I don’t know what’s worse – Zumba Fitness holding #1 for the sixth week in a row, or Call of Juarez: The Cartel – which currently has a Metacritic score of 51% – taking #2 in the top 40 UK chart. The distinctly average Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2 is up from #7 to #3 too, making this one of the more depressing charts to grace us recently.
But it’s not all bad – Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon makes a not too shabby #15 placing. Dungeon Siege III makes the top 10 again too rising from #11 to #6. GAME were selling this for £11.98 on their website last week – a ridiculous price for a new game that’s only been out for about a month. Reviews were alright as well.
Last week’s movie tie-in, Cars 2, has managed to do a whole lot better than Sega’s Captain America. The Captain still hasn’t managed to break the top 40 while Cars 2 skids in at #8 in the all format chart and races in at #6 in both the Wii and DS charts.
I know nothing about The Cartel other than it’s been advertised so heavily on TV of late that even I’ve seen it.
Which can’t be a good thing – Advertising is needed, I admit; but when something is overly advertised it make me wonder how much of that advertising budget could have gone towards the development of a game to make it the best it could be. But then, as the charts show, this technique obviously works because people are sheep that will just rush out in droves to buy whatever game will keep the kids quite over the summer holidays.
(Same goes for ISP’s like Talktalk and Sky spending silly money on advertising to get more users rather than improving their network for their existing ones.)
I’m still impatiently drumming my fingers, awaiting the postman and my copy of EDF. I didn’t see that advertised anywhere, I rarely buy brand-new games and still bought that rather than The Cartel. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Advertiser.
The Captain America movie isn’t out in the UK until the end of this week – wonder of the game will get a sales boost once that’s out?
The Cartel is by the people developing Dead Island which they have high hopes for. I think they rushed it out so they could turn their attention to that.
No doubt Captain America will chart higher next week, although it’s not hard to imagine people will avoid it as Sega’s last few Marvel games have been crud.