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Promotional Consideration: Dual screen theatre
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out. The following DS Lite ads were taken from a series of Nintendo-sponsored station identification pieces (idents) aired over a year ago on Channel 4. For those of you unfamiliar with idents, they're short spots, often themed, stuck in between television shows to help "brand" the channel. In the case of this set, the UK public-service TV station bookended its comedy programs with Japanese theatre-styled advertisements for the DS's features and games. They're some of the most creative commercials we've seen for the handheld, so don't skip this post!
A year of Promotional Consideration
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.The titling of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as we didn't start this column until early July, so it's more of a "half-year of" piece. No, you jerks, the humor in us beginning our Promotional Consideration retrospective on a disappointing note isn't lost on us.Still, with 26 articles now behind us, one every week since this feature's inception, we've written enough of these to develop a few that are actually worth reading. We've picked out our five favorite Promotional Consideration posts of 2007, carefully hiding them after the post break, that magical realm where anything seems possible.
Promotional Consideration: Hataraku Chocobo
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Square Enix has been pushing Final Fantasy IV hard this week in Japan, advertising the 3D remake with five different CG-filled commercials. We were curious to compare these spots with how the RPG was marketed when it first appeared on the Super Famicom, all the way back in 1991, and the two approaches couldn't be any more at odds!
Promotional Consideration: Ms. Yanagihara
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Shipped out to stores in Japan just last week, Fujimori Midori no Let's Tarot performs virtual tarot readings while teaching its users how to interpret the cards themselves. It's an interesting title, one that we could picture possibly being a small success if ever brought to the states, occupying the New Age shelves of bookstores.Also interesting is who publisher Bitway chose to promote the fortunetelling trainer, opting for a celebrity face, Kanako Yanagihara, instead of Fujimori Midori, the medium who lent her name and likeness to the game. Read on for some of Kanako Yanagihara's previous work.
Promotional Consideration: Why we're not watching the Spike Video Game Awards tonight
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.American cable channel Spike premieres the 2007 edition of the Spike Video Game Awards tonight at 9:00 PM (likely re-airing it a dozen times over the course of the next couple of months). Despite the scorn it received from gamers in its previous years, the show lives on, now in its fourth year. There are many reasons one could give for refusing to watch the two-hour program tonight -- the event really is as ridiculous as you'd expect a video game award show to be -- but one specific flaw brought about our decision to avoid the production ...
Promotional Consideration: Professor Layton and the Japanese Commercials
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Though Professor Layton and the Curious Village has until next February before the game appears on US shelves, its sequel, Professor Layton and the Devil's Box, is already selling like crazy in Japan where it was released just last week.Nurturing this new and successful IP, publisher and developer Level-5 had no problem with putting some money behind the second entry's advertising campaign, producing a trio of commercials featuring live actors for the Japanese market. Continue past the post break for the set of ads.
Promotional Consideration: Advertising with Power
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.As of October of this year, Nintendo of America relinquished its hold of Nintendo Power and handed over publishing duties to Future US, the same media corporation behind the official Xbox and PlayStation magazines. Two issues into the transition, Nintendo Power's writing staff and format haven't changed much, but the number of ads certainly has!
Promotional Consideration: Party Like a Rock Star
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/videos/gaming/Outrageously_saucy_Jam_Sessions_commercials_in_New_Zealand'; Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out. This marks the third time we've featured Ubisoft's Jam Sessions in our Promotional Consideration column, but these latest ads for the New Zealand market are the best ones yet. We're not going to ruin their illicit content for you before you've had a chance to watch these not-safe-for-work commercials yourselves, so hurry past the break and see what all the kids are nattering about at recess.
Promotional Consideration: On screen(s)!
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out. As we posted two weeks ago, Nintendo UK has commissioned Patrick Stewart for its latest round of commercials for casuals. The company's previous celebrity-starred ads, featuring Nicole Kidman and Chris Tarrant as spokespersons, propelled Brain Training sales in Europe to heights the US releases still haven't matched. We tracked down the Starfleet Captain's new Brain Training advertisement and put it up for your viewing pleasure. We haven't left it at just that, though. Plot a course past the post break, warp 9!
Promotional Consideration: Having word ability continues to pay
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out. In last week's edition of Promotional Consideration, we snickered over Ubisoft's scandalous My Word Coach ad, reveling in the juvenility of its baseball/sex metaphor. Imagine our surprise and mirth when we stumbled upon another printed piece promoting the vocabulary trainer, this time targeted at women! While not even half as bawdy as its brother, nor as clever, this advertisement still has some qualities worth examining.
Promotional Consideration: It pays to have word ability (word smarts)
var digg_url='http://digg.com/gaming_news/Practice_vocabulary_get_lucky_according_to_this_ad'; Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.While we've exposed you to sexually-charged promotional materials in the past, much to the disapproval of your uptight parents, the last game we ever expected to feature for its immodest advertising was My Word Coach, a vocabulary trainer due for the DS and Wii this November 6th. Read on for the titillating piece and our analysis on how Ubisoft put together one of the most salacious ads to appear in Nintendo Power in recent memory without baring a single inch of skin.
Promotional Consideration: Black Hole Advertising
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Considering that you've put up with the dozens of posts we've published for Advance Wars: Days of Ruin so far, we're sure you'll forgive us for revisiting War Worlds again so soon with this column. This week, Promotional Consideration examines the print ad Nintendo rolled out in 2003 for Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Position your units, end your turn, and peek past the break for more text.
Promotional Consideration: Santeria
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.It physically pained us to see Ubisoft's print campaign and European boxart for Jam Sessions, but the publisher came through with its commercial for the recently-released guitar sim. The 30-second spot is broken up into three scenes of alleged teenagers playing and enjoying the game, all of them singing along to Sublime's "Santeria," a track that isn't actually included on the Jam Sessions cart. It's a catchy tune, one we're sure you've heard many times on the radio, and we can see why it was picked for the piece. Continue past the jump for the commercial and this week's installment of Promotional Consideration.
Promotional Consideration: Drop Dead Zelda
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Though we featured a number of Zelda commercials earlier this week, like Vanessa Williams, we've saved the best for last. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, arguably the finest handheld game ever released, had its share of unusual ads, relying on corny rappers and wacky puppetry to sell the ARPG in the US and Japan. In the UK, however, gamers were treated to the slapstick humor of one of Britain's most distinguished comedians.
Promotional Consideration: COBRAAA!!!
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out."G.I. Joe is the codename for America's daring, highly trained, special mission force. Its purpose: To defend human freedom against COBRA, a ruthless, terrorist organization determined to rule the world."
Promotional Consideration: Mario's DIY signs
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Giant advertising firms with international clients and extravagant budgets aren't the only people working hard to push their video games on you; small mom-and-pop stores also develop stratagems to attract the casual shoppers who haven't yet decided on what to buy. These sales-generating tactics can be something as simple as putting up a notice about in-demand consoles being in stock, or as annoying as hard-selling you on preorders and magazine subscriptions.One of our favorite schemes, and the topic for this week's Promotional Consideration installment, relies on setting up homemade signs with creative interpretations of video gaming's most recognizable mascot, Mario. Join us past the post break for some of the interesting Japanese in-store displays that we've come across.
Promotional Consideration: Multi Screen
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would eventually go on to father the Game Boy and Metroid, was riding home one evening on a bullet train when he spotted a bored businessman randomly pressing buttons on an LCD calculator to entertain himself. Believing that commuters would enjoy passing the time with handheld video games, Yokoi soon developed a set of portable gaming systems which also doubled as watches/alarms -- the Game & Watch.This week, we'll take a look at several ads for the fourth Game & Watch series, the Multi Screen, whose clamshell case and vertically stacked screens would later serve as inspiration for the Nintendo DS's design.
Promotional Consideration: The Ads of War
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out. War is a terrible thing -- a malignant disease, as novelist Martha Gellhorn once put it -- but in our boyhood years, we reveled in anything that approximated the battles and bloodshed. When we weren't drafting our G.I. Joes into military service, we were conducting mock battles with our friends (pew pew) or drawing preposterous weapons with a wide array of arbitrary lasers, scopes, and barrels. This week's edition of Promotional Consideration takes a look at several playful commercials for three war-themed Nintendo DS games. Though war can be hell, you wouldn't know it from how these titles are advertised! Grab your rifle and report for duty past the post break.
Promotional Consideration: Beaning the Red Army
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.With Arc System Works and Milliom [sic] laboring together on a return for the Nekketsu High School Dodgeball Club, we finally have an excuse to bring out our favorite ads for the Super Dodgeball series. Put on your gym clothes, tighten your shoelaces, and run past the break to see what we've been waiting to hit you with.
Promotional Consideration: Underground Brain Training
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Those of you lucky enough to live in a city with a rapid transit system have likely seen at least one ad for a handheld game during your commutes. After all, what better audience to advertise a portable title to than people who're trapped in a high-speed steel car full of strangers while they wait to be ferried from one spot to another? In honor of Brain Age 2's release in the states last week, we'll be looking at a few ads we found for Nintendo's educational software that've appeared in transit stations in countries like Canada and France. Join us past the post break for this week's edition of Promotional Consideration.
