Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure I could do a better job at selling products than the po-faced, Oooh-I'm-all-grown-up, tedium that passes for video game advertising these days.
Still, as dull as most game ads are these, they're nothing next to the kaleidoscopic cascade of hyperactive juvenilia which appeared in games mags 20-odd years ago.
Certainly, if I was ever fortunate to own a time machine, I'd travel back to the 90s and make a small fortune doing a better job than the cack-brained idiots who were doing the ads back then.
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about.
This ad for Kirby Superstar is likening the Nintendo puffball to a marshmallow, which doesn't make a great deal of sense, and is something nobody has ever done, given that he more closely resembles a placenta.
But then they go on to mention a "smorgasbord of Kirby action" - seemingly trying to draw some sort of parallel between s'mores and smorgasbord (of which there is no parallel to be had, beyond the similarity in spelling).
Also features the phrase "hock up the bad guys" which is unpleasant, and suggests a far more graphic act of regurgitation than has ever been seen in a Kirby game.
Also, check out the "Play it loud" dirty protest. Who was running Nintendo's marketing department - Julian Assange?!?!
Nice one. Topical.
Be one? Be a sausage? Be a frankfurter? A hotdog? A wiener? What do any of those have to do with Cruis'n World? What does it mean?! Be at one with the sausage?
Also, is it just me, or is that sausage sweating slightly? We've all had a sweaty sausage, eh boys!
Baffling ad aside, why was Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World even spelled like that? Cruisin' USA I get, but putting the apostrophe before the n, and not putting one afterwards... I... I... it makes me have a grammar aneurysm.
SPOILER: It didn't.
Possibly the most desperate ad of all time.
If you do manage to read on, the main selling point of Virtual League Baseball seems to be that by playing it at home you won't have to smell the disgusting flatulence - sorry, "long, foul, floaters" - emitted by sports fans.
Incidentally, I went to a baseball game in New York once. It was awful. It lasted about nine hours, and every 10 seconds they stopped the game to play a 20-second blast of "Another One Bites The Dust", and most of the crowd seem to be there to get drunk and bellow homophobic slurs at the players.
Why would you want testicles for Christmas? Who is this ad aimed at? Men who were born without testicles? Women? Cannibals?
Which is all well and good, but that text there at the bottom... why did they think it was a good idea to intersperse it with that out-of-context "dude" speech, which TUBULAR was GNARLY embarrassing even BODACIOUS in 1992?
I'm not a woman, so couldn't imagine how difficult childbirth can be, but having done some really big poos in my time, which I'd imagine weren't all that different from giving birth, the thought of it brings tears to my eyes.
What makes this ad for me is the plaintive "Dear heavens, no".