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History Proves That Videogame Ads Are Awful

Posted by Zonk on from the argh-not-the-noid dept.

headcold writes "Scott Sharkey of 1UP just penned his third retrospective of Game Ads, The Best Worst Ads 3, this time culling the tragedies from a stack of old CGWs. Where the two earlier installments dealt with the atrocious videogame ads from the late eighties and early nineties, respectively, this episode explores computer game ads from the mid-to-late nineties — proving, at last, that advertising sucked as recently as eight years ago."

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Annoying ads sell more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ..because they stay with you. Unfortunately, it works.

  2. Breaking news.. by The+Living+Fractal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The next article will be about proving that oranges are orange.

    Let's face it: ads suck. Sometimes, rarely, we might be happy to have watched one. But usually, and I mean a vast majority of the time, we just want ads to go away.

    For video game ads the only thing I take from them is:

    - The name
    - The genre
    - The platform

    Ads for video games are like pictures of women in magazines like Maxim -- they're air-brushed extravagances of the real thing that in no way resemble what the actual woman would look like without all the extra work. Of course, YMMV.

    TLF

    --
    I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
  3. Gears of War Commercial... by Quaoar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does anyone else think that the Gears of War commercial is one of the best, if not THE best, video game commercial ever made? Very memorable...

    --
    I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
    1. Re:Gears of War Commercial... by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, I don't know if it's different in the US (over here it's some classic movie with some in game graphics), but personally I was not impressed.

      If people (like me) don't bother looking at the screen during commercials, they won't even notice it in the static.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. No real game play == bad ad by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Video game commercials are still bad, in the most part. It's only this year I've noticed video game commercials start to use actual in-game footage, rather than pre-rendered crap.

    Using pre-renders is also a big problem on the net. When I hear about Gran Turismo 5 (or whatever), why do they always show us great pre-rendered shots that are totally unrepresentative of what you'll see in the game? I don't want to see a preview video of the cars from the outside.. I want to see the actual gameplay footage. Yet, people drool over the pre-renders, and then when the real game hits.. it's never as good.

    I guess this is a problem with all advertising, however.. but it seems particularly dishonest with videogames to me.

  5. Re:Glass houses? by Tim+Browse · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I particularly liked the way he bitched about the lack of the female assassin characters in Half-Life, and used this as his entire basis for mocking the ad, and then obviously got emailed by a hundred thousand gamers saying "Dude, did you even play the game?"

    I can't imagine anyone who actually played that bit of HL to forget the ninjas - it wasn't like they were easy to kill. Most people's first encounter with them was accompanied by the words "What the hell was that?!", usually quickly followed by some kind of death.

    I also like the whole post-modern uber-cool irony employed about how dumb and shallow marketing people are to use sex to sell ads, and then to say something like "That's an extraordinarily ugly woman."

    And the bonus of a "John Romero's hair is like a girl's hair!" joke. Maybe the brief for this piece was that his jokes had to be of the same vintage as the adverts.