Ubisoft Sucks Balls

So today I was playing “CSI : Hard Evidence”. This game made me certain I never want to play a Ubisoft game again.

Don’t get me wrong, the game was fairly fun and interesting…it’s just that Ubisoft pretty much wrote the book on intrusive advertising. Anyone who’s played “Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory” can tell you that. You couldn’t play that game for five minutes without getting hit over the head with advertisements for ‘Airwaves’ gum and Nokia cell phones.

Anyway, CSI was obviously sponsored by Visa.

The first case you have to solve is a guy that someone set fire to in a taxicab. Slapped right on the roof of the cab is a HUGE advertisement for Visa. Later on, you’re having to reconstruct a glass panel that got shot out in a store…right there in the corner is another HUGE visa logo. You go to a store…another fuck-ton of Visa logos.

Put it this way, playing this game very quickly turns into nothing more than a ‘spot the Visa logo’ game. In fact, scrub that, that makes it sound like you have to actively look for them to find them. They’re not discrete…they punch you in the face.

Now, on the face of it, this doesn’t sound to bad. It’s a ‘real world’ environment, and it’s pretty likely you’d see ads for Visa just going out shopping. Product placement has been around since the invention of the movie camera…so why am I making such a big deal about CSI?

Well, the last straw for me was when I had to check up on a guy’s credit card history. Can you guess what credit card the guy had? Yup, a Visa card.

I shit you not, I went to Captain Brass’ office, asked him if he’d had any luck running the card for fraudulent purchases, and this is what he said:

“Yeah, well I called Visa, great people over there, and thanks to their amazing fraud protection service, they picked up the suspicious purchases immediately.”

I was waiting for him to start giving me a rundown of Visa’s services and tell me how to apply for one.

You see, I’ve no problem with a bit of advertising in a game… but when I’ve parted with hard earned money for a game and get advertising repeatedly thrown in my face, and in such a way that it totally throws me out of the game…I don’t enjoy it. For Captain Brass to take time out of a murder investigation to tell me how awesome Visa cards are, it’s just not in character and doesn’t belong in the game.

An ad on in-game billboard or store…fine…getting a five minute diatribe about how awesome Visa is when I’m asking a game character a question just isn’t right.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you put advertising in a game, I shouldn’t be paying full price for it, and when advertising is this intrusive, I shouldn’t pay anything for it.

I won’t pay to watch or play a glorified advertisment. It’s that simple.