I'll admit that I might be taking this a little too seriously, but nothing says "keep the bummer going" quite like more viral videos out of the Red Alert 3 camp. To go with the goofy dance remix video from last week, a handful of YouTube accounts have posted a ton of short clips featuring the cast and characters from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Most of these clips seem to have been recorded as responses to popular YouTube videos, including clips from other games.
So you've got Jenny McCarthy as Tanya making with the double entendre and chainsaw talk in this clip that was posted as a response to both a Doom 3 and a Gears of War 2 video:
Gemma Atkinson's Lt. Eva shows up a lot, too, including this clip that was attached as a response to a football play:
The Peter Stormare "oh snap" clip from the remix video shows up as a response to a clip of a dude getting shot with a gang of paintballs:
So I've been thinking about all this since that trailer got out last week, and I think I've nailed down why I find all this stuff so depressing. This is Command and Frickin' Conquer we're talking about. In my mind, the C&C series sells itself. Videos like this are, in one way, just done in good fun and totally harmless. But they also make it seem like the publisher is desperately trying to get people to notice that the game is coming out by any means necessary.
As someone who has casually enjoyed nearly all of the games to bear the C&C name, this sort of stuff reflects poorly on the final game in my mind. Like there's some sort of hidden undercurrent of "well, if they're this desperate to get people to notice the game, it must not be very good, right?" On top of that, it's an entirely different sense of humor than the one that you typically get out of the games, even taking into account the somewhat wackier style of Red Alert's alternate-historical madness.
In reality, these videos are probably produced by a team of people totally separate from the people making the game. On their own, they're sort of charming, I guess. But in the context of the upcoming release of Red Alert 3, I'm crossing my fingers that none of this is too indicative of the final product. We'll talk more about this stuff in this week's podcast, so stay tuned for that tomorrow.