Friday, August 15, 2008

More Parodies


Back now with another round of gaming-related parody videos (I'll forgive you if you never read the original Parodies of Parodies on my blog). Last year in the run-up to the launch of the Halo 3 videogame, a series of award winning ads aired for the Halo 3 "Believe" campaign. This series of ads was played out like a PBS World War II documentary, with "interviews" from "veterans" of the futuristic war between the humans and the alien Covenant depicted in the Halo series. This series of four videos can be seen here, here, here, and my personal favorite here below (the old guy in this last one really brings it home in my opinion):

In addition to these four ads, a huge diorama display was built and used in one additional ad (and was so popular that is subsequently toured the country). This diorama displayed a huge battle between the Covenant and the humans, with the commercial playing a piece from Chopin and containing a little twist at the end. Honestly I think it's an amazing piece. Watch it below:




There's a new Viva Pinata game coming out soon (Viva Pinata being both a game series and kids show on TV). The Viva Pinata ad campaign delighfully parodies the faux-gravitas the "Believe" ads try to achieve, with the cleverly titled "Believa Pinata" diorama parody taking the cake in my opinion. Watch both ads below:




4 comments:

yoggoth said...

Yeah, that Viva Pinata ad is good.

I never liked the Halo games much. By the time they came out I'd been playing FPS games on the computer for years and Halo just seemed like a weaker version of Half-life(aka the best game of all time). And you have to use a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard? That's like driving your car with handlebars.

I have more fun helping my 8 year old sister play Viva Pinata than playing Halo 3. Okay, so I've never played Halo 3, but you get my drift. Viva Pinata is very cool for a kids game.

Herr Zrbo said...

I don't expect anyone (especially you Yoggoth as I know you're not a big console gamer) to neccesarily care about Halo. I was more pointing out the marketing parodies. I think the VP parody of the diorama is hilarious.

yoggoth said...

Yeah, I know, it's just what came to mind when I read your post. I'm trying to stir up console/pc arguments ;)

Herr Zrbo said...

It's strange, cause from '90-'04 I was a HUGE PC gamer. I didn't get into console gaming until about early 2005 and now it's hard for me to go back (except for Starcraft and Diablo II, which I could play till infinity).