Offensive and unsuitable for children! Encourages the objectification of women!

No, it's not the games this time, but instead the advertisements, reports Eurogamer.

GamePolitics readers may recall that some members of the Great British public took offense at Sony's billboard advertising campaign for the PSP earlier this year. Complaints were heard in some quarters that advertising slogans such as "Strong language and scenes of a sexual nature here" were inappropriate, particularly when posted near schools or churches.

Other contentious PSP slogans included in the campaign included "Your Girlfriend's White Bits Here," "Saucy emails won't get you fired here" and "Take A Running Jump Here", which, when posted in a subway station, was deemed by some as irresponsible.
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Last week it was Activision's T.V. spots for Call of Duty: Big Red One which drew official ire in Great Britain.

Now, Konami faces complaints over print adverts for its upcoming Crime Life: Gang Wars. But while COD's commercials were judged misleading, some viewers of the Crime Life ads find them simply misanthropic.

GamesIndustry.biz reports that the advert, featuring armed members of hip-hop act D12 and captioned with the tag line "Rule the streets or fall by the wayside," was investigated by the U.K.'s Advertsing Standards Authority (ASA) after the agency received complaints that it was "offensive and irresponsible" on the grounds that it "exploited racial stereotypes, glorified violence and encouraged anti-social behaviour."

Konami and Metro - the newspaper which published the ad - claim they have heard no complaints, adding that they were of the belief that, "people could distinguish between real life and games."

On the subject of D12's appearance in the ad, the ASA concluded "that some readers may not understand that the men in the ad represented the band members and could take the image to be a negative portrayal of black men and be offended by it on those grounds." The organization also criticised the ad's tagline on the grounds it "could be seen to condone violence and present that choice of lifestyle as aspirational in a way that was irresponsible"

The ASA have told Konami not to re-run the advert, and to consult the agency before running ads for similar titles.

-Mark Kelly

Just show me how the damn thing plays!

Are you frustrated with game commercials that display nothing but pre-rendered footage? If you live in the UK you may not have to suffer them much longer due to a recent adjudication from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

The ASA is an independent body set up to ensure that advertising, not just television, conforms to the advertising code. Earlier this year, the ASA received three separate complaints about adverts for Activision's Call of Duty 2 (Xbox 360) and Call of Duty: Big Red One (PS2, Xbox, and GCN).

Apparently, the ads used pre-rendered footage that was far superior to what is found in the actual game play. The Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, the organization responsible for the pre-transmission clearance of UK television advertisements, informed the ASA that they had approved the commercials under the impression that the footage was taken directly from the games. Upon learning that Activision had produced the scenes specifically for the ads, they immediately declared them unacceptable for broadcast.

For its part, Activision says it acted in good faith and maintains that using pre-rendered footage is common practice.

Unmoved, the ASA slammed Activision's explanation. "While the scenes used communicated the themes of the game, they were not accurate representations of the graphics in the games themselves. We considered that this was misleading... They must not be shown again in their present forms."

AE: It's important to keep in mind that the majority of game commercials featuring solely pre-rendered footage (like every Final Fantasy game since VII) are still using scenes from the game. The CoD2 ads in question (view one here) use images that are not found in the game. Big difference that.

-Andrew Eisen