The most obnoxious video game advert/trailer you've seen?

The question is simple. What is the most annoying video game ad or trailer that you've ever witnessed? For adverts, it can be a brief 30 second commercial on television or an ad that you've seen in a video game magazine before. It can anything that goes from having an annoying narrator, terrible taglines or anything that rubbed you the wrong way.

I'll start with my suggestion and bring up this particular trailer for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. The ads I remember from Crash's glory days were the ones with a guy in a Crash suit doing things like talk trash to Nintendo as well as him promoting pizza from Pizza Hut. This trailer, on the other hand, was probably not widely shown because I only saw this recently and the way this trailer was created was...off-putting. It has a motion capture Crash talking to the viewer about why Crash 2 is great and screen time is split between Crash talking and actual gameplay footage. Its obnoxious because of how much it shoves a poorly animated, mo-cap Crash into your face that comes complete with cringey referential humor to things like Elvis Presley and "The Elephant Man" of all things. Its kind of scary too. Here's the said trailer, but you've been warned.

This is far from the worst, but its what immediately springs to mind:

@notnert427: Where's the like button? I can't even think of any other examples. I'm sure there are more than enough, but that is the only one my mind can grasp easily on it's own.

The ads for free to play mobile games are the worst. Most of all, those ones where they have a fake streamer in the corner.

@mocbucket62: Oh god, immediate Elvis Presley into Johnny Carson. I can't.

That Ouya one that they pulled when everyone hated it.

Bulletstorm had some really cringey stuff.

Yeah, like seriously! Fuck that trailer voice guy! I went to prom! Shit was so cash!

There are worst ads that exist, but I can only think about the ads I see in mobile games. The main ones that stick out to me are the streamer ads, where (I assume) a real Twitch person sits down and talks about the grand strategy of this Game of War clone, or how fucking awesome it is to collect this blue dragon, or how totally nuts this vaguely MOBA-esque game is to play.

It's not that bad in the grand scheme of things, but it all sounds like the fakest fake advertising I've ever seen. What makes it great is most of the time they don't even reference who the streamer is. It makes me wish that it is all fake. That the person sitting in that pro-gamer chair isn't a streamer, but just a 22 year old actor/actress who got called in to do the ad.

A few years ago I remember seeing an ad for Sunset Overdrive in a movie theater before the previews came on that really annoyed me. It was framed as a sort of "behind the scenes" thing with developer interviews. I'd seen plenty of things like that before, but this one occasionally had developers "comically" interject snarky comments at each other from separate interviews. I saw what they were going for, but it just didn't work because it didn't feel natural.

I tried looking for the ad on youtube, but had no luck. Found plenty of other Sunset Overdrive stuff, though.

I've definitely seen worse, of course, but that's the most recent one for me.

This is the most 90's-ass commercial I can think of:

@mocbucket62: I commend you for making it through all 3:35 of that ad. I barely made it past 1:00.

Never knew Crash was Australian.

@dgtlty: I got 6 seconds in and I had to stop...

Remember the Ouya?

There are some magazine ads I remember for Forsaken that's literally just a naked woman. I remember actually seeing some gameplay for the thing (it's a Descent-style FPS) and getting so upset at the audacity of it.

It's like the opposite of the Phalanx SNES boxart. Just so lame.

And yet the trailer is somehow better than the game. (that Crash trailer is some nightmare fuel though, thanks for that)

@hippie_genocide: Really surprised to hear a butthole surfers tune in that nintendo commercial.

I mean... I laughed.

@mocbucket62: That Crash trailer is the distillation of a massive trash fire and children's nightmare wrapped tightly in unholy, unknown smut. They should arrest and detain the people who deemed that trailer "good to go" and separate them from the rest of human kind. Holy shit. HOOOOOLY SHIT.

EVERY GAME OF WAR AD WITH KATE UPTON. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

I'll always remember these ads because its so fucking bizarre to me. I know old Gameboy ads where like this but I didn't read game magazines until the early to mid 00's (http://kotaku.com/old-game-boy-ads-werent-exactly-family-friendly-1632133243). I hadn't seen some of the earlier Gameboy ads and I thought, wait, family friendly Nintedo is putting out ads like this? This wasn't even the 90's when everyone was doing it SP came out in 2003. I don't know that they're obnoxious but that bombcast clip got me thinking about these.

Ok, it's nowhere near the most obnoxious ever, but I didn't really like that new CoD trailer. I feel like the old WW2 games had at least some historically respectful aspect to them. Honestly, I learned a lot of history from playing them. This new game looks like it's just exploiting the worlds biggest tragedy ever for entertainment purposes.

@cloudymusic: what kind of game even is that? O.o I remember seeing those ads and being confused as to what the hell was going on.

I don't know which game its for because I hit the skip button, but there are adverts on some youtube videos where it looks like a lets play you have have some guy in the corner of the screen saying something like "I have moved half may army over here so the other player thinks i have a weak team"

Oh wow

@adequatelyprepared: Oh god, that Ouya one was particularly awful because, if memory serves right, it came out well after launch when it was already widely known that the Ouya was an ungodly dumpster fire riding atop a runaway train barreling off a cliff.

I'd give anything to talk to the person who greenlit that shit because I need to know how many people along the way said, "this is a baaaaad idea."

Holy christ, that Crash ad. I somehow assumed for the first few seconds that it's for the PS2 non-Naughty Dog ones, so it would at least go together with their bad quality, but no, just a terrible ad for a great game.

Maybe this one would work just as a forgettable action trailer if they slapped some generic action music over it, but since it's In The Air Tonight...egh.

The weirdest thing about it to me is that it's not like the ad is for some Western super-edgy BMX XXX-type thing. It's Mighty No 9, a friggin anime-ass game from a Japanese dev! Talk about tone deaf.

I think when Intellivision went full Plimpton...

I will admit that George Plimpton (journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and sportsman) was probably the most educated 'hired' video game pundit ever. But the commercial comes off like it beating a dead horse. I will give Plimpton his props; while he talked like a Harvard dean, he was a fair sportsman and a fanatic for all things athletic.

I love Bulletstorm the final product but everything leading up to the game was freaking bad. I almost didn't play the game because of it.

Wow, there's some real crap in this thread. That Mighty Number 9 trailer isn't obnoxious, but it is just terrible. The "Your Mom hates Dead Space 2" ads were pretty obnoxious though.

@schnool: There it is. Daikatana was... interesting in every regard, including advertising.

Side note: Way too easy to accidentally flag posts on mobile.

Ok, hello GB peeps,

I know this is going to be hard to believe but I'm a pretty level-headed guy, I don't flip my shit about too much and I'm always pushing for people to consider their shit before talking about it on the internet. That said, I know it'll be hard to believe.

This is one of my favourite pieces of music.

Thematically it relates to the loss of war, inspired by a mother losing a child and and a child losing their mother. For me, as someone peripherally interested and awed and saddened by the first world war, it speaks to me as perfect sadness. But sadness without melodrama or intent. It's not trying to make you weep, sell you a story or impress you with grand orchestral arrangements. It's simply emotional tragedy on the simplest terms I've ever heard. I really recommend listening to it, crank the volume, walk away from the computed and have a glass of wine or something. It's a piece of music unlike anything else for me personally.

THEN it was used in a fucking Call of Duty trailer (the recently released WWII one) and I almost LOST MY FUCKING MIND I was so angry. I already have SOOOOOOOOOOOOO little respect for Activision and ANYTHING Call of Duty has ever done creatively, they're gaming's Fast and the Furious movies but worse. They play shitty fucking nationalism and hate and bloodlust into their fucking power fantasy, making sure to stroke the balls and tell the player "everything is ok", even if it's complicated "it's ok, just keep gunning down fucking human beings". And yeah, they're doing their fucking bullshit "BOOTS ON THE GROUND" marketing campaign for this new one but come on: It's an action movie, it's guns and pulse-pounding thrills and action-tragedy and it's barely better than "Press X to weep for the Holocaust"

I have never been more angry in my life at video games and the creatively gutless fuckboy semen stain that is 'Call of Duty'.

*breathes*

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See how I said you wouldn't believe I'm actually a pretty calm, level-headed guy? Crazy ain't it...

#pleasedontattackme

#sometimespeoplegottagetshitofftheirchest

I remember back when I bought gaming mags, it was in an era where I guess Virtua Tennis was going to be released soon, so I know I saw this double-page ad in several different issues of whatever:

So I mean, credit to those advertisers, I guess - I didn't forget their dumb ad. For real though, I'd love to know what the casting was like for this photoshoot. "We're looking for a slightly overweight white upper class guy, full frontal nudity, but don't worry, it'll be reasonable. Also we need a fatter white dude to be in the foreground, but don't worry, we'll cover your dick with screenshots of a tennis video game."

Sorry if there's a "no pictures of butt scratching" rule for the forums, mods. I'm genuinely trying to contribute here, but sadly my contribution is untasteful nudity. This was somehow a real game ad!

Remember those shitty Gamestop machinima ads that were voice acted by top quality "Internet Dan" like characters? I would like to submit all those for nominations. Here's one for reference:

The cringe is real.