Dec/13/2001

Lord only knows how they got Ben Folds to star in this one.

In reassuring news today, it has been revealed that the rushed and all around lame Save Your Hands Nintendo GameCube commercials, airing alongside what has become known as "the decent ones" in the US are in fact made by the molten evil known as Microsoft.

Gamers were confused when the Save Your Hands ads started airing (with their poor quality and apparent low budget) with the actual ones made by Nintendo (with their decent budgets and production values).

The fraud was exposed when Nintendo of America's Peter Main noticed one of the ads on TV one night.

"I was like, 'what that hell's going on? That's not one of ours?!', and I called the head of advertising to find out what was going on", Main said.

But no one there knew where, or for that matter who had made the ads.

"Sure, it was free advertising, but it was lame free advertising. It was a real mystery." continued Main.

"That was until, while analysing the ads, we noticed what could only be described as subliminal messages, hidden in the frame just after the 'Save Your hands' text of each commercial!"

Below we have the last three seconds of one of the commercials with the offending frame slowed down for easier viewing.

As you can see, it seems that each ad has been edited together to read "Save Your Hands, For the Xbox that is!" Nice try, but there's no proof that subliminal advertising works anyway.

Having been caught out, Microsoft came clean on everything and released this statement:

Microsoft and all associated with the Xbox are regretful about the fake GameCube ads, and are very upset with our marketing departments, and I mean extremely! And the fact that Nintendo think we did it just to increase sales, well that just pisses us off. Now this wasn't done because the Xbox is a sizable piece of crap that we would have trouble selling even if we gave them all to the $2 Dollar Shop.

We have nothing against Nintendo or the GameCube and are sorry this has happened. Understandably, we don't want this to affect the Xboxes good name.

Well, er, that seems like a very sincere apology, and I think that Microsoft have simply been misunderstood all this time. I can't even think at this very moment, um, what it was that I didn't like about them. I might even look into getting an Xbox. Hey, how's "UnReal Microsoft News" sound to you?

-Blake