False Advertising

Here's Mad World:


And here's Prince of Persia's GREAT but (I think) totally misrepresentative trailer. The bullshit flies off the chart at 3:30...check it:


NOTE: And before anyone posts- yes I KNOW the job of advertising is to evoke feelings in the potential customer. BUT usually those feelings are somewhat tied to what the actual product has a potential shot at evoking. Buy a sexy sports car and you VERY WELL MAY feel like a bad ass for a while. So it makes sense to sell me the car with an ad that stimulates that feeling. But attaching a desirable feeling to a product that in no way has a shot in hell at evoking that particular feeling? That's dishonest and lame and- worst to me- disrespectful to our great medium. ESPECIALLY when the product in question already evokesperfectly desirable feelings that can be used to sell the game (i.e. sell me Gears by promising I get to be a bad ass mother fucker...that's honest).

SECOND NOTE: And where the fuck is the gaming press in calling us out on all our bullshit? It's not that I want to be called a liar- cause again, I'm guilty of this shit too- BUT our games- as an INDUSTRY- get BETTER when we get called on bullshit and are forced to do better with each swing at the bat. Instead, most of the press seems to get all fanboy geekout over this shit and they should be holding our feet to the damn fire about it. And if there is a game journalist out there that is calling 'foul' on this, I am not aware. But I apologize in advance if I was not aware of you.

THIRD NOTE: One thing I should consider is perhaps this is a way to bring non gamers into the fold. They come expecting a certain experience that they are comfortable with and then get into gaming. Hard to sell a non gamer on some of the gamey things games do so well unless they know how cool it is...and perhaps this is a good way to trick them into taking a game for a test drive that they never would. It's still lying and I hate it and think it disrespects what we do. And I think gamers- who are gonna show up for the great gameplay either way- should at least not be so easily swayed. But I can see the point- if that is indeed the case- about bringing in the non gamers...

Great weekend ya'll!

David