Yaris: Bad Advertising and Leveraging Synergies

Remember the Burger King games on the Xbox? Everyone made fun of them for being completely goofy, poor, and representative of the consumer society we live in today.

But dammit, I think the King is hilarious, and by mimicking three of the safest genres out there (racing, minigames, and stealth), they managed to be competent enough for a couple of dollars worth of entertainment. The games sold a hell of a lot, and you knew it was only a matter of time before someone else gave it a shot.

I don’t have to tell any of you how bad this could turn out. The reason BK has done so well with their marketing over the last few years is that they put some effort into how they latch onto trends. Their games were competent enough, and stuff like Subservient Chicken was at least well made Web 2.0 attempts. These days, however, this is the exception. Marketers, I’m afraid, are retarded. Some are shrewd, manipulative, and good at their jobs, which is why advertising can and will continue to work. But then you have the rest, and the “rest” are who came up with the idea of the Toyota Yaris game. This is one of the worst attempts at cool and edgy advertising I have ever seen, and if it succeeds in garnering sales and downloads, I fear for the future of Xbox Live Arcade.

The Yaris game succeeds on only one front – stylistically, it ties directly into the videogamey TV ads that Toyota is currently running. Aside from that, this is a bad game that is disjointed from the product it is trying to advertise. You might think from the screenshots that this is a cute little racing game of some sorts. Unfortunately, the only review I can find about it is a snarky fluff piece from bloggers who think they are journalists, so I’ll have to tell you that the developer Backbone Entertainment decided to make a Live Arcade game based around the same concept as the Bonus Stages from Sonic 2. The only addition is the ability to aim and shoot at targets both on the ground and in the air.

That doesn’t sound too horrible, but the team forgot two important things. First, their concept was a bonus stage in a game from over fifteen years ago. Second, Sonic 2 made those stages somewhat challenging by making them fairly fast and thus difficult to anticipate what lay ahead. Yaris treads incredibly slowly through its pipeline course, obstacles are placed so as to require minimal movement on your part, and the shooting is slippery at best. It throws enough shit at you that it may not be incredibly easy, but I can’t say for sure because I could barely finish the first track. It just isn’t at all interesting, and that, of course, is the death blow to any game. I’ve heard some people say it’s at least worth 200 free achievement points, but I can’t see anyone forcing themselves through this to get 200 measly points, and this is coming from a guy who finished Kingdom Hearts.

Being a free game, there isn’t much to Yaris, but what is there is locked away. Two other car models and several straight-from-the-dealership paint jobs must be earned, and, as you can probably tell, it just isn’t worth it.

To be fair, I wasn’t expecting much when I downloaded this game. In fact, I expected even less when it clicked in my head that Backbone is actually Digital Eclipse, who have made a name for themselves making shoddy ports of classic arcade and console games. Ultimately I don’t blame them for what they did. As much as we all want to believe that every game is a precious baby to the company behind it, a software developer knows that no matter you may love what you do, there is such a thing as just doing a job for a paycheck.

Backbone didn’t care, and rightfully so, because it is obvious that Toyota marketers cared even less about how this came out. Here is a game where more than half of the products we are supposed to see are not immediately accessible. The quirky little monsters and mascots the people at Toyota have concocted lose any meaning when they have no context in the game. You get absolutely no idea about how the real Yaris performs by playing. Hell, you don’t even get a good idea of how it looks because the car models are so basic. The game that was built here actually makes it harder to advertise the product, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone at Toyota or their marketing firm actually looked at this and gave it the green light.

As a matter of fact, I don’t have to believe it. Here’s a press release on the website Marketing Vox: The voice of online marketing. In it you will find the following sentence:

“Hardcore gamers are hypercritical, which is why agency Saatchi & Saatchi, LA farmed the game’s development out to Backbone Entertainment, best known for the Sonic the Hedgehog games made popular in the early ’90s.”

In case you’re confused, Digital Eclipse was responsible for a few recent ports of Sonic games. But you can’t expect the people reporting on the advertising world to know this kind of information about products, so why the hell would the advertisers themselves ever bother?

Yaris is the stuff my college nightmares were made of, when I saw the pathetic final projects of marketing majors while I realized day after day that I would write code for just about anything in order to make a buck. Worse yet, this is the kind of junk that companies are likely to try to dump on us more and more, despite how good the gaming community is at seeing through bullshit. We here at videolamer will do our best to investigate, but I think it is safe to say that all of us, as gamers, do not want this. Please, do not download Yaris, not even out of perverse curiosity. Show Toyota and anyone else who tries to cash in on an idea that it’s the customer that helps make that paycheck, and that they’re going to have to do their jobs if they want our attention.

A bad game isn’t going to sell your product, but combining a bad game with absolutely no attempt to sell the product is embarrassing and shameful. This game fails completely and utterly as a tool for advertising.