Argh! My Life Points!
I've just caught an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh!, one of the current batch of lazily-animated Japanese tie-in cartoons, designed to sell things. In this case, it's a collectable card game, but the brilliant thing is that the cartoon seems to be entirely about people playing the card game. Now I know that Pokemon involved people involving engaging in the same sort of things that characters in the game do, Yu-Gi-Oh actually centres around two people standing around in little pods, drawing cards from a deck, and taking turns. They shout card names at each other, speak sotto voce to camera to explain their tactics, and wax lyrical about the rules for minutes at a time. Sheer genius, from a marketing point of view, at least.