Gaming Memories 04: Advertisements 01

Video Game magazines were big back in the 1990's.  There was a lot of competition between them.  There were those that loved Nintendo Power, but I never really read them because of course all the Nintendo games were going to have great reviews, right?  I did not realize till way later that the quality of the magazine was why people liked it.  Anyway, I was much more an EGM and Next Gen fan, and at one time I had Gamepro and Sega Vision subscriptions.  Somewhere along the line, advertisements started going with "what can we get away with".  Magazines really needed the money, and so a lot of stuff got through that was crazy.  Here's a couple from my personal memory list:

I really really thought this add was funny as hell when I was... let's see, 12? 11?  Well anyways this is probably my favorite of the "shocking" advertisements of the era.  It did not have to be gross, it did not have to have a ton of naked women on the advertisement, it was just a simple phrase for a game named Ballz.  The game is unplayably horrible by today's standards, but back then it was a way to get the 3-D fighter experience on 16-bit consoles.  I played several versions back in the day(rented), and the main memorable thing was a winning song I still get stuck in my head today that just simply goes "boink... yea,    boink yay, ba ba ba boink yea".

This has to go down as one of the worst ideas ever.  Earthbound frankly sold for shit here in the USA, one of the reasons its worth so much now is because it only got popular afterward and everyone decided they needed the game.  Unlike Chronotrigger, its price is actually due to rarity of the cart.  Never forget that Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 sold millions and millions.  Earthbound probably never got past 100,000.  Anyway, the advertisement campaign was abysmal and it was EVERYWHERE in magazines.  It consisted of a stinky scratch and sniff card that did not really need to be scratched to be sniffed.  For like 3 months everyone's magazines smelled like horrible spicy incense.