Not every advertisement we look at needs to be about game software, occasionally we can dip to the side and look at bad advertising for third party hardware. This is a print ad for Asciiware's Super NES joystick control, a device that was released to coincide with the launch of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Although this is a good idea (since playing those fighters on a regular Super NES pad could be killer on your hands), there was something off about the way they decided to market the product.

This advert claims that they "ripped-off a perfectly good idea" by modeling their control after what you would find in the arcade. They even show you a picture of the arcade control they were modeling it after (clearly from the Street Fighter II arcade cabinet). The problem is, in order to make this advertisement make any sense they had to Photoshop the arcade control and change the button lay outs.

Asciiware's control gets the "popular" arcade lay out wrong, instead of featuring three buttons on top and three on the bottom, they have decided to split it in a weird 2/4 configuration. And to make matters worse they tried their hardest to make the control resemble the look of the Super Nintendo, one of the ugliest systems of all time. The control offers a power and reset button, not to mention all kinds of pointless turbo and slow motion options. But the real tragedy is the advertisement which had to trick gamers in order to make their claims make sense. If this was the best control on the market (like they claim), then they wouldn't need to resort to lying in order to make sales.

FROM: Everybody Loves Bad Advertising