Bob Colayco Associate Editor	Now Playing: Animal Crossing (GC), Battlefield 1942 (PC), Command & Conquer: Generals (PC) Eagerly Awaiting: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GC), Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (PC), Auto Modellista (PS2), Starcraft: Ghost (Xbox), Doom III (PC)

Change My Desktop Wallpaper While You're at It

Ads invaded our lives long ago. You see ads on billboards on our highways. You see ads on television interrupting your favorite shows. You see ads on park benches, the sides of buses, and even on supermarket shopping carts. I see ads every day when I take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit--our light rail system) into work. I even see ads placed above the urinals in most bars and clubs these days, forcing me to look at them while I take care of my business. Given this marketing saturation, why oh why am I forced to have ads on the back of my PC-game jewel cases? The phenomenon crept up on us so slowly that many of us didn't really notice. Maybe you didn't really notice it until I mentioned it. First companies added little cards to the inside of PC game boxes. Along with the instruction manual, the warranty card no one sends in, and the epileptic-seizure warning pamphlet, companies added in little paper advertisements for related games that you might like. That's fine, you say. You just have to throw those away if you're not interested. No harm, no foul. Then with the advent of compact disc media, companies started throwing demos or teaser trailers of related games onto your hard drive, sneaking them in during the installation while you weren't looking. That's kinda sneaky. Like that Princeton basketball team that inexplicably sneaks in layups on you with the backdoor cut, you got caught with your head turned. No problem, you say--you just delete that junk taking up space on your hard drive.

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What's the big deal, you ask? Well, to be honest, it isn't really that big a deal. The sun is still going to rise, the world will keep spinning, and you and I will keep buying games. But it's annoying. It bothers me that companies like Ubi Soft, Activision, and the most egregious offender, EA, take advantage of these things just because they can. I hate to single these guys out, because the fact is, every publisher cross-markets to some degree. But it is worth noting that my Age of Mythology case (Microsoft), my Warcraft III case (Vivendi/Blizzard), and my No One Lives Forever 2 case (Sierra) don't have ads for related games plastered on them.

I'm sitting at my desk with a billion jewel cases for PC games, and if I have them turned the wrong way, I start to forget which games I own. Is that the install code for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault or Battlefield 1942? When the heck did I buy The Sims? The bottom line is that we pay money for these games, so why should we be subjected to ads? Ads are usually an annoyance you deal with in exchange for a service that is free. TV is free, so they hit you with commercials. Newspapers are practically free, so they hit you with ads. Meanwhile, GameSpot Complete users have the privilege of seeing no ads because they pay a couple of bucks a month.

Here's another question: Why is it that these companies do this with PC games but not console games? Let's take EA, for example. All my recent EA PC games have related ads on their jewel cases, but I checked my The Lord of the Rings and NBA Live 2003 PS2 boxes and there are no related ads on them. Do they think PC gamers are more tolerant of ads than console gamers? If you look at your average PC game site as opposed to a console-focused site, you'll find that PC gamers are ridiculous complainers and will gripe about anything, right down to the font choice for a game's title.

Can you imagine if the music industry pulled similar stunts? You come home with the latest blink-182 CD, you're all excited, you rip it open, and you find that the back of the CD doesn't give a track listing of blink-182 songs. It just says: If you like blink-182, you'll love Sum41! And then you pop the CD in and find that the first track is actually a 30-second sample of a Sum41 song. If the games industry is stooping even lower than the music industry, the traditional king of slutty marketing practices, you know there's something wrong.

OK, I'm done ranting for this week. Just don't get me started about why we are forced to sit through three or four unskippable movie sequences before our games load up.