I like to see the video game industry accumulate more and more street cred as a viable and effective advertising medium. Ad dollars mean better games, at least in theory. The problem is, bonehead moves like the “Yaris” game set the industry back with every avoidable failure. The Yaris game on Xbox Live Marketplace could have been cool, were it not for one tiny, but important, oversight on the part of its creators.

For those that have zero idea what the hell I’m talking about, Yaris (pronounced “hit-anything-bigger-than-a-squirrel-and-disentegrate”) is a type of car. A very, very, very small car, made by Toyota. The wheels on these things are smaller than a list of Shadowrun maps. If there were ever a product that needed a massive injection of coolness, it’s the Yaris. What better way to make your little tiny car cool, than by creating a video game, and casting the miniature motorcar in a starring role, right?

With an Xbox Live Arcade title, I give the the game about 1 minute before I make up my mind about it. Sounds kinda crappy, but keep in mind that I usually just check these games out on the way to play my AAA games. With the exception of Feeding Frenzy (bought it for my son to play…. I swear) I am pretty picky about where I spend my MS points. RoboBlitz, Worms, Catan… they made the cut. PacMan almost made it… But I think there was a R6:Vegas expansion at the time that I wanted to buy.

So, like I was saying, I enjoy pretending I am the busy executive in charge of a major company, and that a greenhorn ad exec is pitching me on their big marketing idea. “Alright kid you got 1 minute! Don’t waste my time.”

Here’s how it went down:

Imagine this… You’re headed down this perpetual halfpipe, driving a car the size of a labrador retriever, armed to the teeth. Aliens are flying in behind you, preparing to use their infamous “Sneak up from behind and then get in a straight line in FRONT of the dude with the guns” tactic. Let the blasting begin, right? ‘Fraid not.

All of the sudden my crosshairs are pointed straight up at the sky, and I feel like something is horribly wrong. But then I’m like, “Oh yeah I forgot to invert the Y axis.” I hit Start and scanned the relatively short list of options, and found the CONTROLS panel. Wait, that’s just a picture of a controller that tells me what buttons do what. “Surely, I am missing something,” I said to myself. “This is just like that time I went fishing with the deaf guy, and I thought he was being rude.”

I swear to God I tore that game apart looking for the “Invert Y-Axis” setting. I mean, what developer, that doesn’t operate out of an ice cream truck, would forget that all shooters offer gamers the chance to invert the Y-axis. It’s just a rule. Everybody knows that…

“Aww don’t sweat it,” I told myself. “Just play it this way.”

I spent a couple of fruitless minutes trying to shoot aliens, and succeeded in hitting two… out of hundreds. It was like a bad dream. I wanted to rip my hands off and throw them off a bridge or something. It was pure hell. Sounds a bit exaggerated, I know, but if Jesus comes to me tonight and tells me that my own personal hell is going to consist of playing this damned game for all eternity, then tomorrow morning I’m handing the keys to the website over to Lono and Dave, and heading for Seminary.

Forgetting to offer an inverted Y axis, is like forgetting to get dressed in the morning. The Yaris game showed up naked to work!

I quit the game, and immediately deleted it. I don’t even need that storage space, but I wanted the game OFF of my hard drive. It made me THAT mad. This is my gaming equivalent of leaving a penny tip at the Waffle House.

My goal here isn’t to bash Yaris. I am sure their itsy, bitsy cars are just incredible on the highway with a stiff tailwind. It’s to bash companies in general for getting into things that they don’t understand. For not asking enough questions. For not knowing enough about the medium to even know what questions to ask.

It’s bonehead mistakes like this that jeopardize the trust of companies brave enough to try something like a custom video game. Instead of being associated with a fun little shooter about a fun little car, the Yaris will now be remembered by a significant number of gamers (roughly equal to the percentage of gamers that play shooters with their Y axis inverted) as that stupid little car that you drove in that annoying and unplayable advergame. I’m no marketing genius, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what the folks at Yaris Headquarters (it’s a TINY little building in Rhode Island) were going for here.

The developers they hired to make this game ought to have their gamer cards pulled for this. I hate to use this word, but it’s just stupid. Even free games should (A) be playable, and (B) include the BASIC options native to literally every offering in the genre.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. My first impression of Yaris was quite frustrating. I suspect that, in the end, it will be a mutual feeling. Too bad. We could have been something.

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