The Best Marketing Campaign In All Of Gaming

 

I'm not one, personally, to get too swept up in hype and marketing.  Usually what will happen is that I will find out that a game exists, maybe watch a short trailer and then file it away in my mind and not look at anything to do with it ever again until it launches and I get a chance to play it.  I have to admit though, if I was a young Japanse boy in the 90s then there's a good chance that this advertising campaign for the Sega Saturn would have swept me right up into a hype train.

Segata Sanshiro, a play on the Japanese セガサターンしろ (meaning, "play the sega saturn!" said in a sort of aggressive way) arranged so that it sounds like a dudes name was a series of advertisements played on Japanese TV to, obviously, promote the Sega Saturn.  The first few snippits of these adverts depict our man, Segata Sanshiro, a bloke in a karate gi, approaching groups of youths who are not playing Sega Saturn and then beating them up and demanding that they go and do so.  Later adverts depict him doing absolutely insane super-human feats that relate to the theme of whatever individual game they are trying to sell.  For example, one of my favorite versions of this is where Segata is acting as goalkeeper in a football match and instead of just blocking the oncoming ball, he proceeds to flip the entire goal net over his shoulder so TECHNICALLY the ball didn't go in.  After some clips of the game, World Cup 98 ~Road to Win~, the ad ends with Segata being red-carded by the referee while shouting "OH NO!" in an overexaggerated katakana-English accept.

The absolutely insane thing about this series of adverts is that when it came for the release of the Dreamcast, the ad involves a bunch of business folks celebrating the launch when a missle is launched at Sega HQ.  Segata, who just happens to be standing on the roof of the building, proceeds to catch the missle in mid-air, rides it into space where it then explodes and kills him off.  Honestly, a truly hilarious way to give the mascot a sendoff for the next piece of hardware.

Segata Sanshiro seemed to be such a well-liked figure within Japan that he even got his own game on the Saturn but I've heard its an extremely lackluster mini-game collection where your reward for beating the games is the ability to watch the adverts which, honestly, seems trash but having not played it at time of writing this article I'll withhold judgement.  More well liked that the mascot though is the man himself Hiroshi Fujioka who is a bit of a legend here in Japan.  Known chiefly for being in Kamen Rider he's a sort of cultural icon that even my wife, who knows barely anything of video games and even less about Tokusatsu, knows who he is.  Hell, when I looked him up on Wikipedia before writing this blog I found out he even has a fucking planet named after him.  

I wouldn't be surprised if this ad campaign is the reason that the Saturn is remembered quite a bit more fondly in Japan than it is in the west.  Back in England I barely knew anyone who even knew what the Sega Saturn was, let alone had played one.  It was one of those systems that only weirdos like me owned alongside things like the Neo Geo and even today its only really hardcore enthusiasts willing to dig into gamings history that give enough of a shit to look at its libarary.  In Japan though it's a little bit more well remembered.  I've met plenty of folks who have at least got some memories of having fiddled with a game or two on the system in their childhoods.  I even met one guy in a bar once who spent the better part of 2 hours trying to convince me to play Wachenroder which, while it looks cool, I still haven't done yet.  Sorry.

There's a lot of weird, gross and shitty video game advertising out there, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, but Sega really knocked it out of the park with this one.  It's a shame it wouldn't last and Sega would bow out of the hardware biz after the Dreamcast but at the very least their efforts gave us some truly hilarious bits of old advertising to look back on fondly

FMV Trailers Are Bullshit

I don't watch a lot of trailers anymore.  I can't think of a game with the exception of Persona 5 that I bothered to check out any of the pre release material for.  Even a game that I was excited for as Nier Automata I didn't bother to look at trailers for.

So while I was browsing Facebook a trailer for an upcoming game called Extinction appeared on my feed.  It was a FMV trailer of a man with a strange choice of wardrobe parkouring through a city killing monsters in a rather bloody and ruthless fashion.  Think God of War meets Prince of Persia but the main character looks like Connor McGreggor watched a few too many fantasy movies.  What really wound me up that the post and the comments were like "OH MY GOD THIS GAME LOOKS SO COOL!" 

It's fine to get excited, it was pretty bombastic but what people seem to forget about watching trailers like this is that they don't actually tell you anything about the game.  The trailer looks cool but information about the game is minimal.  Nothing about the game play, the most important part of any video GAME, is present.  Just a little bit of story and a cool action sequence with a big ogre thing being chopped into little bits.

If you took the time to go and look further into it you'd find that there is in fact some game play footage.  Now I'll give you that it's pre alpha so the developers have a lot of time to make it not awful but right now the game looks fucking awful.  The kind of thing you'd expect to find at the bottom of a cardboard barrel in a place like CEX along side stuff like Bullet Witch and Asura's Wrath.  To me the game play trailer looked a bit like that Attack on Titan game on PS4 just a lot less interesting and combat that's trying really hard to be intricate but really isn't.

I'm not gonna say the game is going to be shit or that trailers aren't worth watching.  Just keep in mind that when you do find a trailer and it's entirely an FMV with no information on the actual game, maybe you should take a minute to think about what you just watched before getting all excited.  Get excited for the game, not a glorified cutscene.

Affilates and Ad Revenue

So if you've been looking at the YouTube content, reading this blog or as of yesterday, watching the Twitch stream, you may have noticed that a lot of it is registered under various affiliate programs and has adverts and stuff on them.  Considering that this is first and foremost a charity site, I can see why some people might raise an eyebrow at the idea of me putting ads on things and making some money.

Well initially with the blog page and YouTube the logic was that these will generate some revenue without actually costing the viewer anything.  You click an article or watch a YouTube video and the less than a cent value of what it's worth just gets shoved into some account somewhere that will build up over time.  I then thought that I'd use that passive money to do things like upgrade the website, make the quality of the stream better, do more events, offer more charity raffle prizes to the readers/viewers etc etc.

However the reason I'm doing this post is because last night I found out I was eligible for the Twitch version of all this, thinking it would be a similar deal, only to find out that it works via something that's known as "Twitch bits".  This involves buying "bits" from twitch and then using those bits to "cheer" for a streamer when you are in their chat and I think 1 bit is equal to one cent and once you accrue $100 you can pay out to your bank or PayPal or whatever.

Let me make something very clear.  When I set up this website I set it up with the intention of raising money for the Alzheimer's Society and of course that is still the main goal.  My problem with the Twitch affiliate service is that it's not passive like a YouTube ad and incurs a cost to you, the viewer.  So what I want to stress is that if you have a choice between buying twitch bits or throwing a few dollars/pounds into the charity, please please PLEASE for the love of everything holy pick the charity.

As far as improving the site/stream and stuff like that is concerned, I will be doing that ANYWAY from my job money, ad revenue or none.  Please do NOT spend any of your own money to support me directly fucking EVER.  Always prioritize the charity, no matter what.  Do however keep supporting the various content and spreading the word so that there can maybe be more people who would be up for donating to the society.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support

Microsoft Hitting An All Time Low

So, the story that's been flying around the internet recently, is that Microsoft have been paying off popular YouTubers to say very nice things about the Xbox One in their videos.  As far as I understand how it works, you have to be partnered with Machinima (one of the biggest gaming channels on YouTube), you have to have at least 30 seconds of game and you can't say anything bad about the game or the system, it all has to be smiles and happiness.

Now this isn't uncommon in advertising for companies to use big name people to push their products.  For example I remember those Gillette shaving adverts where they were using famous sports people to tell us what a good shave they were having, and no one said anything then.  But there is a difference between that and what Microsoft are doing.

When those adverts appear on TV, you know and are told that these people have been paid by the company to do endorsements for their products so you take what they say with a pinch of salt.  But YouTubers on the other hand are a different story, they aren't big name celebs, they are just people and the reason we watch those videos is because we want another persons honest opinion.

If you watch a video of someone taking part in this deal (there's a tag you can search for), they don't tell you that they are being paid to endorse the Xbox One, they just talk about it like it's a great piece of kit and pass it off as their own honest opinion, which I can bet for at least a certain percentage of those videos, it's total crap.  If you are one of those people who said nice things about the XBone JUST for the money, then I hope all your game systems break at the same time because you don't really have any place critiquing games like that when you have absolutely no integrity.

People wouldn't even be as upset about it if they just came out and said "yeah, we are paying people to say nice things" because at least then we know we would have to think very hard before we took anything in any Xbox One video seriously.  The fact that they are so underhanded about it is what makes the whole thing really pathetic.

But then this makes me think 2 things.  The first being that if they are willing to pay YouTubers to say nice things about the Xbone, how much are they paying big news sites for good write ups of games?  When things like Bioshock Infinite get 10/10s I've always said that it's because someone being paid for that score rather than the game being any good because that game is about as stupid as it gets.

The other thing is, how do we know that Microsoft aren't paying off people to say nasty things about the PS4?  Now I'm going to be rather wary of any Machinima partners slagging off Sony because maybe they got paid to say that shit as well.

Microsoft is fucking pathetic, instead of paying people off to say nice things about their system, why don't they just use that money to make some GOOD FUCKING GAMES....idiots.