8 – Kool-Aid Man,
- An entire game where you quench the thirst of little monsters creatively named ‘Thirsties’.
- Originally the game was obtained by sending in X amount of Kool-Aid items, which makes the game far from dumb, but then it was available for purchase.
- This seems more than a little presumptuous, I doubt many children loved the mascot enough to want to have one of their very few games that they obtained from their parents to be a sixty-dollar ad.
7 – Alan Wake – Verizon and Energizer,
- Most people agree that the most important thing to get right in a horror game is atmosphere, which is achieved through subtlety, environment design and art style.
- All three of these aspects were turkey slapped when you’re forced to watch a TV with an ad for a Verizon mobile phone, which you then obtain and have to use to complete the game.
- Then there’s the Energizer batteries, which powers your incredibly important weapon, the torch and honestly I think this was a bad idea for Energizer, since it’s a horror game the batteries run out very quickly, giving a poor impression on the performance of their product.
6 – Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Airwaves,
- Pretty much every single cutscene in Chaos Theory has an ad for the chewing gum Airwaves, these are included with absolute subtlety to the point where you it seems pretty obvious that they were going for subliminal advertising.
- But in all seriousness it was as subtle as a blimp, literally, they were on a blimp smack bang in the focal point of one of the first cutscenes.
- The worst part was when Sam Fisher grabs some of the gum and eats it while nothing else goes in the scene, forcing you to watch an ad in a game you paid full price for.
5 – Uncharted 3 – Subway,
- Tie-ins such as XP bonuses found on energy drink cans aren’t the same as product placements, but Subway and Naughty Dog managed to do both in this promotion.
- If you bought Subway during the month before Uncharted 3’s release you got to play the ranked multiplayer early, not only that but you could earn subway themed items to use during gameplay.
4 – Halo 4: King of the Hill,
- I can sort of tolerate and understand having bonus XP obtained through buying an external company’s product, but when you’re forced to buy the product, scan it, go to a promoted store and play the game there in order for a chance at getting one of those bonuses you’ve gone way too far.
- Even worse is when you have a promotion for that promotion in a review that’s supposedly meant to be a critique of the game so that players know whether or not the game is good enough to buy.
3 – Battlefield 2142 – Billboards,
- I think the worst thing about the product placement in Battlefield 2142 is that if it weren’t for two pretty major things the placement could have actually added to the immersion of the game.
- The first thing they got wrong is having billboards for movies that would have come out more than 100 years prior to the events of the game, I mean they could have at least tried by making the in game poster to be a remake of the ‘critically acclaimed movie’ or something.
- The next is that the fact that they scanned your browsing history in order to place targeted ads, that’s right the game literally contained spyware and the only way the told you this was in the lengthy EULA that not even the government expects you to read.
2 – EA Games and Obama Political Ads,
- I don’t know about you, but I play video games to escape from reality and political ads are way too deep seated in reality for me to feel anything but distaste for them being included in my alone time.
- Yet that didn’t stop the Obama electoral campaign from paying EA games to have them pop up in all of their online games during 2008 and 2012.
- Apparently it worked a charm, according to their own market research anyway, but that doesn’t make it not dumb.
1 – Captain Novolin,
- The concept behind making a game to increase awareness for an issue as widespread as Diabetes is a noble one.
- But when you take in to account the fact that the game focused on one particular brand of insulin, was sold at full price and donated precisely none of the money towards research into fixing the issue, you’ve got a seriously bizarre piece of capitalism.
- I mean you can’t get much more evil than capitalising on sick-children without giving anything tangible back to them.
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