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"Even the real Superman couldn't stomach this game for more than five minutes"

You know Superman, right? No, I don't mean personally, I mean you've heard of him. You have? Good. You know he's supposed to be some kind of Superhuman guy who's stronger than anyone else in the world and stuff, right? Why am I asking this? Surely everybody in the WORLD knows who Superman is, right? Well, not quite. It seems there are seven babies somewhere who've never heard of Superman, and they all got together and made a game for the N64. And then they charged $60.00 for it. And then people bought it. Please, if you don't own this game DO NOT GET IT!!!
Gameplay: 2/10

Okay, the game starts off with a lazily done cutscene where Superman's friends are standing in front of a portal into a virtual Metropolis and then disappear. Instead of just accepting it and moving on like any normal person does when all of their friends are sucked into a virtual universe, you've got to go in after them. You do, and Lex Luthor tells you that if you want to save your friends you need to find your way through his maze. Okay, cool. Oh wait, it's not? No, it isn't, because Lex Luthor's idea of a "maze" is a bunch of rings floating all over. Okay, the mission starts, and I see a blocky deformed bunch of polygons that look like a cheap dollar-store knockoff action figure (apparently Tidus wants me to believe he's Superman) flying through a city filled with fog (Or it could be the fumes from whatever the programmers were smoking when they churned out this masterpiece, I'm not sure...) I start sending the Not so Super man through the rings, and realize I'm being TIMED! THERE'S A TIME LIMIT?? Yes, sometime during the 23 minutes that Tidus took to program this game someone must have said "Yeah, flying a drunken mutated college kid dressed up like superman through an endless stream of rings is fun and all, but to make this game REALLY great we need to make sure that there's no way to make a mistake and still win!" Yes, if you miss a ring you've got to go back for it (Missing 4 rings triggers a "Lex wins" screen) and turning around takes about 2 days 'cause Superman turns like a tractor trailer. Wow, now there's not enough time to finish the course! The clock will probably run out 2 feet from the final ring in the course, and when the clock runs out you die. Wow, that's some tough superhero, he dies because he doesn't fly through rings fast enough...

Okay, so let's say you make it through all the rings. Wow, now the game tells me "Lift the cars before they hit the innocent people" or something like that (Wait, I thought this was a Virtual city, why am I saving virtual people from virtual cars when there are real people out there in real trouble?). Now I see two cars and two people walking into the street in front of them. I have to lift up the cars and throw them so that they don't hit the people. (Wait, won't that kill the people in the cars?) After that there's more rings, and I see a police car driving down a road at 10 mph and a bunch of people shooting at the car. I've got to pick up the car and carry it down the road, then more rings, and so it goes for about an hour...

Control: 2/10

Superman should have super speed, right? Tell that to Tidus, they gave him "Super Slow motion." He walks like a 500 pound hamster, and as if that's not bad enough they decided to make it so that pushing the control stick sometimes sends you in the opposite direction of what you're pushing. THEN they decided they weren't satisfied with adding insult to injury, so they decided to set up the controller in a way that makes it impossible to comfortably play the game (The R button makes you jump. Who's bright idea was that?) and you'll constantly be falling through floors and walls ala Big Rigs and having to restart the mission.

Then there's controls that just don't work. Hitting "Z" is supposed to make you fly, but usually it just makes Superman wave his hands around like he's swatting at hallucinations. Collision detection is a nightmare, and you punch so slowly that it'll take you about a year to kill a shadow guy. Oh, then there's the robots. You kill them by flying into them. That makes Superman "pick them up" (read: that makes them float in front of Superman) and hold them. Then you need to throw them before they blow up, but WAIT! Half the time superman doesn't throw them! He keeps holding on like he's deciding whether or not to listen to you! And even if he does throw them they have a good chance of only going 2 inches away from you and exploding in Superman's already mutilated polygonal face! Basically, the controls just don't work.

Music: 3/10

It's basic and stupid, and loops like crazy. I could make better music than this on my Commodore 64.

Storyline 1/10

Okay, basically the story is that Lex Luthor kidnapped Superman's friends and hid them in some virtual world that he made on a broken Atari 400 when he was in his 6th grade computer class wearing a blindfold and now Superman has to save them (Note: by "saving" I mean "Not make any effort to save them at all") Somewhere along the line he decides that it'll help his friends if he spends hours and hours flying around through rings and saving people who aren't real in the first place, and even if they were real they could easily avoid the danger by not crossing the street in front of a car or standing in the path of a tornado. Then he decides that he wants to save the world that's been designed as a prision to hold his friends in. WHY DOES HE CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO LEX LUTHOR'S HOLOGRAM METROPOLIS? And what's the deal with these rings anyway? They're not the ones who kidnapped your friends, so why are you flying through them? Because Lex Luthor TOLD YOU TO! Are you kidding? I guess this "Superman" thing in the game is so weak that he'll ignore his friends' troubles to fly through rings just to make Luthor happy. Sheesh, nice going Tidus...

Graphics: 3/10

Graphics? We don't need no graphics! I've played good games with bad graphics, but this game has no gameplay that makes up for the mess I look at when I play this game. It's like the designers made sketches of all the Superman characters and then brought them to a toddler to look at them, and the toddler threw up on the paper and then the programmers put the vomit into the game as "Textures."
Superman looks like a toy that got it's face melted by an 8-year-old with a magnifying glass! His chin is big enough to be it's own Metropolis, and his face is about one inch across. He moves like his elbows and knees are fused together, and everyone in the game talks telepathically (They don't even move their mouth, come on!)

r8ing: Even Jerry Seinfeld would hate Superman after playing this..

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/25/05