Dateline, America: In preperation for the launch of the XBox 360, Microsoft totally overhauls cuddly XBox lead designer J. Allard into a lean, mean, stylish, shaven, earringed, soul-patched XXX-treme-inator (the soulpatch is most visible on this lovely 320dpi image, suitable for framing).

Dateline, Japan: The Japanese XBox 360′s “coming soon” ads forego any sort of gameplay footage for the suggestion that buying a 360 is like entering an empty room where white people and black people magically appear and dance with you, while you kick out phat jams on a magical floating turntable.

Dateline, America again: On a tour of XBox HQ, Engadget is shown “J Allard’s XBox 360“, which the man himself has personally plastered with expensive boutique stickers, including Hello Kitty dressed as Paul Stanley (I had originally thought she was dressed as Jem until I chiggity checked my riggity references) and Doraemon wearing an energy dome, nevermind the fact that, being the lead designer, J Allard would have a black developer’s XBox 360.

Dateline, U.K.: Britain’s “coming soon” XBox 360 ads also forego any gameplay footage (except a couple seconds of some soccer player playing soccer), focussing instead on dirty, homeless-looking 20-somethings rambling about using the 360 to look at pictures of “b-boys and breakers and your honeys” while people breakdance in the background. More 360-stickering occurs, with some random stoner talking about how putting stickers on his 360 makes him feel “human energy”, and some skater talking about how he can put stickers on his skateboard, and change out the wheels and trucks, exactly like the XBox 360. Good thing, too, since I totally can’t pull off any of my sick lip tricks with the crappy plastic wheels that my XBox 360 came with (disclaimer: I didn’t actually buy a 360, and openly laugh at those who have, and try to justify spending $400 to play Geometry Wars).

To be non-partisan here, the PSP’s “coming soon” ads also showed no gameplay, and featured someone who was not Bam Margera riding in a shopping cart, and the “coming soon” Revolution ads just featured people swinging the controller haphazardly (but at least they showed the controller). Maybe this is some sort of “post-ironic” advertising, where marketers are past the point where they know we’re on to them and winkingly let us know that they know we know. Maybe now it’s just implied that all advertising is ironic, and winking is passe. Or maybe the marketers just have no idea what they’re doing, and think “the kids” call girls “honeys” and like to collect stickers.

Special thanks to Geek on Stun, U.K. Resistance (who’s just like Geek on Stun but with funny accents), and Engadget for doing all the work for me so I could just string it all together with half-assed witty commentary and call it a blog post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 3:58 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.