Yeah I believe that the Smash Bros commercial was the best videogame commercial ever made, I remember the first time I saw it on MTV, I laughed so hard!

Just about every game commercial ever made. As a rule, they're atrocious.

At some point 15 years ago, somebody decided that games weren't "cool" enough to stand on their own in ads, so the "gimmick ad" was born: basically, it's 25 seconds of live action footage showing some really bad joke or artsy scenario that vaguely relates to the game, then 3 seconds of game footage, then 2 seconds of logos. And even now, when games have reached a storytelling and visual level where there should be no question that they can be the focus of the ad, we're still stuck with this crap 80% of the time.

Can you imagine if they advertised movies this way? Never actually show any footage from it, and instead show a bunch of doofuses reenacting a scene from it or have a guy in a mascot outfit describe it to us?

Sony has to deserve a lifetime achievement award for Ads that Pissed Me Off. It's difficult to pick the worst one... the "woman on a toilet" ad in Europe was pretty awful, but on the other hand, once the whole 5 minute ad was released it wasn't that bad as a sort of indie film... it just didn't have the slightest chance of making anyone buy a PS3. The white room ads were inarguably godawful, of course... But I think the very worst has to be the talking squirrel/rat/whatever PSP ads. Nothing, nothing could top those pieces of utter crap.

The last really good game ad I remember seeing was for Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles on GC. Basically, it was just the theme song to the game (the actual theme song, not some pop piece the marketers decided would be better) played over footage of the game for 30 seconds. Simple and refreshing.

I couldn't find an upload of it on youtube though. Ironically, all I could find was this one, a perfect example of the lame gimmick ads I was just complaining about:

Damn your analisys couldn't be more accurate, I hate those commercials too, full of non-game footage and almost no gameplay, and the worst is that people actually buy games from cool commercials even if they don't have gameplay footage at all. I think there would be no other way the army men series could have survived for so long...

100% correct. 

Game ads are by far the most divergent from the product they are trying to sell out of ANY industry.  Even in the cavemen commercials, they MENTION insurance throughout the commercial.  You SEE people eating a snickers in the commercials.

As a callback to my previous post about Halo 3, I never once saw a second of gameplay footage in a single one of the ads for that game.

agreed that smash had the best--the one that ticked me off happened last night

Assi Creed came one and never mentioned that it was on other systems..JUST THE PS3--that ticked me off

This has been really common as of late. Two off the top of my head that I can think of are The Simpsons Game, and Tony Hawk's proving grounds. Both made mention only of the PS3 titles. Regardless of the console being touted, it is most certainly the result of hardware manufacturers stepping in with cash to advertise for only their console. No multi-platform developer in their right mind would shoot themselves in the foot with sales potential with out some sort of monetary compensation, or due to some contractual obligation penned in to the licensing agreement. That said, I would think it would be the latter, as I don't think Sony would sink a bunch of cash for exclusive advertising for the two aforementioned titles...

The third place. Do i need to say more.

About advertising multiplatform game on a single platform, it also depends on that do different console version have different importers/publishers. If they do, importer/publisher propably advertise only the version it have imported/published.
Of course, if console manufacturer pays for advertising on their console, it's a differen case then. For example if i recall, NHL07 was advertised by the "skill stick" feature. "NHL07. New skill stick -only on Xbox 360". Although "only on 360" was meaning the skill stick, it still gave you an image, that the game was 360 exclusive.