Video game ads can be, quite frankly, terrible. If you’ve watched any TV appealing to the nerd demographic, you’ve seen them. Horribly forgettable and captive of their genre, they use the same crunching music over and over again, the same jumpy cuts from one FPS kill to the next. Even good games can be made to look uninteresting and cliched - while great games, like the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, just aren’t the sort of things that play well in the 30-second ad format. It’s similar to movie trailers that way - the more features, the more complexity, the less ability to simplify and sell - so a crappy and formulaic genre film paired with a recognizable drumbeat, an ominous voiceover, and a quick jump cut at the end is transformed into nicely motivational preview, while plot-heavy indie films can be harder to scale down. Sometimes impossible.

That said, after seeing the PS3 ad mashing up Shakespeare’s Henry V St. Crispin’s Day speech tonight, I was reminded that really is some quality ad work out there. So here’s a quick list of my personal Top 10 Video Game Ads.

The only rules: no fan made inclusions - otherwise Half Life Full Life Consequences or Half Life in 60 Seconds would take the cake, and no print media, even though that’s where some of the best work has been done (who can forget the impressive Divine Comedy PSP promotion).

10 - Water Balloons

A devious little ad promoting the online multiplayer capability of XBox Live, set to the creepy strains of “Teddy Bear Picnic.” Frank Budgen has done some great work on this front - he worked on at least three of the ads on this list, besides his work for Nike and other big names.

9 - Gears of War: Mad World

This is on here mostly as a contrast with the kind of FPS game ad I noted before. It’s similar in some respects to this ad for BioShock set to “Beyond the Sea”, but the Gears ad featuring Gary Jules’ Mad World has an enduring following, and hits the right note for Gears’ post-apocalyptic environment.

8. George Plimpton doesn’t know Henry Thomas

This ad just gets more bizarre every time I see it. George Plimpton was the spokesman for Intellivision, and made a host of good ads for them, but the humor here is that Henry Thomas had just finished making E.T. - the idea that Plimpton wouldn’t recognize him was just ridiculous.

7. Pole Position

Turn your speakers down for another throwback. “Hey! You look like a real jerk!” “Well, I am a corporate executive…”

6. Mountain

Another multiplayer ad, with much the same feel as the XBox one, albeit for a different system. But I love this one more, not just for the soundtrack, but the perfect encapsulation of the exhilarating feeling you’ve experienced if you’ve ever broken into a national Top 100 list (I’ve only done this once - Warhawk, right when it came out) on a multiplayer game.

5. Ratchet and Clank

The Ratchet and Clank ads were ahead of their time in their Youtube-esque feel. I always liked the one with the gravity boots best. Also, Cloverfield is totally a ripoff of these ads.

4. Halo 3

These are all ads from the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign, which are just a phenomenal representation of the war documentary feel. I wish the game was as good as these ads - but I’ve always loved the initial teaser, which ran during the Super Bowl, even better:

3. PS9

Now this is a classic. There is still a minor cult around this ad - and a running joke that whatever console problems there are, they’ll be fixed at the PS9 stage - and the design in it is excellent. The only problem: at the rate we’re going technologically, I doubt we’ll have to wait til 2078.

2. “Banned” XBox Shooting ad

I still kind of doubt that this ad was actually “banned”, as opposed to just released as a bit of internet fodder. But it does take me back to the days of running around the backyard with fingers raised or nerf guns, and the inevitable arguments that would emerge about whether someone got hit or not.

1. Double Life

By far, the best ad ever done for any game system ever. And one of the few bizarre ads created for Sony (and there have been a lot of those, many of which are magnificent triumphs of awful) that actually works. This doesn’t just work: it speaks to anyone who’s ever played a game and loved it so much as to enjoy “a life of dubious virtue.”

This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.

It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad - albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:

The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising

Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.

From Gio’s Bio:

Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media

Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.

As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.

Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.

Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.

If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?

Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.

Update: The Consumerist is all over this.

For a presidential candidate who has based so much of his message on an appeal to a new generation of voters thirsty for hope and change, Barack Obama said something a few weeks back which almost seemed – dare one use such an epithet – uncool.

Speaking to an audience in Indiana, Obama talked about the latest national ill he hopes to cure from the Oval Office: the scourge of video games, embodied by the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. Admitting that he was only prompted to make the remark based only on a morning news report about how the game will “break all records and make goo-gobs of money for whoever designed it,” Obama spoke in the stilted, uncertain tone politicians tend to use when they’re describing a subject with which they have little familiarity. Here’s a hint to listening: it has the same false certainty of Republican Senator Ted Stevens when he infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”

“These video games are raising our kids,” Obama said. “Across the board, middle-class, upper-class, working-class kids, they’re spending a huge amount of their time not on their studies, but on entertainment.”

Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election. In February he urged University of Texas students to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,” in another dated reference. And in 2006 Obama rather rudely returned a donation from Doug Lowenstein, then-president of the game industry’s Entertainment Software Association.

Obama isn’t alone in his dislike for gamers – during her time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would’ve expanded the regulation of game sales and imposed heavy penalties on stores who accidentally sold the game to underage customers. And more than a few politicians in both parties took to the airwaves in anger in response to the release of one of Rockstar’s previous iterations of the GTA series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game that could be unlocked within modified versions. But it’s clear that when it comes to video games, there are far fewer Republicans who have a problem – this is a Democratic issue.

What is it about video games that infuriate so many Democrats? What is it about these games that make them emulate ambulance chaser Jack Thompson, the ever-present clownish Florida attorney who would probably find a way to blame video games for acne and crabgrass? And why is it that these political leaders refuse to acknowledge the plain truth: that the video game industry as a whole has undergone a massive change for the better in the years since Tipper Gore’s crusade against the evils of Ice Cube?

Over the past eight years, the Federal Trade Commission has significantly stepped up their monitoring of the video game industry. The unspoken message: shape up, or we’ll start cracking down. And to their credit, the industry responded as we would hope responsible members of the marketplace would: they stepped up their support for self-regulation, they made the rules clear for gamesellers, and they made a sustained effort to educate parents on the ESRB game ratings that are now the industry-wide standard.

According to the FTC’s 2007 report on their “mystery shopper” monitoring program, the area of greatest improvement over the past eight years has by far been the video game sector. In 2000, 85% of underage customers teens were able to purchase Mature-rated games – today, that number has been more than cut in half, down to 42%. By comparison, 39% of underage customers were able to buy an R-rated movie ticket – and that’s comparing a purchasing system with a stagnant model that has been in place for more than thirty years to one that has expanded drastically, rocketing to $18.8 billion in sales in 2007.

It’s not just the industry that’s matured, either. Gamers themselves are growing up – according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, over 35% of parents American play video games, and 93% of their children, numbers that will only increase in the future. Engaging systems like the Nintendo Wii and the vast arena of online play have taken video games from a pursuit for teens alone to a cross-generational platform for group entertainment. And as Harvard psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson find in their new book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, the overwhelming majority of young players use games not to play out violent fantasies, but to relieve stress and relax.

Obama’s tired anti-gamer rhetoric about slacking and laziness starts to sound particularly silly when you consider the creativity, ingenuity, and strong social conscience at the heart of the grown-up gamer community. For an example, one need look no further than Child’s Play, a charity founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade, which has given over two million dollars in donations from video gamers of toys, games, books and money delivered to more than 40 children’s hospitals worldwide. Not bad work for a bunch of underachievers.

If Barack Obama wants to take on video games as his latest straw man for America’s manifold problems, that’s his business. But he should be smart enough to recognize that gamers can’t be caricatured anymore: too many people have played these games without being inspired to do violence and mayhem. Gamers look increasingly like America as a whole, and they want to take responsibility for the upbringing of their own children. The same Hart study found that 85 percent of voting parents say that they – not government, retailers or game creators – are responsible for monitoring their children’s exposure to games. Sorry, Clinton and Obama – that’s one less area where voters want the government to play daddy.

Let’s give the Illinois Senator a pass on this one, though. It could be he’s just stressed out from the campaign trail. If he wants a break, he might consider a trip to Liberty City to blow off some steam. At least it’ll take his mind off of whatever Rev. Wright is up to today.

originally published at Right Side Politics

>> Last year was the first year since I could afford a console that I didn’t buy a single version of Madden Football - I settled for NCAA Football on the PS3, and I remain quite happy with it.  Turns out that last year was also the first year in a long time that sales of EA’s cash cow declined.  But next year?  Yeah, I’m gonna have to put up the coin for this. A jam-packed 20th Anniversary version with #4 on the cover?  Nice.  I just hope the Madden Curse of old doesn’t mean that Favre falls off his riding mower and breaks his leg the week it comes out.

>> Salvador Dali’s Pinball and other beauty from the Atari Age.