After seeing the commerical for the new Rayman game, all I could say was "Yikes!" Seroiusly, how is a bunch of guys peeing in the snow supposed to make me want to buy the game? Does anyone stop to think about how bad video game commericals have gotten? With the new Zelda game, they got it right: plenty of shots of the game, less bullshit... it's actually the best game commercial I've ever seen. But some of these commericals are so dumb and have nothing to do with the game at all.
I thought Sega was the worst offender, back during the Nintendo vs. Sega war. Remember the commerical where the guy playing the gameboy hits himself with a chunk of roadkill and then goes "duhuhuh, colors." Dear lord, that was the worst game commerical ever, but the ones that Sony is churning out are so stupid it makes me want to boycott the games out of spite. What the hell happened to game commericals? How hard is it to put a video of the game and say "Here's what it looks like. Now do you want it?" No... the average game commerical features less then five seconds of actual game footage... sometimes none at all. And you wonder why a lot of these game companies are bleeding money.
Most of the print ads are terrible also. In the past, some of the ads were genius. Genesis does what Nintedon't. Simple and effective. The message there is clear: Genesis has better Graphics then the NES and here are the screen shots to prove it. Now let me pick up a fairly recent (November 2002) EGM and let's see what some of the ads are.
OK, a two page ad of a guy flying through the windshield of his car. Big words, "SMASHING!" Ad is for Burnout 2. Actual title of game takes up 10% of ad. Actual screen shots take up less then 5% of ad. Gee wiz, I wonder why Acclaim is going bankrupt (well, that and anti-trust lawsuits).
Now here's another two page ad, this one for Superman: The Man of Steel for the X-Box. The first page is just a big Superman Crest. The 2nd page has four whole screen shots. Actual title of the game takes up about 2% of the ad. Screenshots: 10%. Superman Crest: 20%. And that leaves the remaining 68% of the ad: NOTHING BUT BLUE. That's it. The actual space to let you know that you can only buy it on the X-Box is less then 1%. Fucking idiots.
I'm sick to death of game ads. Very, very few are good (GTA and Zelda)... most of them are shit (every 1st Party Sony game).