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I don't normally do just random linkage any more, but this is really the sort of thing everyone needs to be aware of, sort of how each household should be educated on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion in their city. Just be aware that, after watching this, you may not have the capacity to feel joy for the next seven to ten days.
Then again, perhaps you can take some solace in knowing that, however screwed up your life may be, at least you didn't attend this thing.
I can appreciate that you guys don't feel obligated to make bleeding edge games with elaborate, costly graphics, but now that Disgaea 3 is coming to the PS3, I think you can try a little harder than this.
Or sell the game for $20 because you haven't made any new sprites in six years.
Did this year's E3 seem kind of.. boring to anyone else? I realize the show was scaled way back, but with the conferences and the media coverage and the Live Marketplace Bringing It Home content, the trappings of E3 to the outsider at least seemed the same. But what actually came out of those sources wasn't terribly impressive.
I had planned to write about the conferences, as I have done in the past, but there was so little to them that there wasn't much to say. Microsoft deliberately avoided showing footage of Fable 2 or Halo Wars so we could instead get an extended pitch for Goddamned SceneIt (that's the full title). Nintendo breezed past the core gamer titles (Reggie briefly mentioned the Smash Bros. Dojo updates, as if to say that since we're getting info from the Dojo blog we don't need to get anything from him) to spend the bulk of their time showing off WiiFit, which will undoubtedly make them billions of dollars and only further prove that core gamers are absolutely unnecessary to them now. But as with Microsoft, it's not simply that they didn't have new games to show, but that they chose to avoid the subject. The first NiGHTS trailer was released the day before the conference, yet no mention of the game was made; even Mario Galaxy was only touched on briefly.
Despite -- or more likely because of -- the embarrassment last year, Sony had the strongest showing of the three, random Chewbacca cameo and Jack Tretton's nerves aside. The self-satisfied swagger of the previous year was nowhere to be seen, with Tretton even going so far as to cap off the evening with
We know that all of our accomplishments bring no guarantees for the future. We want to continue to earn each and every consumer's business, and we're dedicated to bringing them the very best entertainment experience possible.
Thus, Sony's conference was a pretty straightforward roll of game footage peppered with some talk about Home and a smaller PSP. It wasn't a knockout, but was at least pretty solid, and managed to actually show new games that grabbed people's attention, something neither Microsoft nor Nintendo bothered to do.
The show itself maintained the trend, remaining mostly concerned with games we already knew about. Many of the biggest titles this year were also the biggest titles last year. There wasn't much in the way of major surprises or announcements outside of WiiFit, a smaller PSP that will load a little faster, and Sony's pretend price drop (a move that doesn't make sense for about a thousand reasons, but I think everyone else has pretty much covered that by now). It's not unexpected to have a kind of lull the year after two console launches, but surely one of the big three could come up with something. At least throw us a new Brawl character, for God's sake. I'm not suggesting that there was absolutely nothing of interest at E3 this year (hey, at least Professor Layton is coming stateside), but it was all low key enough to make me wonder whether the show was necessary at all.
E3 is almost upon us, so there's no better time for me to pull out old stuff I scanned in just before I moved that has nothing to do with E3.
I was looking through some old Game Players issues from late 1995 when I noticed that 3DO's ad campaign sort of sucked. I suppose it says enough that it took me 12 years just to look at them long enough to see that they sucked, but it gets worse when you actually start reading them.
Like so. There was a whole series of these for different games, all in the same template, with each ad featuring a different jackass reporting from "the REAL 3DO Zone™" with an overdose of slang and every -ing verb cut to -in' to show how x-treme they were. It's painfully obvious that this was all put together by some thirtysomething copywriter who's trying far too hard to put himself in the shoes of today's youth and figure out how they really talk.
You see, how teenagers really talk is to use the word "hey" a lot and speak in numerous clumsy half-formed sentences. I suppose I should at least give the guy credit for restricting himself to just one ballz related pun, but it gets taken away again for use of the word "kneez" and cutting the g off of "groveling."
I have no idea what kind of nickname "Two-House" is. I don't even know what that means, unless he's got a summer cottage and he's just a prick about it. Otherwise I'm forced to assume he's related to Steve "Two-Phones" Mackabe.
The writer's problems only get worse when talking about Isis, because there's no good way to make a puzzle game sound cool or x-treme. There's definitely no way to make the involvement of Earth, Wind and Fire sound cool or x-treme. Or even appealling.
I have no idea who this goddess is and I have no reason to care. I'm not terribly concerned if she gets confined to solitary or not. These are not the things to hinge an ad campaign on. Just say HEY DO YOU LIKE MYST WELL THEN BUY THIS and be done with it.
I remember reading an article about some movie Tia Carrere was going to be in back in 1994. It spoke of her role in the two Wayne's World movies as if it was some sort of embarassing period she was now past so she could start her "real" career. Then a year later she starred in The Daedalus Encounter. Then the ad spelled her name wrong. Then the back of the box really spelled her name wrong. The lesson is to never attempt to advance your career.
The other lesson is to never think for a moment that anyone under the age of 35 has ever uttered the phrase "way cool space dude" unironically. Not even little kids.
Well, this one isn't so bad, maybe things are getting better.
Nevermind. Though I'll admit, a lot of the problem here is not the format of the ad itself but that they're trying to get people to buy Cyberdillo. This is still a felony in most states.
And here we have the problem distilled into an almost surreal state. The man is raving about a murderous rampage in a game where you play a pyramid that shoots at other pyramids. Which part of a pyramid is the chest?
Is it a coincidence that failed game systems so often have terrible ad campaigns? Did the manufacturers' incompetence in designing a good console extend to their choice of marketing? I don't think you can completely blame the games, as even some of those listed above weren't bad. You can give Icebreaker a try for yourself if you'd like. It's fun until having to clear each level with one life starts to grate on you.
We need one really terrible system with crap games to come out with an utterly compelling and well-crafted ad campaign to see how it does. One of you, get to work on that. This is for science, dammit.
Allow me to take a break from deleting about 500 spam comments to note that the lack of site updates in the past couple weeks is related to the fact that I've been in the process of moving and haven't even had my computer hooked up for the past week. I probably should have mentioned this before I left, but hey, what do you want from me.
Articles and inane blather to resume shortly.