When your product is nothing more than another joystick sitting on the shelf, it can be kind of difficult to come up with a creative ad campaign. Unlike the games we normally cover on this page, the Power Clutch SG doesn't have the luxury of cool graphics or character artwork. Instead they had to come up with something to show off how cool the joystick was ... and as you can tell by looking at this advertisement, they failed in every way possible.

Let's get the obvious out of the way, you're looking at a person that, for no good reason that I can think of, is split between two extremes. There's the side that is wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, while his other side appears to be what that leather guy from the Village People would look like if he was turned into a vampire. These contrasting sides are strangely sewn together to make one very disturbing advertisement. It kind of reminds me of those half man/half women acts you would see in the traveling freak shows. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near as sexy as those circus freaks.

This advertisement demands that you "grab the clutch and feel the power," yet I'm struggling to get that out of the half boy/half biker imagery we're presented with. He's clearly grabbing the joystick (he's not playing, nobody can play a game like he's holding it) and feeling some kind of effect, but from the looks of it it's not a very pleasurable one. If anything I want my joystick to make me look like an athlete or movie star or something, not an extra from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When you're selling a control the only thing you're required to do is make it look useful and fun, but the Power Clutch SG looks like it's going to infect your body and eat your soul. And I think I'm going to pass on that today.

FROM: The Case of the Bad Advertising