What is this I don't even: Part 4

As my wife has pointed out many times to me over the last three years, I am becoming a bitter old man. In truth, I long for the day when I can shuffle around my retirement home, complaining about every damn thing, remembering the good ol' days, and being as surly as can be. In the meantime, I'll reserve my complaints to things that are genuinely terrible. And friends, we are in the midst of two completely terrible ad campaigns.

First, we have the Frobinson Framily. Sprint Corporation, in their continued efforts to stay relevant in the cellular market, is promoting their "framily plan", which allows anyone to start new plans or combine their existing ones into a single extended plan. It operates much like a typical family plan, only the participants can live at different addresses and receive and pay bills separately. That, in and of itself, is a solid idea. It provides savings for the customer while also encouraging groups of friends to switch to Sprint. What is absolutely not a solid idea is the way it's presented through their TV ads:



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I'm really struggling to understand what the intent of the ad is. It's not funny. It's not referential. It's not clever. It's just flat-out puzzling. Why is the patriarch a hamster? Why does that girl have animated birds constantly flying around her? And if the entire point of the plan is that they're billed separately, why are they all living together? It gets worse when we meet Gor-Don:



So mom and emo-basement-dweller are talking about goth-basement-dweller and he's creepily standing over their shoulders listening to them. Yes, this clearly makes me want to sign up for a new cell phone plan. Judy Greer deserves better. They even forked over the money for Kevin Durant to appear in another bit, for reasons undetermined. Maybe I'm just missing the point. Maybe there is something hidden beneath the surface that ties the whole ad campaign together. But for the life of me, I can't find it.

But oh, the state of commercials gets better, and by better I mean much worse. DirecTV is almost always ahead of the curve in their ongoing war with the cable and FIOS industries and other satellite providers. They've paid the NFL truckloads of money to retain the exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket. They were one of the first to realize the appeal of TiVo and digital video recorders, and offer them with their service subscription. Now their latest hook is servicing multiple televisions without the need for boxes or cables in every room. Sounds great, huh? Let's introduce America to the wireless TV with a little nightmare fuel:



Ad exec: "Cable boxes have wires and marionettes have wires so let's go with that! People love some good old-fashioned marionette humor!"

Board room: *stunned silence*

Ad exec: "Well do you fuckers have any better ideas?"

Board room: *tumbleweed rolls by*

Considering this guy is having his friend over to watch TV, wouldn't the friend know that the wife is a fucking puppet? And that's not just me cursing, they have a son and she also has a father, so that's three generations of marionettes that are sentient and able to reproduce. Terrifying, and I never even saw the Child's Play movies. But how are things in the bedroom, you might ask (if you were a sociopath)? Well, doll-fuckers, DirecTV has an answer for you:



Didn't anyone in the design and production of these commercials stand up and say, "You know what? Maybe we shouldn't depict a grown man in a sexual relationship with a life-size wooden doll." Seriously, these ads just make my skin crawl.

What is this I don't even

Review: Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I've had quite a busy year. I got married. My wife and I went to Italy. We moved into a townhouse. A bunch of my friends got married and/or had kids. I'm still working nights and weekends. And to top it all off, my wife and I are expecting a beautiful baby girl in a month. Needless to say this has cut down on my gaming and blogging. But right now I feel like it's time for a little nostalgia.

About a year and a half ago, I asked my wife (then-fiancée) for a PS Vita as my big Christmas gift. We had a lot of travel planned for 2013, and I wanted to play Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and possibly see what the Dissidia nonsense was all about. Then, about two weeks before our wedding, I discovered a title I recognized from my past on PSN -- Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Many moons ago, I really enjoyed Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen on Super Nintendo. Unfortunately I never actually found a copy to buy, which is a bummer because they now go for over $100 (way more if it includes original packaging) due to a limited number of copies released in the United States. So I just rented it from Blockbuster about a dozen times instead. And later in my gaming career, of course I fell in love with Final Fantasy Tactics. Therefore I figured Tactics Ogre would be the perfect combination of those two games. I bought the PlayStation version, and after playing through most of the game I came away feeling very meh about the whole experience, mostly because of the way classes worked and the 100-floor "optional" dungeon (nothing is optional in RPGs). But my attitude changed this past year after finding a Let's Play thread about the new-ish PSP port on Something Awful forums. Square Enix brought back the original production team to clean up some of the shoddy mechanics and add content for the new release, and after toying around with it more than I'd care to admit (especially on our honeymoon, there are long train rides in Europe, don't judge me) the game reignited my interest in the entire Ogre Battle series. Flash forward to a few months ago, when the ease of NHL 14 and my reluctance to join my friends on Final Fantasy XIV led me to fire up the ol' SNES emulator and play the original Ogre Battle once more.

A revolution in under a year? I guess it helps to have dragons and magic.

More after the jump...