Videogame Attack Ads

While political attack ads are common place, in the U.S. anyway, it’s still a bit out of the norm when publishers take each other in their marketing programs and today we offer two such examples for your perusal.

Remember the ill-received F.A.G.S. video designed to tout Modern Warfare 2? It decried grenade-spam in the game and featured Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels. Well, EA has created a spoof of the F.A.G.S. video designed to highlight its new release Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Sponsored by F.R.A.G.S. (Friends Really Against Grenade Spam), the spot has its own MLB hurler—New York Yankee CC Sabathia—and takes dead aim against MW2.

Sabathia offers that, “In Battlefield: Bad Company 2 grenade spam isn’t going to prove quite as effective as one might find in competing games of this particular genre, not with destructible buildings, adrenaline pumping weapons and more vehicles than you can count.”

EA even took pains to label their spoof as a video response to the F.A.G.S. video.

One game taking shots at another is fun and all, but console makers throwing stones at each other takes it to another level. A new Sony spot for the PlayStation Move motion controller takes quite a few jabs at Microsoft’s Project Natal.

The spot features fictitious Sony spokesman Kevin Butler, VP of Realistic Movements (this time), in the future (November 2010).  While a gamer puts PlayStation Move through its paces in the background, Butler notes that, “PlayStation Move is not only crazy precise, it’s also got, what we in the future call, buttons.” Project Natal, of course, lacks buttons or any controllers at all.

Butler states that the buttons “turn out to be pretty important to those handful of millions of people who enjoy playing shooters and platformers, or anything that doesn’t involve catching a big red ball.” The “red ball” comment is another shot at Microsoft; popular demonstrations of Project Natal often involve the game Ricochet, which has users slap red balls against a series of targets.

Butler continues, asking, “Who wants to pretend their hand is a gun… what is this, third grade?”