Incomplete Gamer

Posts Tagged ‘US Military’

This month, Capcom’s Blog ran a Street Fighter promotion; the prize up for grabs, the dubious opportunity to get your pixilated mug shot transposed onto the body of a bystander in the up-coming Street Fighter IV video game. Lame. Where’s the glamour, the excitement, the money. Capcom made ¥74.542 billion in 2006. Surely there’s enough small change under the couch cushions to spring for a more exciting prize. Make me a fully animated fighter who talks like me. Fly me to the game launch in Tokyo. Don’t make me a inanimate background character that I’ll never notice ’cause I’m too busy mashing buttons. To be fair, Capcom is not the first video gaming giant with a stingy or unimaginative promotions department.

A while back, the Stars and Stripes (a daily newspaper published for the US military and their families) reported details of Sony’s promotion of the then new turn-based combat, PSP game, Field Commander. Sony ran a competition with copies of Field Commander on offer. If you think coming up with twenty five words or less why you love product X is a bitch, try this contest on for size. Just to be in the running to win a copy of Field Commander you needed to be serving overseas in the US military. And if the chances of being stuck in a war zone, or at best, a very unfriendly neighbourhood weren’t bad enough, instead of twenty five words, Sony wants an essay of up to five hundred words. I don’t mean to be unkind but if you could churn out a decent prize-winning five hundred word essay, you would probably not have enlisted in the first place and opted instead for a safe desk job back home in the States!

Frankly I think it would be a lot less trouble just to rent the sucker. I didn’t think anyone would actually be bothered going to the trouble of entering the competition, but a former colleague of mine, First Corporal Hector de la Garza, a US Marine currently serving in Iraq, sent me a copy of his entry, which I’ve printed below.

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