I've written about publicity stunts going awry before, but at the very least they were one-off things that not everyone had a chance of seeing. But when you have an entire ad campaign based around one or two bad ideas, there's a good chance that everyone will see them and collectively laugh you out of existence.

Trust me though - the advertisements I'm going to be discussing beyond this point get bad. Really bad. The paint will peel off of your walls just to get away from how awful they are. While we might all agree that they're just plain awful, you have to remember there are dozens of people who think these are good ideas. We have to thank them for things like...

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Sony Takes The 'Scare People' Approach

We'll start off with a classic ad campaign from this generation. What was Sony to do after all the bad press they got from the Playstation 3's original retail pricing in 2006? Make an ad campaign so terrifying that people would just up and forget about the prices out of fear for their very lives. It didn't work, but it was still freaky.

Buy the PS3 or we'll run these ads indefinitely.

I can't even begin to imagine how the brainstorming session might have gone behind the walls of one of Sony's many studios. I imagine that they were hoping people would consider them very artistic and bold to make such off the wall ads. They must have thought consumers would want a mature artsy console to play on and would flock to stores.

Instead, what they got were floods of people going on to message boards asking why that baby doll was crying, or why Sony was trying to traumatize random children with their campaign of terror. The advertisements lasted a pretty good amount of time before they were replaced with much better ads featuring montages of different games that were releasing soon.

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The "Banned" Xbox Shooter Advertisement

While the live action shooter commercial for the Xbox 360 wasn't inherently ridiculous, it wasn't exactly a good commercial either. There were no snippets of gameplay for any game whatsoever, no games were mentioned during the entire advert, and the only connection it had to the console was the Xbox 360 logo at the end.

Eight people died while filming this [citation needed]

While I've heard that the commercial was more about the Xbox 360's online functionality, it still doesn't make sense to me. People weren't buying the Xbox 360 so they could be connected to the internet. They were buying the Xbox 360 to play games online. So now people knew the Xbox 360 had online, but they didn't know about any games.

But the really ridiculous thing about this advertisement was the fact that it never made it to any air waves. The reason as to why it never aired is still a mystery, but rumors were all over the place. Some people said it was because it was too violent, others said it wasn't approved, and even a few people claimed Microsoft pulled it to cause a stir.

Whatever the real reason was, it is just ridiculous that so much controversy was stirred up over a commercial that had absolutely zero gameplay attached to it.

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Red Steel Was Just A Big Lie

I'm sure you all remember when the Wii was first revealed to the world. It was pretty awesome for everybody involved. But there was one game that stood out above all the others at Nintendo's conference that year. That game of course, was Red Steel.

Hurry up! I have to go be Kill Bill in five minutes.

The trailer and commercials shown for the game made it look like the Wii's big killer app, this was going to be the game that put Wiis in people's homes. It had nice graphics for the Wii at the time, what appeared to be some pretty great AI, and of course the sword fighting.

Fast forward to the Wii's release and we learn the horrible truth. Red Steel sucked. The graphics weren't as well done as what we saw at E3, the AI liked to stand in the line of fire whenever able and the sword fighting was just... Don't even get me started. Eventually Red Steel 2 released with 1:1 sword fighting implemented, but it was too little too late.

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The Past Of Advertisements Isn't Any Better

While the three mentioned above happened just in the last few years and even a bit into the future, you should know that the past of video game advertisements wasn't any better. In fact, it was a whole lot worse. Back in the 80's and 90's the trend was the more radical you were, the better. Game companies took this to heart and came up with the worst ads I've ever seen.

Now, I understand the image. But none of the text makes any sense at all.

SEGA was especially guilty of these horrifically terrible advertisements. There was a time where SEGA just figured everyone wanted to pretend they were masturbating a robot and went from there. Why they did this, I can't possibly understand. But I've got the ads posted above and below just so you can look on in astonishment at how bad they really were.

This ad would take an even worse turn if he was holding a DS.

This isn't anything like the Segata Sanshiro ad campaign that took Japan by surprise. If anything, it just makes me want to avoid ever touching another SEGA product for the rest of my life in the fear that I might actually be pleasuring some sort of robot hidden in my console. Hey, it could totally happen.

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I'll never understand it. Companies can and will throw millions of dollars into ad campaigns that any regular person would call out as being insane at a moment's notice. Why do these ideas even make it past the drawing board? Why did they ever hit our TV screens? Sometimes these things just become too expensive to fail. But at least we can rest easy knowing they don't last forever,

As always, thank you for reading. I know there are plenty of other crazy, or just plain awful ads out there. Perhaps you could share a few of the ones you've personally seen? Feel free to leave your stories in the comments below.