The three worst game ad campaigns of 2022

Let us pause at the end of this tumultuous year to pay brief homage to some folks who’ve made things just a little bit worse: the creators of terrible game ads.

These criticisms aren’t directed at the games being promoted. Far too many times I’ve seen ads for games I actually play that have no connection at all to actual gameplay. For all I know, the games themselves might actually be fun. The ads, on the other hand, definitely aren’t.

Homescapes takes the lead-off spot. If the ads are accurate – and that’s a big if – the object of this game is to pull pins out of tubes to route items to the best exit point. The samples shown offer obvious solutions, which the simulated player never seems to find.

I understand this as a marketing strategy. Convince a potential customer that they’re way smarter than participants in the ads, and they’ll feel safe wading in. And here there’s the additional aggravation of watching failure after failure in a system that should be easy to beat.

But even that isn’t enough stress for one ad, apparently. Rather than show the puzzles in the abstract, they’re framed by a story of sorts. A woman attempting to care for a child desperately needs whatever item needs to make it through the chutes. Every loss brings more suffering.

The idea must be to increase the urgency of downloading the game to play it correctly and get help where it’s needed. Instead it’s a mixture of stupidity and cruelty worthy of Elon Musk on Twitch.

Next on the list is Evony. The ads make a significant point of showcasing actual game play, so I’ll go ahead and assume that the game itself is as terrible as the ads. Once again we’ve got deliberately obtuse failures. But it’s also crystal clear that non-stupid strategies will inevitably require the player to inflict painful death on animals. I’ll pass.

And then there’s Royal Match.

The first dozen times the ads run: that king seems like he might be a friendly guy. What a shame it has to end badly for him when the sample player inevitably fails over and over again.

After losing untold hours of my life sitting through ads with no end time indicated and an instant trip to the app store for touching the screen anywhere other than right on the tiny X in the corner of the screen: Die, bastard! Get poisoned! Get eaten! Freeze! Burn! Drown! Die! Die! Die!

There, I feel a little better now.

Review – Black Adam

Dwayne Johnson does a great job as the eponymous title antihero. Stir in some expensive effects, and I figured that would be enough to sustain an empty-headed action movie. But then the script stirs in confusing subplots about the complex relationship between global superpowers and their autonomy-hungry fellow nations. As if the crew of not-too-familiar superheroes wasn’t already hard enough to navigate. Mildly amusing

Review – Carol for Another Christmas

Ask Rod Serling to redo Dickens and you get pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Sterling Hayden takes on the Scrooge part, perfectly typecast as a crabby conservative corporate type clinging to his greed and xenophobia. The usual ghosts take him on an all extra preachy journey from the grim history of war profiteering to a post-nuclear-apocalypse world dominated by an insane cult leader (Peter Sellers). This plays like an extra-long, extra-strange episode of The Twilight Zone, which makes it an interesting look back into internationalist politics in the mid 1960s. Mildly amusing