Mercenaries 2 Free Petrol Stunt Buys EA Acres of Coverage for £20,000

Electronic Arts have brought the computer game 'Mercenaries 2:World in Flames' to the attention of a lot more people than they might have anticipated courtesy of a relatively cheap PR stunt in North London.

EA offered up to £40 worth of free petrol to 500 customers at the Last Stop garage in Finsbury Park, causing traffic chaos as commuters queued to take advantage of the offer, designed to emulate Venezuela, the game's setting, where fuel is used as a currency.

Police ordered the garage, whose staff were dressed in camouflage gear, to stop giving away petrol in order to pacify angry drivers and ease the congestion. They had managed to give away around £11,000 worth.

While there are obvious drawbacks to something like this, it has already appeared on a number of newspaper websites and blogs, and generated positive feeling among those who were successful in securing free fuel, while drawing typical scorn from a local MP. The company themselves have apologised for any inconvenience, but will privately be rubbing their hands at coverage for the game reaching further and wider than they could have hoped otherwise.

Here's some video footage of the carnage courtsey of the Telegraph.



UPDATE: And of course while I was bashing together my opinions on this, so war Nick Burcher, along with an improbably long photo of the snaking traffic.

Alfonso Ribeiro's Breakin' and Poppin'

Better known as Carlton Banks from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, here's a young (and amazingly moustache-less) Alfonso Ribeiro flogging his book, record and dance mat combination pack for the princely sum of 'under 20 bucks'. I want one.



Another reason to revisit the Reverse Bel Air, methinks.

Football Manager 2009 - It's the future!

I went to the launch do for Football Manager 2009 last night, the latest in the series of games that ruined your degree/relationship/life. It was at Kick in Shoreditch, an excellent venue which allowed for copious hogging of the table football (and a double defeat of the French. Superb).

I'm not going to post a review of Football Manager 2009, largely because it's not finished yet, but Miles Jacobson, the man behind the franchise, showed us a video of some of the features and then took a Q&A.

A lot of the content from the film is in this You Tube video that's also on the official Football Manager 2009 site:



The main new feature to talk about is the 3D match engine, which is based directly on the motion capture technology used in Virtua Striker, thanks to Sports Interactive's link-up with Sega. It looks really good already, and Jacobson was keen to stress it's about 40% of the way to being finished. Oh, and there are now 350,000 players in the database. More for Gary Megson to try and sign for Bolton then!

I'd also recommend, partly because it features my good friend, the Evening Standard's James Olley, checking out their series of podcasts, which will be a source of news for more of the myriad new features for the game.

Beat The Credit Crunch...

...with this natty T-Shirt by Guy Moorhouse



It's available from Airside for a reasonable price. Kudos again to It's Nice That for being a generally funky-ass site.

RocknRolla - A Return to Form

I've been a busy boy the last few days so haven't had time to update the blog. Last week I was fortunate enough to get a preview ticket for the latest Guy Ritchie film, RocknRolla, which I was cautiously excited about.

As you can see from the trailer below, it's pretty standard Ritchie fare, by which I mean the Guy Ritchie who did Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, not the one who did that other dross since. What do you mean it's the same guy?

Anyway I would suggest that if you liked his old stuff, and haven't been put off by the rest, this is definitely worth a look. It's pretty stylish, Tom Wilkinson is excellent among several others and, above all, it's got that charm and humour about it that makes a good British gangster flick.