I learned a lot from this Castle of Dragon advert. For example, without this commercial I wouldn't have known that the "most powerful weapon" is the mace. All this time I thought it was the nuclear bomb or love or something, but no, it's a simple mace. I also learned that "the trick to destroying Medusa is to keep away from her." Yeah, I never would have guessed that I would want to stay far away from a woman who can turn people to stone. Thanks for the heads up. Do you know what I should do after avoiding the hot snake chick? Use the mace, of course! After all, it is the most powerful weapon.

What you may not know is that this Castle of Dragon advert is attempting to look like an editorial inside of the magazine. See, Seta wants to trick you into thinking that GamePro wrote this and not some savvy marketer who has their finger on the pulse of what's cool. Unfortunately this "S'more Hot Hints" section doesn't look anything like the rest of GamePro, making it painfully obvious that this is an advertisement. In fact, this commercial is so bad that it actually makes GamePro's horrendous layout look good in comparison.

But the really confusing part of this advertisement is at the very bottom, right in the coupon section. Because I'm a gentleman I'll ignore the fact that most editorial content does not come with a free offer and a cut-out coupon. This coupon suggests that if you purchase a copy of QBillion and any Try Soft store you can get Parez Hilton's Velcro wallet. Wait ... QBillion? That's right; this coupon is for another Seta game, a Game Boy puzzler named QBillion. I can certainly understand putting this coupon alongside a commercial for QBillion, but Castle of Dragon? Apparently Seta figured that all they needed to do was throw a few teeny tiny pictures, write some snarky hints and feature a weird picture of an old guy and the game would sell itself. I guess Castle of Dragon didn't need the bottom of its page, with a name like that it's hard to imagine anybody denying its charm. Even with the faux-giveaway, this advert didn't make me run out and buy Castle of Dragon. As a kid I was savvy enough to hold out for Castle of Pie, because ... mmmmmm pie!

FROM: I'm Bad Advertising ... Get Me Out of Here!