Ubisoft putting up $10M in Shaun White Snowboarding ads

by Justin McElroy { Oct 9th 2008 at 9:00AM }

Try as we might, we just haven't been able to get excited about Shaun White Snowboarding. To date, we've only been able to motivate ourselves to post about its use of the Balance Board and the inclusion of mighty Target Mountain, coated daily by artificial snow machines and values. Now, Ubisoft is taking action against our apathy with a new $10 million ad campaign for the game.

In fact, if you watch next week's episode of South Park, Shaun White Snowboarding ads are all you can expect to see (except, you know, crudely animated chastisement of all society's ills).

Tags: shaun-white-snowboarding, ubisoft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Kye - Me_DF @ Oct 9th 2008 9:13AM

If that's the Wii version...
And it uses the balance board well...

Then where do I leave my right arm?

John Z @ Oct 9th 2008 9:19AM

I'd guess that's probably not the Wii version being displayed, but I would also bet it might be close enough to spit.

And if the Balance Board gets used as well as it is in We Ski, then you can leave your right arm on the pile next to mine.

Jack of No Trades 85 @ Oct 9th 2008 9:22AM

I thought graphics didn't matter boy?

Plus I think its funny that you thought it was the Wii version....wow.....talk...about...crazy

Mr Khan @ Oct 9th 2008 9:24AM

Nah, Wii version's much more stylized

Kye - Me_DF @ Oct 9th 2008 9:33AM

Jack,

1 - Im not a boy, I'm a man.

2 - Graphics do matter, but gameplay matters more. I've absolutely refused to play (or even own [returned gifts]) some games that are widely regarded as good just because of the gameplay.

3 - If the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox then why couldn't it be the Wii version?
Not that I thought it was the Wii version, but why coultn't it?

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 9:41AM

"3 - If the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox then why couldn't it be the Wii version?
Not that I thought it was the Wii version, but why coultn't it?"

Simple, there are no jaggiez in that pic. Thats why its not the Wii version.

Silly boy...

KeenCommander @ Oct 9th 2008 11:27AM

@xFenixKnightx: I'm guessing you haven't played Galaxy? Not rid of them completely, but no worse than any 360 game I've played. Cause, you know, Gears of War totally had no jaggies whatsoever...oh wait, it totally DID have them!

The only way your going to be free of them completely is get a $2500 PC, hook it up to the highest resolution monitor you can find, and crank the antialiasing up to 8x. They're a fact of life, people should be focused on how nicely stylized a game is, rather than whether or not it has "teh jaggiez". IMHO, Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast is more visually appealing than half of the "next gen" games. Obviously Bioshock and the likes are gorgeous, but I doubt having a little "jaggies" is really going to hinder your experience in a snowboarding game...which, since you're just trolling, you probably won't be buying on any system anyways.

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 11:49AM

Galaxy is the SOLE REASON I bought the Wii. Also, I was just being sarcastic there. Even still, you cant possibly believe that would be a Wii screen.

Duke @ Oct 9th 2008 11:54AM

KeenCommander, you made good points but Fenix wasn't trolling. You went for the throat when it wasn't really needed.

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 12:01PM

Yeah, thanks Duke. Keen overreacted but its all good. I actually chuckled when I saw that he went overboard for nothing.

Kye - Me_DF @ Oct 9th 2008 12:24PM

"Simple, there are no jaggiez in that pic. Thats why its not the Wii version."

How could I have forgotten; it's not like any game image or video for any other console has ever been faked enhanced in any way.

Name-calling is for children.

Haggard (Mr.ESC resurrected on a... thursday?!) @ Oct 9th 2008 12:26PM

"Nah, Wii version's much more stylized" lol

I know you mean no harm, Mr. Khan - but surely you can see you're a fanboy?

AoE @ Oct 9th 2008 3:41PM

wow NDF is out in force today! TGS got you guys all in a tizzy or something?

Mr Khan @ Oct 9th 2008 5:51PM

I didn't mean stylized as in this game lacks style, i meant stylized as in they didn't shoot for as much realism, they went for a quasi-cel-shaded look

TGS is turning out just fine for us, i think. No More Heroes 2 and Monster Hunter 3? If you count the media summit in with TGS, we're out ahead.

Haggard (Mr.ESC resurrected on a... thursday?!) @ Oct 9th 2008 6:59PM

Ah sorry, I misunderstood.

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 9:22AM

Ubi was also running a lot of commercials and 2 exclusive previews of Far Cry 2 and Prince of Persia on The Ultimate Fighter last nite. Safe to say they worked, I'm pretty pumped for both games.

ExMcCloud @ Oct 9th 2008 10:53AM

R u buying Far Cry? Cuz I want to but me have no one to MP with...I hate playing with randoms

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 11:12AM

I'm not sure yet since my buddies are undecided about it. If they buy it then I'll probably buy it too. If not then I'm Gameflying it.

Evan @ Oct 9th 2008 9:25AM

$10 million? Capcom spent $20 million advertising Lost Planet. And I don't dare guess what EA is spending to promote Dead Space, backing an entire the animated promotional movie and such. So, $10 million doesn't seem too far out of line.

Mr Khan @ Oct 9th 2008 9:28AM

A pre-rendered trailer of the next Tom Clancy, a mostly real-time runthrough of Far Cry 2, and an overview of Shaun White

The Season Premiere of South Park was rife with them. Went well with their somewhat graphic depictions of Indiana Jones getting raped by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Duke @ Oct 9th 2008 9:37AM

They won't change my apathy for this title. I just haven't enjoyed these kind of games in the past.

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 9:57AM

Some here man. You should check out PURE. Its awesome!

Duke @ Oct 9th 2008 11:16AM

Oh yeah? Maybe I should start gameflying some stuff cause my backlog of games is brutal right now.

I'm playing the force unleashed right now. Worst controls ever!

xFenixKnightx @ Oct 9th 2008 12:04PM

Yeah controls are a little iffy. I'm getting back on that today as well.

Jack of No Trades 85 @ Oct 9th 2008 9:45AM

Kye

"If the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox then why couldn't it be the Wii version?
Not that I thought it was the Wii version, but why coultn't it?"

We have yet to see any games on the Wii look the same as a xbox game besides Super Mario Galaxy and that was a first party game. So im pretty sure Ubisoft won't try to tax the Wii when games with PS1 graphics are selling well on the Wii.

SKI @ Oct 9th 2008 10:12AM

Have you watched any of the videos of The Conduit?

ExMcCloud @ Oct 9th 2008 10:54AM

So you haven't heard of Metroid before? It looks better than some 360 games NO BS

Duke @ Oct 9th 2008 11:18AM

You cant really measure a game to it looking better than some of the 360 games. Every console has low end games where the devs did a sh*t job on them. I could make pong with 3 pixels for the 360 and then you can say the Wii is much much better with graphics. How do you use that as a measure?

Mr Khan @ Oct 9th 2008 11:28AM

It's debatable, i've had people (very recently) argue that Super Mario Galaxy could've been done on GameCube, and there really is no *proof* that it couldn't be

some day, somebody needs to rip Wii ISO's (or just parts of cracked Wii games, since Wii ISO's are bigger than GC games), and then put them on a cracked GC, and see if they can run to any degree of acceptable framerate.

My estimate? Sonic Secret Rings, The Conduit, Brawl, Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy, the upcoming Sonic Black Knight, and the upcoming Monster Hunter 3 are all better than GC could do, and despite what the specs told you GC ~= Xbox (remember, architectural differences meant that Xbox needed that extra power to do roughly what GameCube could do with less)

Jack of No Trades 85 @ Oct 9th 2008 11:38AM

Mr Khan

"The Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and runs a custom operating system which exposes APIs based largely on DirectX 8.1; the API commonality led to a common confusion that the OS was a stripped-down version of the Windows 2000 kernel."

Xbox had better textures and shaders and had a higher output resolution.

"CPU: 32-bit 733 MHz Custom Intel Coppermine-based processor in a Micro-PGA2 package. 180 nm process"

"133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front side bus to GPU.
32 KB L1 cache. 128 KB on-die L2 "Advanced Transfer Cache". "

"4 textures per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing (NV Quincunx, supersampling, multisampling)
Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering"

Similar to the GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 PC GPUs.

"GPU and system chipset: 233 MHz "NV2A" ASIC. Co-developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Geometry engine: 115 million vertices/second, 125 million particles/second (peak)
4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each"

"932 megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines), 1,864 megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units) (peak)
Peak triangle performance (32pixel divided from filrate): 29,125,000 32-pixel triangles/sec raw or w. 2 textures and lit.
485,416 triangles per frame at 60fps
970,833 triangles per frame at 30fps"

"Resolutions: 480i, 576i, 480p, 720p, 1080i"

Gamecube

648 megapixels/second (162 MHz x 4 pipelines), 648 megatexels/second (648 MP x 1 texture units) (peak)
Peak triangle performance: 20,250,000 32pixel triangles/sec raw and with 1 texture and lit
337,500 triangles a frame at 60fps
675,000 triangles a frame at 30fps

8 texture layers per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing[10]
Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
Multi-texturing, bump mapping, reflection mapping, 24-bit z-buffer
24-bit RGB / 32-bit RGBA color depth.

Resolutions: 480i, 576i, 480p

Kye - Me_DF @ Oct 9th 2008 12:21PM

That the developers don't push the systems is not the Wii's fault.

But I wish that they did. So that I may have good looking game that I can happily get repetetive strain injury with.

Mr Khan @ Oct 9th 2008 5:56PM

Yes. On paper, Xbox > GC and Xbox ~= Wii, but in reality, GC ~= Xbox and Wii > Xbox

But Intel architecture is somewhat wasteful if you match it up, spec for spec, against PowerPC architecture. How else would Phantasy Star Online for PC, a game which did not max out the GameCube, require 32 MB of V-RAM on PC? More V-RAM than the GC had (43 combined total RAM, but i forget how it was apportioned)

JoeTheBlow @ Oct 9th 2008 10:26AM

They might want to funnel some of that money to somehow make him not come off as a giant douche.

gh0st @ Oct 9th 2008 3:57PM

Really? I am more jazzed about this game over any other on the horizon. I mean, yah I will get Fable II, but it isn't marked on my calendar.

Saun White is definately on there! Now, I know this is mostly personal opinion, not trying to make a claim of what will be better or what won't.

But, come on! A snowboarding game with Havok and the Assassin's Creed engine? Player stats and gear that affects play? Different kinds of snow and ice (Havok baby!) and appropriate effects on gameplay? Just watching the gameplay and seeing how the camera works, I was like "ok...why was every other developer of a 'follow behind' camera system a masochist bastard who wanted to drive me insane??"

And a real boarder having impact on design. I don't even snowboard, but I *still* pop in Amped 2 every now and then and I really couldn't be more jazzed about this game. Even more than Skate. 2, because I have Skate. for my pavement sessions, it will be nice to have a competant snowboarding game.

gh0st @ Oct 9th 2008 4:03PM

Oh, and on the jaggiez jihad...first, you find me a human eye and brain that can tell the difference between 10K and 20K polys and then MAYBE this will be a meaningful conversation.

Not even going to get all old school here (I remember when 'swaying arms while walking animation' was a technological selling point) and just note...Tetris? Ka-Glom? (I play it on blackberry, but would guess there are other distros out there). Those games, which can suck up years of your life, have 2 shapes and 16 colors and they are still some of the best games ever written.
The whole graphics soapbox needs to die.

...well, maybe. You can almost always pick out the weenie haning out with the gearheads because he is the one all mushy over the decals and rims while not being able to tell you what a carborator does. I take it back, keep up the really meaningful discussion.