Promotional Consideration: Moons, Zombies, Dodgeballs, and Tactics
Aside from its preview page tease and Time Hollow's localization, there wasn't much in the way of exclusive DS news in this month's Nintendo Power, at least compared to what we've seen in recent issues.
Paging through the magazine, however, we spotted at least two advertisements that we wanted to share with you. As we were tearing them out to throw into our scanner, we thought, "Why not post all of the other DS ads (and the cover)?" Join us past the break for the scanned pages!
June 2008. V229. Aerosmith.
We were convinced that this was a terrible cover at first, asking anyone who'd listen to our inconsequential ravings, "What kid is going to buy a magazine with Aerosmith on the front?" Then we remembered that most kids are unlikely to recognize the aging rockers, confusing them as a generic Guitar Hero band.
We love that they stuck K.K. Slider in the 20th Anniversary badge, keeping with the cover's music theme. Really, Nintendo Power's staff should have just made him the centerpiece.
Quick note about the ads before we start cracking jokes on them: We left out the print ads for multiplatform releases because they not only lack screenshots from the DS version, they're missing Wii screenshots as well! Instead, the images appear to be from the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 games.
We brought this up before with Warhammer 40K: Squad Command, but here it is again, this time with Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Top Spin 3. It would have taken only a few minutes to make sure the depicted screenshots are appropriate for the publication.
"Girls Want Farming Fun Too!"
Really, Natsume, we're sure you could have come up with a better headline than "Girls Want Farming Fun Too!" This reads like email spam subject lines from porn sites. It's three X's away from "Barnyard girls riding horses on webcams RIGHT NOW."
"The Invasion Is Underway!"
We're still not sure who this game is aimed at. We absolutely adore zombies -- we even paid money to watch Diary of the Dead in a theatre -- but somehow, Ignition Entertainment managed to create a zombie game that we have no interest in playing. This advertisement is probably more fun than actually playing the game.*
*We haven't played it ourselves, so we could be totally wrong on this!
"Not The Face!"
Now, this is what we're talking about! Panda throws, explosions, and a "Kunio Series" emblem! If you remember our Promotional Consideration installment on ads for the original NES game, we noted that Super Dodgeball's release brought about the Cold War's end. Could Super Dodgeball Brawlers be the key to finally bringing peace to the Middle East?
"June 2008"
Square Enix must feel extremely confident about Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift's release to advertise it without any screenshots or copy on the sequel's features. We suppose that anyone interested in the SRPG series already knows what they're getting into, and Nintendo Power has a three-page feature on it, as well, but a short paragraph explaining what to expect would've been nice!
In case you weren't able to guess, the last two print pieces we featured were the ones we were originally interested in. We hope you enjoyed the scanned ads!
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
