"Zone of the Enders", PlayStation 2, 2001.

And now, an ad for a game whose most critical sales point was the fact that it came bundled with a demo for the latest member of a far more popular and hotly-anticipated series.

with ultimate power
comes ultimate consequences

TACTICAL ESPIONAGE ACTION
METAL GEAR SOLID 2
SONS OF LIBERTY
TRIAL EDITION
PLAYABLE DEMO INCLUDED

"Certainly one of the most exciting games we've ever seen, and it plays like an absolute dream."
Official PlayStation magazine
Control system is intuitive and easy to use in a 3D environment
Your decisions during combat affect the outcome of the story
Versus Mode for heated, 2-player battles

The controls of a fully-armed, giant, mechanized, prototype robot are in your hands. So is the fate of your entire space colony. Life and death decisions aren't easy -- but when the time comes, you'll know what to do.

Immersive story follows characters as they examine the meaning of life and death.
Computer AI reacts to and learns from your actions, helping you minimise civilian casualties.
Combat system allows both close-quarter weapon attacks and long-range laser attacks.
Fast-paced battle sequences with multiple enemies in full 3D environments.
Missions change when re-played.

The game's headline seems derivative of Spider-Man's core axiom ("with great power comes great responsibility", which is appropriate for an ad running in a comic book. If you want to connect with them, you need to understand how they talk!
Personally, I've heard enough about the 3D environments -- presumably this was to distinguish the game from other launch games which, while technically in 3D, may not have done much with the perspective?
I was never able to pass the first boss, but maybe that last point ("missions change when re-played") should have inspired me to try again. That means I don't have much from personal experience to report regarding this title, but I can tell you now that I will buy any game that successfully delivers on this game's promise of Immersive story follows characters as they examine the meaning of life and death.

"Buck Rogers XXVc: Countdown to Doomsday", 1990.

My understanding is that this is a relic from a dark time in the RPG business, when a tiny seed of uncertain rot planted at the very founding of TSR, before anyone thought D&D had any commercial promise, germinated into a full-blown attempt by a hostile outside interest (in this case, the estate of the creator of Buck Rogers or "The Dille Family Trust") to refigure the thriving business into a house organ for an unrelated and somewhat basically incompatible outside intellectual property... or at least to divert and misallocate funds from the business to the estate until the business was spent, exhausted and deflated. Quick, while Gygax is distracted in Hollywood making Saturday morning cartoons!

Spectacular Inter-Galactic Battles

Blast into the future for hours of adventure.

Join Buck Rogers and the New Earth Organization in the exciting 25th Century, and play the BUCK ROGERS XXVc Role-Playing Game and Countdown To Doomsday, the new computer role-playing game.
The XXVc role-playing game is packed with adventure, fantastic civilizations, genetically-engineered races, and future-science technology. This game contains action-packed adventures sure to thrill science-fiction fans and game players alike.
The computer game thrusts you into a race to save humanity from the enemies of the inner planets. Players must follow clues across the solar system, through the space ways, and to the surfaces of Mars, Venus, and the orbiting satellites of Mercury to discover the awesome DOOMSDAY Device.
Earth's future is in your hands! Look for these games at book, computer, hobby and comic stores everywhere.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I suspect that any product sold at book, computer, hobby AND comic stores is unlikely to satisfy any of their regular patrons.
You can't see it here (an absence of screenshots always a conspicuous omission), but playing the Buck Rogers CRPG on SSI's venerable Gold Box engine was a really jarring experience: some might disagree (eg. Bioware, Raven) but you can't just re-skin a fantasy game engine as sci-fi (or vice versa) without knocking some people for a loop. The engine was getting long in the tooth by this point (it had been quite some time since it launched with Pool of Radiance) but by all accounts this fundamentally misguided product was nonetheless a solid, workmanlike effort.

"Bonk's Adventure", TurboGrafx-16, 1990.

And a glorious return to minicomic video game ads within comic books! This time, TurboGrafix-16 (or rather its Japanese model, the PC Engine -- hence his punny Japanese name, "PC Genjin") mascot (barring Johnny Turbo) B0nk the caveman in his debut console romp, Bonk's Adventure:

B0NK'S ADVENTURE
A LONG, LONG TIME AGO, LATER THAN YOU THINK AND SOONER THAN YOU KNOW, THERE WAS A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE KINGDOM...

"HELP! BONK! SAVE ME!"
TREE: "I WOULDN'T WANT TO BE IN KING DROOL'S SHOES ONCE BONK BONKS HIS WAY TO HIM!"

DROOL: "BONK... HAH! THAT CRUDE CAVEBOY WILL NEVER MAKE HIS WAY HERE... I'VE SEEN TO IT! YOU'RE MINE, PRINCESS!"
PRINCESS ZA: "YOU MUST BE JOKING! NOTHING CAN STOP BONK!"

BONK: "SHE'S NOT TALKING THROUGH HER CROWN, EITHER! BRICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES... -- BUT NOT WHEN I BONK 'EM WITH MY HEAD!"

TREES: "WOW! THAT'S... REALLY USING YOUR HEAD!" [B0NK!]

BONK: "WOAH! I WASN'T COUNTING ON YOU SHOWING UP!"
DINO: "I'M COUNTING THE PAY DROOL GAVE ME TO STOP YOU! I'M WORKING FOR HIM NOW!"
FLOWER: "BONK, OVER HERE!"

[ROARRRRR] BONK: I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH POWER YET FOR A HEAD-ON COLLISION WITH YOU... BUT I WILL WHEN I PICK THIS FLOWER..."

BONK: "... AND CHARGE UP WITH MEAT AND OTHER GOOD THINGS AND -- [WHOOSH!] ... GO NUCLEAR!"

BONK: "YIKE! THE TERRIBLE T. RACTORHEAD! IT'S ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER IN THIS PLACE!"

BONK: "TO BONK HIM, I'LL NEED ANOTHER FLOWER FOR TWICE THE POWER!"

BONK: "OOOPS! A VENUS BONKTRAP! I'M STUCK!" [CHOMP!]

PRINCESS: "I'M DOOMED... UNLESS YOU SAVE BONK SO HE CAN RESCUE ME... IN THE ALL-NEW TURBO-GRAFX 16 BONK'S ADVENTURE"

This ad ran, among other places, in Todd McFarlane's crack at Amazing Spider-Man #1 -- at its time the best-selling single comic book issue of all time, before he jumped ship to Image. You've certainly seen the cover artwork of the first issue of his Torment storyline. In any case, I imagine it ensured that this ad got seen by a lot of kids -- but even they weren't enough for the TurboGrafx-16 to be a viable platform on this side of the water.

A caveman protagonist was rarely enough on its own to float a game; by this sophisticated era they also needed to ride skateboards, a la Encino Man (or more to the point, Wonder Boy rebranded as Master Higgins). Eventually we got Caveman Ninjas and, well, then the whole thing started to fall apart. Though NEC never got a better mascot than Bonk together, the shine fell off his tenure when his debut game appeared on the NES -- a mercenary move, Hudson!

A blogger with less restraint than I might not have been able to avoid a joke in that "twice the power" panel. Me, I like how several times over the course of this strip, Bonk appears to be an angry baby.

"Atmosfear: The Harbingers", VCR/board game, 1995.

Not much to say here: again, something like this wasn't considered a video game even though video games incorporating full-motion video had been around since Dragon's Lair hit the arcades in the early '80s, home FMV-game systems had been designed to encroach upon living rooms everywhere (see the ill-fated NEMO and its games Night Trap and Sewer Shark, later repurposed for the Sega CD), and of course once the CD-ROM format came about crappy video was actually all you needed to stink up a disc and call it a game. This gets an extra nail in its coffin due to the necessary use of game board and tokens in order to track player progress and game state -- something that, again, wasn't unheard of in the early home consoles and which we'd seen as recently as Infocom's Suspended in 1983. OK, this was over a decade later, but for years between the two computer games would direct players to consult entry number 224 in the game journal included with the package just to save disk space for text. Clearly all the elements were on the table but they weren't yet all unified in a single presentation!

ATMOSFEAR
'The Harbingers'

The sound, the nighmare, the game.

ATMOSFEAR
Experience the game

What I want to know is how are you supposed to frighten people when your company is named "A Couple A Cowboys"?

"Alien vs. Predator", SNES, 1993.

This is just about the only video game advertisement I ever saw in the pages of a Dark Horse comic book (which would typically only advertise -- other DH comics!), and for obvious reasons -- it's an extension of a mash-up first explored (in any depth) in their pages.

THE BATTLE TO SURVIVE

JUST GOT UGLY

Two titans of terror are about to square off in the more fearsome fighting the galaxy has ever seen!
As a Predator Warrior, you'll battle dozens of deadly, double-jawed Alien beasts bent on your annihilation. But you're ready. A cloaking device makes you instantly invisible. You're armed to the teeth with spears, lasers, wristblades and killer kickboxing maneuvers - Weapons you'll need to survive ten treacherous levels of claw-to-claw combat.
Overcome swarms of Alien drones, warriors, chestbursters, face-huggers and you still face your ultimate challenge: a monstrous battle with the Alien Queen! Alien vs Predator, now face to hideous face on the SNES, Game Boy and MS-DOS from Activision.

Activision may have overextended itself somewhat here; I can find no record of an MS-DOS port of this game existing (concurrent development for both platforms would have been rather unusual), while the Game Boy "version" is a separate but related game subtitled "The Last of his Clan". But the cover artwork is so good it was used for both games (and the ad for that matter: save your money, here's a picture of the box in which we sell the game! Plus -- some gooey Alien fluids.)
I love the Predator's claws, and this is the reason why -- in the later, PC AVP game, the Predator is able to use its forearm computer in order to switch weapons systems and even activate a mutually-assured-destruction tactical mini-nuke. You see it raise the keyboard before the player's "face" and type keystrokes in on the keys. And because the Predator has long claws emerging from its fingers, it is unable to type as a normal person would, on fingertips, but instead is consigned to a kind of typing on the fleshy finger pads similarly to the way a receptionist would if she had gone overboard on the fingernail extensions. Because Predator Warriors and Glam Receptionists would typically be located at such polar opposites of most spectrums, it's neat to find that here it just ticks over and they meet. On that later game I also wrote a piece on the Alien's "mouth-cam", years ago. And... well, I would say to what extent I digress, but surely you must expect that by now.

"Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles" LCD game, 1989.

Do you consider these things to be video games? Of course not! But Konami sure did, after dropping a mint for use of the TMNT license and helping Kevin Eastman buy Heavy Metal. I mean obviously not -- you could play Pong on these things, and I had one that doubled as a digital watch that turned into a Transformer knock-off! But here you are: Konami even uses the phrase "video game" to describe them. And heck, Nintendo would agree, with its early Game & Watch hand-held LCD games: even if the technology is old or "cheap", if you can have fun with it, it's worth employing. (For further kicks, dig the "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" ideology.)

But let's be frank -- these aren't actually as fun as virtually all competent console games. But at least a bad LCD game tended to cost quite a bit less than a bad console game.

THE NEXT TIME YOU'RE BORED,
TWIDDLE YOUR THUMBS.

Pop your knuckles and fire up your fingers, because Konami's coming at you with six awesome new hand held video games.

Based on your favorite arcade and home video hits, these boredom busters are packed with action.

And they're portable, so you can slam dunk a basketball in the car, take the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles out to lunch, or launch a heat seeking missile from Grandma's condo.

Licensed titles available in this little series appear to include not just TMNT but Gradius, Super C, Double Dribble, Top Gun and ... well heck, they actually appear to have made quite a lot of these. I guess there was money in it -- they were Tiger Electronics' bread and butter for gawd knows how long, at least until the Furby came along.

In conclusion -- video games? Well, maybe, maybe not -- but as far as their ads in comics books are concerned, they sure were marketed as video games!

"Tomba", 1997, PlayStation.

Of course, screenshots can be overrated. This one bold panel tells you all you need to know about this game: jungle boy fights pigs. Stop, stop -- you had me at "jungle".

BACON ISN'T JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE.

Evil pigs. Hidden paths. Enchanting worlds. And man-eating plants. Can you believe what Tomba has to go through to conquer the evil swine? Fortunately he's got a bunch of weapons and a ton of spunk. Tomba's here. And it's the first wild action game with role-playing adventure mixed in, too. (You'll love Tomba even more than a BLT on rye.)

The first role-playing adventure action game, you say? If you add a couple more crayons to that rainbow, it all comes out brown. I'll have to take their word for it that this game is enchanting and wild, but after making two pork jokes, they seem trustworthy enough.