The Shameless Art of Marketing Seduction: Part 1

Over the past couple years I’ve grown very fond of tech demos. I can’t recall why, but one day during my daily three hour long interweb trolling stint, I decided it would be a good idea to watch a demonstration of Boom Blox (at the time it was just called Blocks). Neil Young presided and spoke of Wii play dates between Steven Spielberg and Shigeru Miyamoto and how Spielberg’s next game, with all of its impactful images of dead birds and solemn characters wearing hoodies, will have an epic story and apparently bring tears to the collective dry eye of the gaming community. But the meat of the demo came when he showed off Blocks. With each Jenga skyscraper demolished and every “character” bombed (rectangular cows that waddle around absentmindedly apparently qualify for character status these days), he let out an artificial whimper of awe, even producing a guttural squeal (similar to what one might hear when veal is being made) during the collapse of a small, short-lived block city. Oh, anonymous block city… we hardly knew ye.

This video has kept me amused for some time, and now it will hopefully titillate all of you… if there really are any of you out there. I’ve made my own little trailer for Boom Blox. Check it out below.



A special thanks to Gametrailers for turning all of their videos into digital bouncers through code, and apparently Final Cut Pro is NOT on the list. I spent about 3 hours figuring out how to thwart this absurd safeguard. For anyone who also wants to figure out how to do this, all you have to do is download a video converter, I recommend Vilisoft, and convert it to something else so you can them import into FCP. AVI worked for me. So, you guys at Gametrailers own the work that other people put into making the presentation you filmed? You own the playthrough your shitty testers had with a game demo? I think basically what this comes down to is you own the super fuckin’ sweet, super fuckin’ loud, super fuckin’ obnoxious motion graphic at the beginning of all your videos, the hard drives that store the direct feed footage, or the cameras that filmed the demo. God forbid I should import one of your videos into an editing program for the sole purpose of vandalizing your sweetass motion graphic, like cleverly changing ‘Gametrailers’ to ‘GAYtrailers’. Who do you think I am?

The next video features MGS creator, Hideo Kojima speaking English. I have to warn you, it is rather disturbing. It’s not that I find this video funny because of Kojima’s broken English. It’s not like “look at the little, funny, elflike Japanese man trying to speak the only language that matters!” It’s his forced, manufactured inflection, overly exuberant and strangely reminiscent of Scooby-Doo. I’m not sure whether this was Mr. Kojima’s idea (possibly inspired by a Scooby-Doo episode he saw earlier that day) or if some Konami rep shot him full of uppers beforehand, but little did the rep know, his suppressed stomach acids made it possible for Kojima to swallow balloons filled with helium. As with most Kojima-related things, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt… but it’s becoming a weary, apprehensive habit by now. We may never know the answers to these questions, but they’re fun to ponder while watching.