Hi there.
Happy New Year to you! I haven’t quite decided whether we published enough reviews this year to actually bother doing a round-up [it hasn’t stopped you in the past – FFG reader] so I’ve come up with another way to cynically reheat some content from 2017.
I guess our major feature this year was a look back through the pages of PC Zone magazine. And at various points, several adverts for games and gaming products caught the eye. So, if you can’t be bothered to read through our history feature, I’ve picked out some of the ads and put them in a list here. Because we all like a good, lazy, listicle at this time of year, right?
(It’s worth pointing out at this stage that this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of dreadful adverts: I’m sure there are many others. As for the worst one I can remember, well, you would have to go some distance to beat the notorious Jo Guest/Battlecruiser ad, about which my friend and colleague has already written before).
Here we go then, and in no particular order:
10. Championship Manager 96-97, Eidos
Catering directly to a schoolboy audience already familiar with jokes about ‘lobbing Seaman’, you’d hope that such tactics were beneath the venerable Championship Manager series, but obviously, they weren’t.
9. World League Soccer ’98, Eidos
Another appearance for Eidos, and another football game. Be warned: playing multiplayer WLS could lead to alcohol, getting naked and…who knows where else?
8. Strife, 3DO
Strife used the Doom engine but had talking bits as well. So, er, brains as well as, um, balls? Which sort of makes sense, in a way. But then you see the weird suggestion in the bottom corner that you should take these raw ingredients, blend them together, and consume them while playing.
7. Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, Microids
In Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, it doesn’t matter if you have one of the smaller guns in the game, as long as you direct it towards the bad guys’ genitals.
6. Gravis Controllers
If you buy a Gravis Gamepad, this sexy lady will do whatever you want – guaranteed.
5. Championship Manager 01/02, Eidos
Eidos, and Championship Manager, make yet another appearance. I hope this woman has asked her boyfriend/husband to put cream on her back, and these aren’t simply the actions of a crazed beach stalker.
4. Director of Football, Empire Interactive
At the point of this game’s release, ex-Rangers striker Ally McCoist had not undertaken any kind of managerial or coaching role, but felt happy to endorse it as “without a doubt, the most comprehensive and authentic football management simulation”. PC Zone gave it a score of 23%.
3. Blood Wake, Microsoft
I’ve never played the Xbox game Blood Wake, but apparently it’s at least as much fun as farting in the bath. At least I hope that chap is farting. He seems to be really straining.
2. Gainward’s ‘Golden Sample’
Ad Guy 1: “This card’s called ‘Golden Sample’. Any ideas?”
Ad Guy 2: “Sounds a bit like ‘Golden Shower’, doesn’t it?”
Ad Guy 1: “Brilliant! Also, is it ‘Graphics Card’ or ‘Graphic’s Card’?”
Ad Guy 2: “Don’t know.”
1. PlayStation World, Future Publishing
Step 1: Note similarity of cover game to popular film series.
Step 2: Put name of film series in quotes.
Step 3: Make crass remark about the game’s star while misspelling her name.
Step 4: Add cryptic reference to “Gold-Digging Sluts.”
Step 5: Go to pub.
Posts
Ugh, 90s lad culture. Strife deserves better than that.
Narrowly missing your 96-06 window, but I remember a terrible advert for the problem-plagued Frontier First Encounters – it just said “we’ve squashed the bugs” with… a picture of a squashed bug.
Not offensive, just embarrassing that they had to take out an advert just to acknowledge that their game was released in an unfinished state and hope that we’d give it another try.
January 3, 2018 @ 11:48 am
I remember that one too…
The 1996-2006 thing was completely arbitrary, in fact the whole list was just restricted to what I found when going through old PC Zones. There were quite a few gaps in the issues I had access to – I’m sure there were many more dreadful ads in the mid-90s especially.
I think just the general laziness/crapness of some of them got to me. I’m remembering another one now, for the PC port of Daytona USA. It was a picture of some roadworks with a speed restriction and a slogan along the lines of ‘We’ve all thought about it, haven’t we?’ – implying that the game would allow you to live out any fantasies about smashing through some roadworks and speeding away to freedom. But the game was about motor racing, on a purpose-built track, so it didn’t seem like a great fit.
Unless the message was simply about a game that allowed you to drive fast instead of being caught in traffic? But, still…
January 3, 2018 @ 12:45 pm
No mention of John Romero’s infamous “John Romero will make you his bitch” advertisement campaign?
January 7, 2018 @ 2:26 pm
It’s one of the more famous bad ads of the 90s, and if this was a proper list of all of those (instead of just a fairly random selection that caught my eye while going through old PC Zones) then it’d certainly be up there.
To be honest, though, I never thought it was *that* bad – just some (dreadfully chosen) words on a red page…
January 7, 2018 @ 8:00 pm