, in both scope and marketing hype. I’m sure they’ll have a lot more to say – and show – at E3 in a couple of weeks. The latest Full Moon podcast did confirm that they would be demonstrating the 60-person multiplayer component at the very least.

I have a little confession to make: back when I was a teenager I thought I was “too cool” for video games. I know, I know — nobody can be cooler than Mr. Driller, so who the fuck did I think I was? But still, it happened and there’s not much we can do about it. So what turned me around?

There were a few small things that had me dabbling. Ocarina of Time was my foot in the door, and FFVIII got me to buy a PS1. But it was the release of Metal Gear Solid that turned me from mere dabbler into full-time hobbyist. When 2 came out, I loved it (fuck you, confused masses — it was great.) I snagged up Snake Eater on launch day and played through it with my wife in tow. When the PSP launched, what was the first title I brought home with it? Ac!d of course.

So when word of MGS4 first crept out you can no doubt guess how excited I was. And that excitement lasted, too. From the first suggestion of it at E3 2005 right up until the close of the MGO beta, I was in. But these last few weeks? These last few weeks have been hard. It just seems like everywhere I turn , there it is — and it’s been that way for a year. Big game releases like GTA4 would give us a month off from MGS4 news, but as soon as they were on store shelves the Snake news would just keep sneaking out.

I just don’t know if I care about Metal Gear Solid 4 anymore. Will I still be picking it up? Sure — but I feel so burned out on Snake right that I honestly don’t know when I’ll be putting it in my PS3.

What about you guys? Has the hype machine killed your interest in MGS4? Did it kill it for other games like Halo 3? Let’s talk hype.

Microsoft is running their own independent GTA IV campaign in the UK, to break the common stigma that Grand Theft Auto is a “PlayStation franchise”. This ad is the best one I’ve seen for the game in short-form; it’s going to be a long 12 days.