On The End Of A Quill

On The End Of A Quill

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Video Game Ads 16-Bit & Beyond: Part Two

We finish up, and skip a generation, with a look at a few Ads from the PS2. The massive success of the original PlayStation placed Sony firmly as top dog in the video game market. The PS2 was released in 2000 and is still being produced today, twelve years later! It may only be the big sports games, but at least it's still going.
Capcom unveil the first in their popular Devil May Cry series. The selling point they focused on was that the game was from the creators of Resident Evil. It is said that Devil May Cry started out as a sequel to Resident Evil, but ended up become a game in its own right. Hideki Kamiya, who directed this game, also directed RE 2 and went on to work on Viewtiful Joe and Bayonetta, among others.

Released by Sony themselves, early on in the life of the PS2, was the survival horror game Extermination. It showed off some of the tricks of the PS2 but wasn't widely liked at the time, and isn't fondly remembered now. If remembered at all!

For the PS2 and Xbox comes Konami game Silent Hill 2. It is not a proper sequel to the first game, but is set in that eerie town of Silent Hill again. I remember getting the soundtrack CD when buying this game. Creepily ambient stuff.


A two-page spread for Ico in the form of a maze. Can you find your way from the start to the finish? An excellent game that recently got a HD upgrading on the PS3. One of the true classics from that era of gaming. The game doesn't take too long to finish, but you don't feel short changed as it plays so well.

Video Game Ads 16-Bit & Beyond

We return to our look at advertisements from the nineties by moving up to the 16-Bit era. Improvement in graphical muscle can only mean a parallel improvement in the marketing of games, yes?
 
First up, US Gold (remember them?) and Delphine Software bring us Flashback on the MegaDrive. Boasting that it's the first game to sqeeze CD quality images onto a humble cartridge, using a massive 12 Megs! The cut scenes in this game were brilliant for the time, but I honestly can't remember getting past the first level? Doesn't this print Ad just ooze excitement??

Hey Chico! The WWF got everywhere back in the 90s. Here we see the 5 major systems of the time each getting a wrestling game. But the main focus is on Royal Rumble, which was coming out on the SNES and Genesis. A fun game in multiplayer, made all the better by including one of the best wrestlers ever in the roster, 'The Model' Rick Martel. His pic does not appear on this Ad unfortunately!

What can I say about Mortal Kombat II that hasn't been said? It came out on all the main systems, and everyone played it at one time or another. Of all the versions that came out in the end, the 32X version is my favourite.

Konami released one of the best games on the Genesis with Rocket Knight Adventures. Its part platform game, part shooter. It's bright and colourful and stars an Opossum called Sparkster. Later Konami released a sequel, simply called Sparkster.

Go west young man! Konami follow up the popular Lethal Enforcers game with a sequel set in the old west called Gunfighters. It was ported over from the Arcade to the MegaDrive and MegaCD. You could also buy it with the Justifier LightGun, shown here bottom left. I think it only came in bright blue though, so police wouldn't confuse it with a real gun and blow you away while playing the game.