The above image shows some tasty (but annoyingly not discounted) bananas I just bought. The sticker on the left is a normal “I’m a banana and stuff” sticker. The other two are adverts for Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll. I think this is the first time I have seen videogames advertising on fruit and I wanted to share it with you all.

The advert itself aims to direct you to a website where you can enter a sweepstake by simply handing over a bunch of personal information. I think this goes along-side the unavoidable Coke adverts on planes (the next flight to disable the “off” button on the TV and play ads is getting a sternly worded complaint) as passive-aggressive advertising with no effort made to subsidise the consumer.

Still, I have some bananas now so that’s good.

At Ubisoft’s presentation with Microsoft Advertising’s Gaming Upfront (you can just taste the evil oozing off of that name) they revealed that they intend to pepper their new game Splinter Cell Conviction with copious amounts of paid advertising. Not only do they want you mentally shopping during the game’s gruesome torture sequences, they’re shilling out any other piece of in-game real estate to the highest bidder as well. At the conference, they showcased what they call “heat maps”, a layout of the most heavily traversed or easy to spot places to slap an ad for Dr. Scholls.

I don’t mind the idea of advertisements in certain types of games. In sports and racing titles they’re relatively inoffensive and in some ways add realism. When it comes to action titles like Splinter Cell, fictional stories of fictional people in a fictional setting, it breaks the illusion of reality to see a big fat Whopper plastered on the wall. We’re paying good money for these games. Don’t you think developers owe us better?

Via: Joystiq