Pompously promoting: NiGHTS
Judging by the above promo, the Sega guys of the mid 90s would have been the kind of kids at school who’d get into a fight, throw dirt in their opponent’s face and then go in for the dreaded Rear Admiral. Still, you’ve got to admire a campaign that absolutely slates a rival console that would ultimately go on to sell over a 100 million more units than their own product. Ballsy or not, though, this is still a load of petty, arrogant toss, which NiGHTS is far better than.
How it should have been advertised
Instead of getting bogged down in how many processors the PlayStation had, Sega would have been well advised concentrating on its own business. Drawing more attention to a superior console that was about to catch the public’s imagination like none before it was, in hindsight, probably a bad call. And perhaps it should have just gone for a simpler, less confrontational campaign.
Pompously promoting: Gears of War 2
Oh come on. A f*cking flower? Really? The only thing ‘the Train’ ever looks at through his sniper scope is the freshly shot bits of frontal lobe from whatever Locust he’s just blown to pieces. It’s so sappy, sentimental and out of kilter with Gear’s near emotion-free world, it makes the relatively sensitive Mad World trailer look like a snuff film about small puppies and rusty power drills.
How it should have been advertised
Yeah, yeah. So there’s a tiny bit of a love story in Gears 2 for those emoticon-spewing humanoids that need a slice of melodrama stuffed into their portion of alien murderising. But two minutes of Dom shedding a couple of crocodile tears for his dead missus in between 14 hours of ET genocide hardly echoes the touchy feely sentiment of this ad. Really, if MS wanted to say Gears 2 was more of the same but with a little tender lovin’ injected into proceedings, it should have gone with the below.
Pompously promoting: Halo 3… again
We’d gladly savage this egomaniacal ad that likes to treat shooting colourful, cartoon aliens with all the reference of a real life war documentary, but we think we’ll let the boys at Consolevania do that for us.
How it should have been advertised
Why did Microsoft’s advertising team think 14 year olds sitting in their Master Chief-emblazoned briefs would care about the fictional, indulgent ramblings of an old European dude? Next time, leave the made up war stories and long war-weary looks on the cutting room floor and show us some Covenant killing.
