I picked up a couple of old The Uncanny X-Men comics the other day and couldn't help but appreciate the ambiguous video-game ads in them. Apparently, the marketing departments of Capcom, Ultra, and Arcadia in the late 1980s and early 1990s didn't find it terribly important to include actual screenshots of the titles they were promoting in their spreads. But after looking at the following pages, could you blame them?

Ultra Games: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Defender of the Crown, and Skate or Die

I'm impressed that Ultra managed to plug several of their upcoming projects  -- "three of the most thrilling games of all time" --  in one page. Each one gets a whole sentence to describe it. Are you sold yet? Well, consider that it's 1988, and these guys are making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game; that's all you need to know, dude. My favorite part is for more info, you could send them your name, age, and address, and presumably they'd mail you some promos...or hook you up with a creepy pedophile pen pal.

Capcom: Gun Smoke

Who's that cowboy? Who cares? He appears to have just ruthlessly murdered someone in a shoot-out, and that's cool. Can't you just imagine how sweet it must look in 8-bits on your Nintendo Entertainment System? If you can't, the ad encourages you to picture something like the "dazzling graphics" of Commando, 1942, Mega Man, and Ghosts and Goblins. At least I think that's what that fragmented sentence is suggesting. Now I want to incorporate "dazzling" into my lexicon.

Arcadia: Silver Surfer

Arcadia must have figured that you're already a diehard Marvel fan if you're reading an issue of X-Men, so pushing Silver Surfer for the NES would be easier than shooting Sentinels in a -- err, giant-sized barrel. Then again, if you were one of those kids who just looked at the pictures, you might not have understood right away that this was an ad for a video game...or you might have thought it was named "Intense!" If you take the time to read it, however, you will find some gems to help spice up your gamer vocabulary. In particular, "With 12 levels of outrageous game play, amazing graphics, music, and radical sound effects, it's the hottest game in the galaxy!" Priceless.