Spotted this in Borders at the weekend en route to the new Bond movie (omg that MI6 database UI. What were they thinking).
They even give you a free MAGIC TUBE to vomit into when you've shelled out your thirty pounds for it!
It's amusing googling for Imagine Dream Weddings Review. Gamespot and Eurogamer - while listed as search results - haven't bothered uploading any data on the title (hardly their userbase, is it). Four reviews on Amazon.com, which can be summed up as, "wow, it's rubbish!". Ho hum.
Still, a magic tube. I've always wanted one of those. I think.
It may be a silly question, but what is a "magic tube"?
Posted by: Cinabar | November 24, 2008 at 18:27
Is it just me, or should Google start *heavily* punishing sites like those two, that routinely have zero content (literally) but leverage their domain-level hits to plaster the word "review" all over their page and destory the google results?
The bit that really irritates me is the way that they often outright lie to search engines in the description field, so that on Google you see e.g. "Great review of [game]" or "Full walkthrough + tips for [game]" ... when the *actual* page you jump to has a title like "No reviews for [game]", or "Add your own walkthrough for [game] now".
They're highly predictable (it's the usual suspects every time), to the extent that I've considered making custom filters to remove all results from IGN, gamespot, et al - even though those sites often have good content - simply because they make search unusable in the rest of cases.
...or, as I said, maybe it's Just Me :).
Posted by: adam | November 24, 2008 at 18:27
EG should give those Imagine games to Ellie to review. She would love them I'm sure.
Posted by: Mr Tom | November 24, 2008 at 18:38
What, it's not "Imagine: Dream Weddingz"?
I think the Imagine series is moving up in the world.
Posted by: chesh | November 24, 2008 at 21:15
The sad thing is I probably would have bought a game like that if they had girls games when I was a kid. Thank goodness they didn't and I got to play SimCity and commander keen instead.
Posted by: Helen | November 25, 2008 at 09:30
@adam: Hardly the worst offenders in trying to game google search algos, but yes, annoying. Google will figure it out at some point.
@alice: 'magic tube' in this context sounds like some kind of euphemism. I think they ship those with some of the Japanese, er, 'toon' games.
Posted by: Kim Pallister | November 25, 2008 at 17:54
On closer examination of the photo, the "magic tube" is one of these:
http://www.play.com/Games/DS/4-/7523872/DS-Lite-Magic-Tube-Case-Peach-Yoshi/Product.html
Posted by: Mr Tom | November 25, 2008 at 20:55