One of the my favorite games this year is Far Cry 2. Unfortunately, it's published by Ubisoft, who's never met an ingame ad they didn't like. I'm a bit worried what's going to become of all the billboards strewn around the game's unspecificed African country. So I just ran a spot check of a few locations.

Above is the best-case scenario of an ingame ad (pardon my grainy digital photography). Seko Pilsner Beer isn't a real product, but you'd never know. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you'd see advertised outside a small African town. It looks suitably non-flashy and even the ad copy -- "When nothing less than the best will do!" -- sounds entirely plausible and not terribly polished. This is exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the billboards in Far Cry 2.

I have no idea what this one is supposed to be.

A chemical company? Bio research? Frog wallpaper? It sounds vaguely Dutch, which is therefore vaguely Afrikaner, which is entirely appropriate. It is faded, obscure, and irrelevant. Thumbs up.

Then there's this one, which is actually a worst-case example of a fictional ad.

Quickie's great fast food? Okay, I can maybe accept that a Third World country ravaged by war and disease, almost all but abandoned by its civilian populace, is the location of a fast food chain selling burgers. But for ninety nine cents? What country is this again? Nice work, Ubisoft. All that cool stuff in the game about blood diamonds as a unit of currency and this slips under the radar? Might as well have made everything cost "space bucks".

Here's the most alarming type of ingame ad. I found it when I hosted an empty multiplayer server so I could have a look around without being gunned down.

That big fat blank space all but says "please stand by until we can sell this to someone". In fact, I wasn't sure if it was blank simply because my server was set up as for a private friends-only game. So I went into a ranked public server and found this, smack dab in the middle of the map, carefully situated in a high traffic area at the center of the three capture points.

EndWar is Ubisoft's recent real time strategy game. Now that's a global release strategy! Fortunately, at this point, it looks like Ubisoft's only putting ads in the multiplayer games. The moment I see that junk in the single player game is the moment that Ubisoft clumsily unravels the developer's superlative work creating a gorgeous and believable world. If they want to drop ingame ads into Rainbow Six: Vegas, they can be my guest. I've been to Vegas and I'd expect nothing less. But I've also been to Africa, and I didn't see a single ad for Axe, Dell, Endwar, or 99 cent hamburgers.

Now who wants to go grab a Seko with me? I'm buying.