Bloody clever bit of marketing from the guys and gals at Sega - a House of the Dead Overkill poster creator, promoting the lightgun blaster which is released this Friday (or today, if you’re in the US).
Featuring a wealth of titles, graphics, character and background art, you can craft your own grindhouse-style movie poster, adding your own credits if you fancy, and muddying the print for added authenticity. There’s even a bunch of tacky filters you can apply to any part of the poster, along with a host of ‘warnings’ for adult content and such like.
You can see one of my efforts above, and I’ve produced a couple more here and here. Do have a go and feel free to link to your own posters in the comments thread below.
As if to partially disprove the point made in my last post, and to show that it is interested in selling core games, Nintendo has decided to partner with Square-Enix for the forthcoming Dragon Quest IX on DS, with Satoru Iwata making it very clear how keen the company is to help promote the game overseas.
In an excellent piece from one of my favourite writers, Chris Kohler on Wired.com’s Game | Life blog, Iwata remarks that “there are two things I’d like to make reality. The first is to build a thriving Japanese game market together with Dragon Quest that rivals the West’s. The second is to form a strong tag team to promote Dragon Quest overseas. At Nintendo, we were able to popularize the Brain Age series overseas, which was said to be unmarketable. I want to increase the number of people worldwide that understand the appeal of Dragon Quest, which represents all Japanese gaming culture…even if that only turns out to be a single person.”
As Kohler says, this is hugely significant for two reasons - one, that Iwata is concerned about the Japanese gaming market, to the degree where he’s hoping one game can spark it back into life after recent lacklustre sales of both core and mainstream titles; and two, that he’s concerned that Japanese games aren’t selling overseas.
If anyone can get this strategy to work, it’s Nintendo - and it’s heartening to see that someone is making an attempt to bridge the gap between Japanese and western gamers. It’s telling that there’s a growing market in Japan for western titles (with a few games - mainly first-person shooters like Resistance 2 and Bioshock - selling to relatively small but not insignificant numbers, particularly in launch week) but that there is little sign of the reverse happening in the west. Let’s hope that Dragon Quest IX can open the eyes of a few people to how the Japanese do things, and that this could spark an increase in more eastern-friendly titles making it big in the west.
With Nintendo’s big Christmas PR campaign having started in earnest, it’s not really too much of a surprise to see an impact upon sales. What is a little more eye-opening is just how much of an effect it’s had.
In a week which saw the launch of hugely-hyped RPG Fallout 3, astonishingly the role-player had to settle for the runner-up spot in the Top 40 Individual Formats chart, with Wii Fit hitting the top once again, rising from seventh place. Another game with a significant boost was Mario Kart Wii - oddly enough, I’ve only seen ads (and several of them) with Girls Aloud playing the DS version, but it’s the home console game which roars into chart contention like a late burst from Lewis Hamilton, finishing one place higher than the F1 champion in his most recent race in fourth, up from eighth on the grid.
Meanwhile, with stalwarts Wii Play and Brain Training bouncing back into the top ten, and Wii Music and Animal Crossing still to come, it’s clearly going to be a happy Christmas for Nintendo.
Wii Music, then. It’s not perfect (see yesterday’s blog for details) but it’s likely to sell boatloads. And the US TV ad above is a terrific bit of marketing, perfectly capturing the fun of creating your own take on a familiar song, and making it look suitably accessible.
Kudos to Nintendo’s marketing bods for using the Super Mario Bros. theme too, as if to show off its hardcore credentials. And ending with a neat musical stave motif is a stroke of genius.
Given Nintendo UK’s predilection for celeb-themed ads, we’ll probably just get a bit of Girls Aloud messing around. But it’ll be hard pressed to beat this rather joyous celebration of Wii Music’s simple, freeform jam sessions. Lovely stuff.
Yes, the popular (it says here) girl group are the latest celebs lined up to pimp Nintendo’s wares, and they’ll be appearing in an ad campaign which is set to run throughout the festive season, beginning on October 27th, where no doubt they’ll be doing something kinda ooh with their DS styli, the saucy minxes.
“We all love our Nintendo DS, whether racing with Mario Kart on the tour bus or looking after our Nintendogs in the studio at the end of a hectic day,” said the girls, apparently simultaneously. “There’s always something to keep us laughing and entertained - the different DS colours mean we never get them mixed up too!”
Bet they’ve not got Imagine Girl Band, though, eh, readers? That’s because Holly and Fearne won’t share their copies, of course.
Anyway, it’s not just the foxy fivesome who’ll be hopping onto the Ninty bandwagon this ‘holiday’, as Jamie and Louise Redknapp, Fern Britton and her husband Phil Vickery and Ronan Keating have all signed up for the forthcoming ad campaign. If Keating turns out to be a Layton fan, I may just have to re-evaluate my opinion of the fella.
 
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