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Post by excelsior on Nov 1, 2022 10:45:27 GMT -5
I've been going through my old comic books to sell them off lately and it reminded me of the abundance of video game ads you'd find in them. I thought I'd share the odd one here and perhaps others might do so also. I like this ad for Captain Planet because the tongue in cheek messaging feels like an actual dig at this awful, preachy show. I don't remember the Captain Planet game being any better, but at least it didn't make me feel sorry for the dude who was stuck with 'Heart' as a power. Konami really wanted us to feel badly about sucking at their games. It seems the ad is much better suited to Super C (at least in my opinion) but leveraging ad space in order to cover (gasp) two games at once seems to be an idea lost on publishers in modern times.
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Post by spanky on Nov 1, 2022 14:18:17 GMT -5
Cool thread idea, I love revisiting old gaming related media... I was just thinking about this the other day for some reason....While it was mostly regarded as a kids toy, for a while there, the Game Boy was marketed towards adults. Which is easy to see why with all of it's puzzle games. I think it actually caught on for a bit because I had an adult aunt who had one and she played games like Dexterity and Daedalian Opus. Supposedly this ad appeared in a Playboy magazine but I can't confirm that ("I just read it for the Nintendo ads!")
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Post by dsparil on Nov 1, 2022 14:58:16 GMT -5
I pretty much only look at old issues of CGW for the ads! Here's two from March 1990: The first is for computer ports of Blades of Steel and Castlevania. I don't know about BoS, but Castlevania is awful with a weird control scheme, jerky scrolling and a PC speaker soundtrack. Castlevania isn't really a scary game, but that port sure is! This ad for the first Tex Murphy game is not good. It's a true classic, but I would never have bought it based on this. One of the funny things is that most of the color content in its 66 pages is the ads. I know the older ones were black and white only, but I was very spoiled growing up with full color on every page.
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Post by spanky on Nov 6, 2022 14:05:17 GMT -5
Was going through some old EGMs the other day and found this horrendous ad for the SNES version of World Heroes. Here's another ad for the same game. Not much to say about it except it's ug-leee The port received above average reviews in EGM. Three 6's and an 8 citing it being a good port of an OK game. Though I suppose by the scale of video game magazine reviews you could consider this a bad score. The producer of the game certainly did and wrote EGM a letter about it. I find it sort of fascinating as it shows how fast things were evolving during that era. World Heroes was considered a pretty good SF II clone when it was released in 1992. A year later, a very good port of the arcade version looks like ancient history in comparison to other games being released. It's one of the reasons I hold up this era so much. Things were changing so much - Hell, we were only 3 years off from full 3D worlds in games at this point. Today's industry feels very stagnant to me in comparison.
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Post by vnisanian2001 on Nov 6, 2022 14:30:34 GMT -5
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Post by spanky on Nov 10, 2022 8:09:08 GMT -5
^^^^ Absolute hall of fame magazine ad right there. There was a game accessories company back in the 90s called STD though they tried to downplay that and rebrand as Interact . They had a bunch of ads, including some pretty funnily worded ones ("Get more ways to win, from STD!!!"). Unfortunately I can only find a few of them online...Google Image Search is borderline worthless nowadays.
Yeah..."scuba diving" sure thing man Not much to say about this one except it looks very cozy to me!
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Post by magic89 on Nov 21, 2022 8:12:59 GMT -5
Speaking of Christmas ad from one Spider-Man comic book published by TM-Semic(defunct) in my country Poland. "Pegasus IQ-502 The best gift" Yea...ad promote selling pirate copy of Nintendo Famicon i write TM-Semic defunct because company who selling Pegasuses are Bobmark are exist today but no longer selling those consoles after year 1997. Insteead they manufacture and sale another knock off produck Hoop cola.
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Post by excelsior on Dec 20, 2022 8:33:29 GMT -5
I really like this Ico ad.
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Post by spanky on Dec 20, 2022 14:44:48 GMT -5
Here's a an old Sears ad that I find kind of interesting. First of all, 3 of the 4 screen shots are mislabeled, but the ad also features an off model Bowser and some very off model Koopa Troopas that have heads that look like...ducks? Geese? It's funny, because I remember as a kid that some people I came across would refer to them as "ducks." I always wonder where that originated because I heard it multiple times. I mean they didn't really resemble ducks at all to me. Maybe it was this art that caused them to think that? (Koopa Paratroopers having wings notwithstanding). NES games required a lot less imagination than the era before it, but sometimes the graphics in those games were still vague enough that your brain would make you see things in a different way than the artist's intended.
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Post by excelsior on Dec 20, 2022 23:55:37 GMT -5
NES games required a lot less imagination than the era before it, but sometimes the graphics in those games were still vague enough that your brain would make you see things in a different way than the artist's intended. This is definitely true - and extended to some later games too. Another good example - and how could we forget.... Back to topic though. This isn't an ad in the traditional sense, but a form of advertising nonetheless. It does make me laugh regardless.
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Post by windfisch on Dec 21, 2022 5:33:00 GMT -5
Your thoughtful neighbourhood Spider-Man.
(that bit made me smile)
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Post by magic89 on Dec 22, 2022 23:28:35 GMT -5
at least it's not Tokustasu Spider-man.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 26, 2023 8:56:03 GMT -5
I was looking through an old GamePro, and very coincidentally came across this two page spread for Breath of Fire!
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Post by spanky on Jan 26, 2023 9:09:28 GMT -5
That Breath of Fire ad was everywhere in magazines. I wonder if the game sold well because Squaresoft promoted the hell out of it. I'm not a huge fan of the art on it's own but I think it's neat in a 90's time capsule sort of way. The sequel's box art kicks it up a step more with your cute appealing anime characters from the game looking like they've all contracted rabies.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 26, 2023 12:33:29 GMT -5
I figure Square would have published the sequel in the US too if the first had been a big seller. The legendarily awful BoFII translation makes me think that Capcom didn't have huge hopes though. FFII on SNES was around 300k so my total guess is high five figures maybe breaking 100k. All Capcom says on the matter is that the entire series has 3.3m in sales across 15 titles which must include VC releases and probably NSO just to boost the number.
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