Subaru Impreza Shakedown is an advergame and contest promoting the Subaru Impreza. The main gameplay consists of you driving one of various Impreza models around the course for the best time. The best times will win prizes at the end of the promotion.

What I liked: The overall site design and site philosophy seems to try to drive the player to actually race without pushing them through too much advertising. The site is obviously branded Subaru throughout but it feels natural and unobtrusive. They have also done a good job integrating short video clips to help drive home the experience for the Subaru racing team.

What I didn’t like: My biggest gripe is the overly intensive registration process that must be completed before you can even race once. (I’ve complained about this before). This site isn’t quite so bad because they never imply that you can play without registering. However, their registration is extremely intrusive forcing the user to not only enter their name and e-mail, but report information about their current car, and plans to buy. My guess is that they will either lose almost all potential visitors at this step, or they will receive a lot of Joe Blow registrations.

My other problem is that the game and site are buggy. When I first registered I could not get back in to actually race. In fact, I had to completely leave the game section and come back before I could race. Then, during the race itself I had to complete several laps before it actually counted me as finishing.

Overall: The overall mission and direction for this site is solid, but it is getting killed by a really poor decision on registration, and then further hurt by some problems in the execution. My guess is this will not be a very successful campaign for Subaru.

Update: It appears that the registration might not be forced, but may have been either a bug when loading or possibly some issue with the Flash 7 player. At any rate, you can actually race without registering which is a good thing.

While lots of people have talked about an aging gamer audience, this is the first article I’ve seen referring to Grandma Gamers. Apparently there is a 69 year old Grandma “Old Grandma Hardcore” who’s an avid gamer. She even has a blog. While the article itself is a good read, there’s some very interesting facts listed too:

• 19% of gamers are over 50
• 53% of gamers expect to play as much, or more than they do now in 10 years
• Adult gamers have been playing an average of 12 years

All of this is just even more proof that gaming is for much more than just “pimple faced teenagers” It is truly a mass-market medium, and progressive brands will do well to embrace this.

This probably isn’t something we’d normally blog about since Advergame developers won’t get access to this technology until a plugin developer actually incorporates it. (hint-hint Virtools, Macromedia, etc )

Local Ottawa-based company TransGaming has just released SwiftShader. This is a technology that provides a software renderer for the latest pixel and vertex shader effects. To put it in layman’s terms, with this technology developer’s can use the latest and greatest graphical goodies, and not have to worry about their users having the latest video cards, or the latest driver or DirectX version.

Oberon media has apparently licensed it for their tool-suite, so casual game developers can start using it now.

Fresh on the heels of a retro TV commercial, spoofing the $10,000 Pyramid is the Comcastic
website and embedded advergames.

With a 70’s look and feel the broadband site is promoting Comcast’s cable services through activities and games.

What I liked: The games on this site are well done, and match the overall promotion. Each game is very simple to play, requiring just the mouse, they have simple, but not cheap graphics, and the gameplay is straight forward. User’s don’t have to read through lots of instructions to understand what to do.

They have also thought through the activities and made games that mesh well with the overall goal. I see very little overt branding yet the entire experience “feels” Comcastic. Each game relates to some aspect of technology and broadband, without beating the user over the head that it is a Comcast ad.

I also really like the choice they made with regards to user registration. Everyone is free to play the games as much as they want, but you must register in order to make the high score boards, or to use the tell a friend feature. This should provide a good nudge to very active users without chasing off a more casual audience.

What I didn’t like: There’s really only 2 things that I dislike about this site. First is that it takes over my entire screen. Fortunately this is in a popup window so it isn’t as annoying as other sites but it is still unacceptable. There’s no reason for the games to be full screen. (You’ll notice the link goes straight to the game page, and not the launcher page )

Second, the games are very bandwidth intensive. This is a bit of a quibble given the ever-increasing broadband penetration but on a site trying to sell high-speed service it would be nice to allow narrow-band users the ability to play.

Overall: This is one of the best advergame/advertainment sites I’ve seen in a while. They have nailed the execution, successfully reinforced the message without ramming it down the user’s throat, and overall made a solid promotional site.

Our latest game for Detour has just launched. B’s Stunt Tracks allows you to play as B through a series of different stunt tracks to try to get the highest stunt score.

For the creative in you, this also features a level editor allowing anyone to create a new level and submit it for the world to play. This has proven extremely popular in Laser Envy and we expect it to be a hit with the Detour audience as well.