A few months ago, I picked up a CD-ROM at a spent video shop that contained various Ubisoft marketing materials for upcoming games, where “upcoming” was defined as anytime from a few months to a year after the middle of 2004. I wrote about this more in this entry. The disc contained a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that were marked as not being meant for public consumption. I thought about uploading them at the time, but PPTs aren’t very friendly to the web.
Last month, however, I learned of a service called slideshare, which can be described succinctly as the YouTube of Powerpoint presentations. I have uploaded all 14 PPT files for your perusal:
Now that the slides are out there, perhaps someone can answer this burning question: Who are these slides made for? My best guess is that they are targeted towards retailers, trying to sell them on devoting shelf space to Ubisoft titles by describing how strong their various brands are based on a variety of factors. E.g., the Rocky Legends Product Presentation describes the target demographic of the game, and what other things that demographic is statistically known to like (South Park, The Dave Chappelle Show, and ESPN Sports Center).
I’m no expert on game retailing. That’s why I ask.
I’ve been realizing the importance of metadata recently. The situation is that text is easy for search engines to gather, index, and search. Multimedia data such as images, audio, and video can not be indexed the same way. The efficacy of indexing such multimedia data is largely dependent upon the textual data surrounding the multimedia. I have always made a careful habit of clearly describing my images in their metadata tags. This is probably why so many searches are driven to my various blogs by Google’s image search facility. This applies to some extremely common search terms, such as the popular (American) term for the game that was the theme of these pinball games.
I was auditing my web logs today and saw that the entry for Bikini Beach Stunt Racer actually got hits for that ‘b’-word search term related to ladies’ swimwear. Even more interesting is that the user agent string included the data “Windows CE; PPC; 240×320” and the referral string indicated a start index of 95. This means that a rather patient individual was searching through many, many bikini pictures on a portable device of some sort, with a tall vs. wide screen.
That reminds me that I have been meaning to produce a series for this blog called, “The Ladies Of Obscure Games.”
I have had a lot of trouble capturing Sega Saturn screenshots via DV hardware. Actually, that’s an understatement– I have had absolutely no luck capturing thus far. That was with the standard composite cables that came with the unit. My last ditch effort was to procure an S-video Saturn cable, which arrived today. Works beautifully:
I’m in business now. This is great news since I currently have 26 Saturn titles on my master spreadsheet that are missing screenshots in the database.
I have had Jungle Legend on my big board for a few months, meaning that it still needs to be entered into the database. I was working on some nonsense for a description at the time since the manual gave me all the data I thought I needed. However, I felt there was one crucial detail missing– what the game actually looks like. 2D scoller? 3D in any way? RTS jungle adventure, commanding your tribe? Google searches generally just yield a few sparse game listing pages with the same regurgitated description and no screenshots. Worse, my own page is one of the top hits now. Not helpful.
But then I found some generic game listing site that happened to link to the developer’s original website… which happens to be defunct. Enter archive.org, and behold: the last recorded valid page for the game. If the screenshots are to be believed, it’s an FPS-type adventure.
I’m glad I investigated because there are several other games from the same company that aren’t in MobyGames yet. That seems to often be the case with these value publishers that have proliferated in the last decade.
I spent the day playing catch-up by finally entering into MobyGames a bunch of the games that I reviewed in the past few months (all the way back to April). Have fun, MG approvers!
It was pretty straightforward in some cases, particularly for the 4 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures promotional discs from Taco Bell. The only tricky part is doing the first entry; the remaining 3 are patterned after the first. Here’s a screenshot of the Prairie Dogs course in the wild west theme CD-ROM. There is also an exceptionally large scorpion right at your feet. You would think that would be cause for concern:
And for completeness, here’s a screenshot for the Carnival adventure, the Loop da Loop course. It took me quite a few strokes to get the ball through that thing the first time I encountered it:
My recent batch of acquisitions included not only a plethora of actual games, but a number of sample discs as well. One is a Generator disc, volume 1 of a series of Sega Dreamcast sample discs. I have yet to delve into this one.
Next is a fairly non-descript optical disc simply labeled “Merchandise Video” and bears the ubiquitous PlayStation symbol. The circumference of the disc lists a number of games. I pop it into my DVD player (which doubles as my PlayStation 2) and it begins playing immediately. The disc plays a brief commercial for each of the games previously listed and loops when it gets to the end of the string. Pressing “Menu” seems to just reset the commercials. This leads me to believe that this disc is meant to be played on autopilot in a sealed PS2 kiosk. The promotional material for God of War is enticing but nothing else on the disc really impressed me.
Next up is the Ubi Soft Product Catalog 2004-2005. This is perhaps the most fascinating disc of the crop if only for the dire message: “Content not approved for consumer use. Not for distribution to the public.” Forbidden material– I’m intrigued. The disc is a CD-ROM that contains promotional material for a number of Ubi Soft games for a variety of platforms. Each game comes with some screenshots and some general artwork. Several come with trailers and other video files that are encoded in a diversity of multimedia formats. Nothing too special so far. The most interesting aspect is that every game entry comes with a “fact sheet” — a .DOC file that describes the game in a single printed page — as well as a directory named “Product Presentation – NOT FOR PUBLIC USE”. This contains a PowerPoint presentation that basically sells the game. My question was, “Sell to whom?” At first, I figured that maybe this was for investor relations, a sort of video game company prospectus. But on deeper examination, it appears that the slides attempt to sell the game to a retail establishment. This is a fascinating glimpse into the video game industry. I’m pretty sure the slides are trying to convince retailers why they should devote shelf space to these titles, or perhaps give particular titles more prominent real estate on the selling floor. For example, many of the presentations have a slide devoted to “THE BRAND” which documents the strong selling history of the franchise (and most of these games belong to franchises; Ubi Soft is not known for taking chances on unknowns, though neither is any other publisher).
A lot of the material reminds me of documents I see on the inside of corporate America that are customarily marked “Company Confidential — Not For External Distribution” (which is something that makes every corporate drone chuckle with the knowledge that no one inside the company could possibly care about the document, much less an outsider). Anyway, I doubt that this is actual confidential material. As mentioned, this is probably intended as industry marketing material. There is also the fact that the marketing material is not yet finalized. For example, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is still known as Prince of Persia 2 throughout the disc’s material.
As for the audio/visual promotional material, there is nothing that really catches my eye. Sure, all of the screenshots and artwork are sharp. But there are no videos that deserve instant YouTube treatment. However, I couldn’t believe the timeliness of this screenshot from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory:
That brought back fond memories of Crystalis’ prophetic “End Day” (1997/10/01).
The last sampler disc is called Sega Screams Volume 1. It is for the Sega Saturn. I have not explored it using my Saturn console yet, but I can view some of the files on it. Here is one movie that’s fun enough to upload to YouTube, the intro of the Saturn version of Virtual On: Cyber Troopers:
