ONM Remembered – #21
“Life’s a game”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 118 (July 2002)
I talked about another ad in this series before, so my basic complaints still stand: It’s outstandlingly bland. Look, it’s an ad for a GameCube game! How can you tell? … well, there’s a GameCube in the corner. And there’s some stuff inside a cube. Watch out, dudes, high-end concepts in action here.
You know, this ad could have been great. The image of Pikmin actually being at the roots of flowers and leaves sticking from the ground could be a very powerful one… but the scope feels so minimal and the focus so cramped because of that blasted cube. On first glance, I just see the Pikmin and go “oh, Pikmin in a cube. Cute.” It’s only after looking closer do I notice all the leaves at the top, and only then does the image of so many Pikmin crammed into that soil spring into my head.
But since the soil is viewed from a low perspective, you don’t get to grasp just how many leaves there are in there. It’s an image that requires a large scope, but the template of something in a cube chokes the creativity. The other ads in the series stick to just a single simple image – a guy in bandages; a magazine saying SUBSCRIBE NOW; real no-brainer stuff. Even something simple like a flower pot with a Pikmin head protruding from the soil could’ve sufficed. But this one actually frustrates me. There’s the potential for a great full-page splash ad here, and they ruined it! They freakin’ ruined it!
… I hadn’t actually intended to rant so much! I didn’t even pay much notice to any of this when scanning the page. My intention was just to say, “isn’t this a boring ad,” and then whine about how Pikmin can’t walk on bridges to save their lives. Like, literally. Little dimwits would fall off and drown every time. Drove me up the wall.
