Bury the Shovelware: Superman Returns

Posted by Mister-X on August 6th, 2008 at 01:06pm

Filed under: Bury the Shovelware

Opinion leadership. It’s quite a scary concept. When planning the waves of advertisement for a product, marketers will implement what they describe as “opinion leaders”: those who are viewed with respect by the potential market and will help persuade “lower-level consumers” to purchase their product. In other words, we’re too stupid to know what we want and so they’re going to pay someone we think is legitimate to tell us what we like. I wouldn’t dare point fingers, but perhaps you’ve seen this before: a large gaming news source suddenly seems to be hot for a certain upcoming game. (Don’t look at us.)

As discomforting as this sounds, it’s actually a very common and natural occurrence. Certainly we’ve all been persuaded by friends, family, and respectable gaming news sources. Additionally, the influence isn’t restricted towards the positive. Indeed, in the wake of anti-French sentiments and boycotts following France’s denouncement of the Iraq war, French’s Mustard (unrelated to the country) felt the need to release a press statement assuring consumers that “the only thing French about French’s Mustard is the name.” As you can see, unrelated negativity can percolate into that which is only similar in the letters used to identify it.

Superman for the N64 — commonly referred to as Superman 64 — is widely regarded as one of the worst games of all-time. So when I discovered Superman Returns for the DS floating around the very bottom of the system’s metascores, I was truly puzzled. “Could they really have messed up Superman this bad twice?” Read on to find out.

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