If Wednesday's ad filled me with rage, this one makes me a little sad. Not because it makes an appeal to male gamers' baser instincts; that is a hallowed tradition of game advertising. Rather, it's sad because the games on this page look pretty good, and the developers must have been horrified to see what the geniuses down in marketing came up with. Instead of turning the games into objects of desire, the screenshots on this two-page spread say, "Hey, sexually frustrated pubescent boys! The Sega Saturn will prevent you from seeing naked chicks. SEGA!" The Saturn was already struggling, and this feels like the ad folks were turning the knife.

This ad came from the June 1996 issue of GamePro. No joke: The page on the flip side of the ad features a story about PlayStation sales topping 1,000,000 units while the Saturn, despite being out four months longer, had barely eked out 500,000. The writing was on the wall. When I saw that, I got the same pit in my stomach that I got at this year's Nintendo GDC keynote -- when Iwata showed that Nintendo had sold almost as many Wii Balance Boards as Sony had PS3s. This can be a brutal business.

By the way, not to strut or anything, but this centerfold required my most careful slicing yet with the Official Crispy Gamer Retro Game Ad Exacto Knife. You'll see I did particularly close work on the fleshy portion of the spread. The poor girl had already been airbrushed within an inch of her life. I didn't want to add to her misery.

Check out more great retro game ads.