The web is buzzing with reviews for Mercenaries 2 and while my opinions are not decided yet an interesting story has come to our attention. On Friday the 3rd September EA took over a London petrol station near Finsbury Park and completely transformed it into a military style bunker. Going as far as to include oil barrels, sandbag walls and costumed actors to pump the petrol.

What they failed doing when giving away their £20,000 of free petrol to anyone who came along was choosing a good location. As anyone who has been to London knows there is no space anywhere so having 20 cars down the middle of a road waiting to get their free £40 of fuel caused a huge number of complaints including the local MP speaking out. Temperatures increased and those drivers in the queue started swapping abuse with those trying to get past so chaos was close by the whole time. What made this even less impressive was while the promotion began around 7:30 in the morning the press release to announce it was to take place didn’t go out until 9:11am local time. This meant that it was too late for most media outlets to assign reporters, let alone camera crews to go along and film the story. As anyone in PR should know you need to provide several days notice at the least when an event is to take place as the very minimum the press requires is to figure out a way to get to the site and plan interview questions etc.

Who knows, maybe Microsoft have been watching some television as they are going to pay $300 million dollars to be more popular. All because Apple have been calling them names and it’s starting to hurt their feelings, or more importantly, perhaps the bottom line.

To this end, to complete with Apple’s long running advertising campaigns showing Microsoft as the old, stale company with a grey operating system compared to the artistic delights provided by Apple’s OS MS have had an idea. That is to spend big money on Jerry Seinfeld. Not just buying him dinner so he says nice things about them but as the new face of a huge advertising campaign to fight Apple and regain their place as the undisputed champ, the (Star Wars) empire, the king of cool, the man of the hour, the…you get the point!

Source: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2008/08/21/microsoft-to-drop-300-mln-in-cool-quest/

We promise this is the last MGS story for a while as we are getting fatigue as much as
you are! Still this is news. In a new interview 4’s producer Ryan Payton has come out
with an idea that is being bounced around over a storyline for Metal Gear Solid 5.

Apparently “[there is] a lot of room for filling in the gaps as far as Big Boss is concerned.”

While it was given as a huge PR promo that MGS4 would be the last game in the
series it is now being said that Kojima Productions was misunderstood in that
respect and that the game would only be the last one with writer/director
Kojima himself and the last game with Solid Snake as the main character.

For the most part however we are sure there will be plenty of people who
will be happy to play another sequel in the long running franchise that brings
reality to the term from The Simpsons Game trailer “out on every console, ever made.”

What does this mean for you? Yet another Metal Gear Solid PR campaign coming soon
and depending on your point of view another good or bad game. No question though
even more stories about Kojima & Co.

Interview story source: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/53254