We've been a little remiss in our coverage of advertising games of late, and I'm going to try to correct that over the coming weeks. Let's start with Microsoft Live Derby 2007, a browser game agency EVB created for Microsoft to promote the latter's Google Maps competitor, Live Search Maps.

Map mash-ups have been all the rage for a while now, but this is a pretty involved version of the concept. I'd characterize the game is a vaguely wacky combination of Rally X and Pac-Man (two arcade games that shared the same hardware, as it happens). The player chooses one of five cities and drives around a small area collecting pellets on the streets and visiting specific businesses marked on the map.

In the section on advertising in Persuasive Games, I suggest that games can simulate the features and functions of products and services. When I first started playing, I thought that's what Microsoft Live Derby was doing -- taking the maps application and creating arbitrary goal-based paths through it. But it seems to bear no resemblance to the actual Live Search Maps service at all. That service just looks and works like any old web-based map. That's too bad, because it makes the game just another web-based promotion -- except the actual service is less appealing than the advertising. It's rather amusing too, because you'd think that using a web game to explain how a website works would be a pretty easy charge.

(via Adverblog)