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More Worst Videogame Ads
An anonymous reader writes "1UP has posted another feature with the best worst videogame advertisements of all time. There are some absolutely laugh-out-loud ads and descriptions for the Jaguar, 3DO, Super Metroid, Bubsy, Super Street Fighter II, and a bunch of others, including some bizarre peripherals from the '90s such as the Interactor, a subwoofer that you'd attach to your chest. 'It's the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a particularly lame supervillian, except he'd at least be able to knock people down with some kind of ripply sound wave effect, as opposed to just looking like a dip while playing Mortal Kombat.'"
Which of today's advirtisments do you all find most irritating? I know that some people (read: not me) were offended by the racial overtones in the PSP ads recently. I think that today's ads are generally pretty good. Much better than Awesome Possum (from TFA).
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I think this title is the most worstest of all. There is not none more badder wrote.
My vote goes to the "Coffee? Tea? SEGA!" ads that were on TV during my Saturday morning cartoons in the mid-90s. I still have nightmares about those ones!
I'm sorry to just post something verbatim from the site but this had me rolling on the floor:
3 152506
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=6&cId=
For: A Joystick Under a Napkin
From: STD
Appeared in: EGM, September 1994
Of course I'm prepared. I covered my joystick with a napkin to protect it from lightning strikes weeks ago. The imagery here doesn't capture the excitement of one-on-one fighting games so much as it looks like someone trying to hide an embarrassing erection at a restaurant.
I think the run of ads around 1980 were particularly bad as each and every one of them showed people in near-orgasm at the sight of a few pixels:
r i%20commercial
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mLiBK3O1zHU&search=ata
There were other ads from atari not nearly as cornball, but these were in the highest rotation so yes I'm scarred for life.
The worst box art I've ever seen has to be the one from the first Megaman game. It's so lame it's a miracle people even tried the game (which is excellent).
But my guess for the worst videogame ad would be the "John Romero will make you his bitch".
I will get back to you after I read it.
Those ads are almost as bad as the 1up ones!
wait, worst one more time ads were the intellitxt ones splattered throughout the article. It used to be you just had to watch where you click to set the focus for your scroll wheel, now if you're not careful your pointer becomes hopelessly entrenched in a mine field of intellitxt garbage.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
I can't believe I just generated ad revenue clicking through that garbage.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
It's only a passing mention in the article, but Atari Jaguar enclosures are now used for dental camera systems?! That (PDF) is awesome.
For more information, click here.
Does anyone get the idea that someone just took a stack of circa-1994 EGM and Gamepro magazines and just picked out random ads to put here? I mean, some of these are bad, but they're hardly the worst I've seen. In fact, these ads seem to me to be par for the course in that era. And to be honest, I thought the Lords of Thunder ad was decent even if their math was a bit lacking. I wasn't in awe over it but I don't remember thinking it entirely stupid when I first saw it.
...amen!
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Surely the UK advert for Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time has to be the worst ever: A game that women enjoyed playing at a time when almost all gamers were men, and they advertise it with the slogan "Willst though get the girl? Or play like one?"
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http://uk.gamespot.com/pages/profile/video_player
Those spaces they talk about are probablyRiemannian, not Reamnnian.
"The imagery here doesn't capture the excitement of one-on-one fighting games so much as it looks like someone trying to hide an embarrassing erection at a restaurant."
I'm currently suffering the pain that comes from laughing Dasani lemon-flavored water up one's nasal passages.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Oh, that thing. Aura was a sad story. They developed the first really powerful direct drive linear actuators, things that looked like hydraulic cylinders but were entirely electrical. (U.S. Patent #5,099,158) Some were so powerful that they were used for active damping on metal bridges, to reduce vibration when heavy trucks rolled by. These things were shown at industrial automation shows.
But they didn't sell. Good idea, too expensive.
Aura tried making the Interactor, a big subwoofer, using their actuator technology. Nobody cared. Aura eventually went under, in an ugly mess involving some stock scam.
Before man dares to fight.
What game is that by line from? I thought it was the dummest line ever...
Definitely SONY PSP ads. "Cheese you can listen to", "I'd hit it", and so on. They try so hard and so badly to imitate the internet counter-culture-which-became-mainstream-like-five- years-ago that instead of making me laugh, those commercials make me cringe and I immediately think of everyone working at sony to be seventy year old people who want to communicate to the "young crowd" that they "is down with them".
Also, most TV videogame ads that show FMV, FMV, FMV and nothing else. That's how Nintendo got fucked when Zelda 64's ingame and gameplay-only commercial looked like ass compared to FF7's OMG WE'RE NOT LYING TO YOU IT'S REALTIME GRAFIX!!!-FMV-based ad.
Come to think of it, I don't like ads from anyone at all, anyway. Why are we glorifying what is essentially legal corruption? Never thought of that?
Game publisher : If you give our game a bad rating, we'll cancel this 3-million dollar page ad.
Game magazine : zOMG Tonic Trouble is teh WIN! Six stars outta five!
Shiggity-shiggity-shwa.
(No, it's not a real ad, but it's the first thing that popped into my head.)
Oh, sweet hell. There's an Atlas Shrugged movie in production. That doesn't leave me much time to do all those things I've always wanted to and still be able to kill myself before the licensed tie-in game comes out.
Amen.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Is it just me, or do all the new slashdot stories seem to have come from digg.com first?
How about the "Worth 1000: Beta Busts 5" Games that never got made, photoshop games box competition... This one had me laughing so hard I was crying... Check out the "World Cup Hooligans" entry or "Halo Kitty".
Worth 1000: Beta Busts 5
Article about bad advertising in gaming mags
Honestly, where do they come up with this crap? I work in advertising, and from my perspective I really have to wonder who had the final say over the copy in this...it really is laughable.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Here's the first part of the ad: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3149992/>
Here's the first part of the feature:
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3149992/
is that lister think somekind new fashion?
and of course these need to be a "worst" kind... huoh
www.granstrom.fi
Does anyone else find it very annoying that they make comments about the screen shots and fine print in the "worst ads"-- but the scans are too low-res to actually see or read what they're talking about?
That's okay they're still bad:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/07/26
Woah!
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and the game advertisements are poor also.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
I don't like that specific comic because it's very hard to see the details. For example, where are either of the "two clocks"?
:)
But the real reason I'm writing this post is that, since you're linking to a recent PA comic, there's actually a better example from their newspost archives.
I'd like to be able to read the text in the BlockBuster image, but at least you can get the gist of the advertisement without those details.
Anyway, Gabe's post there is a must read, even though he's a cheeseball.
This is not my sig.