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Videogame advertising should be almost impossibly simple: all anyone needs to hear is that it's a videogame, it's fun to play, and…that's it. "Videogames are fun, you should buy this one because look how fun it is!" Nothing more is necessary. But maybe it's because of the utter simplicity needed that marketing for videogames gets so weird – to set your videogame apart, maybe the ad should be a surreal journey into a bizarre, trippy, nonsensical world?

The answer to that question is "no, really you shouldn't do that, that's just confusing", but don't tell the gaming industry that, because they're pretty committed to it. Here are the worst videogame commercials of all-time.

20. Sega CD

You know when you're watching TV and a guy comes on and starts berating you about something and you have an IQ of 35 so you're incapable of speaking other than grunts and…well, relatability is probably not the goal here. The goal is to show how the weird, bad graphics of the Sega CD will cause a wind tunnel in your home and briefly turn you into a skeleton and finally turn you into the Joker. "Sega CD" is a pretty disappointing answer to how he got those scars.

The holiday season is upon us, and everybody knows the best part of the holidays is all the new games. Remember repeatedly seeing the commercials for games you REALLY wanted? It was painful, but it was also kind of great. In a perfect world every commercial made before the year 2000 would be included on this list, as they're all glorious in their own way, but this site isn't made of unlimited space, so we had to opt for 15 instead of 15 thousand.

15.

Before we had Rock Band or Guitar Hero (or any music game for that matter), we had PaRappa the Rapper, the lovable dog who taught us all how to believe. This commercial really helped to convey the consummate weirdness of PaRappa the Rapper to the general public. To this day, people who have never played the game still know about the part where the weird stoner lizard sings about having to pee.

14.

Truthfully, this is a pretty standard commercial for the time period. I mean, I like it, but I don't love it. But what sets this apart from any other commercial of the era is a young Paul Rudd, blown away by the powerful graphics generated by the Super NES. It makes you wish that Paul Rudd would do another commercial for Nintendo today, charming us all by simply talking about Wii Sports Resort or the new Donkey Kong. Now that, I can get into.