With E3 here and many of us glued to the screens of our computers, tablets and phones watching all the news from Microsoft, EA and others unfold, today definitely seems like a day for looking forward and on things to come. Which is why I would like to bring everyone back to a simpler time when games didn’t rely on high res graphical gimmicks or women in revealing outfits to sell copies. No, they used good gameplay, tight controls and a good narrative to provide us addictive goodness.
Of course, none of those features have really ever been found in any of the Superman games.
And I kind of get it. Let’s face it, creating a game around a pretty much immortal character has to be difficult. If barely anything can hurt your protagonist, what kind of enemies and challenges do you throw at him? Not every bad guy can be made of Kryptonite or wielding magic. This is one of the reasons we’ll never see a game that features the Phoenix; how can you kill a god?
All that said, though, the Superman games, by and large have sucked, and there is really just no getting around it. Despite this fact, I have put together a list of some of the more (un)memorable ones, so please join me as we walk down memory lane and ignore the rotting roses to the sides of us.
Superman for Atari
Spiderman, Spid … errr … Superman, Superman
Even though I’m old as hell, this game was still before my time. I’m only including it because the game premise is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Superman has to repair a bridge — that’s it. Oh, and if he gets hurt, he can be revived by the kisses of Lois Lane. It doesn’t make it any better that it looks like you’re controlling Spiderman and not the titular character.
Superman for NES
The box graphics looked better than the game
This game, I distinctly remember playing as a kid, but I know that I lost interest in it really quickly as it was, for lack of a better word, boring. You start out as Clark Kent running around frantically looking for a phone booth so you could change into Superman and then get the ability to jump really high — until you got hit enough times and turned back into Clark and had to search for another phone booth. That was about it. I’m sure there were more powers available as time went on, but the amount of effort that would actually be required to get there wasn’t worthwhile. The funniest part of the game was that Supes couldn’t use his X-Ray vision to see into buildings because Lex Luthor had lined them all with lead. Not that there was ever a need to look into buildings, or anything, but the devs had to give the player a ‘reason’ why they couldn’t just in case.
The Death and Return of Superman
I don’t know what the hell he’s fighting, and I don’t want to.
If you were a kid in the 90s, you played (and loved) all the beat-em up arcade games — X-Men, Simpsons, Ninja Turtles, Spiderman and the Avengers, etc. They all followed the same process: everyone picks a character and then slogs through ‘room’ after room of enemies until you come to a boss. As derivative as these games were, what drew us in were our love of the characters and the fact that it was completely bad ass to use Nightcrawler’s teleport ability to wipe out a room of Sentinels. Death and Return of Superman tried to capitalize on this idea, but here was the cool twist — you’ll play through the same levels 4 times as 4 different Superman type characters, and everyone of them has the same powers! Won’t that be a blast? We’ll throw in a few different elements every now and then just to change it up, but you’ll basically be doing the same thing over and over again. That’s not to say that I didn’t have fun with the game when I was a kid for the first few hours, but after that, I was really glad that I had rented it and not plunked down enough money to actually purchase the game.
Justice League Task Force
Yes, he’s sporting a mullet. Just got with it.
While it’s not a stand-alone Superman game, because he’s featured in it, and also because it’s not a steaming pile of crap, I’m including it. JL:TF was a Street Fighter clone that swapped out Ryu and Ken and inserted DC Characters. Even though it bordered on the line of mediocre and bad back when it came out, my brothers and I played the hell out of it. We did have one house rule though — no one was allowed to use the Green Arrow or Superman bug to win games. You see, each of them had a move that would freeze the other person’s character and also cause them a little bit of damage. Unlike the creators of Mortal Kombat, who made it so that if Sub Zero double froze someone, he would get frozen instead, JL:TF actually allowed you to freeze your opponent over and over again thus guaranteeing your victory. The first time I ever got in trouble for saying the “F” word was at my little brother when he wouldn’t stop doing it to me.
Superman N64
God … Damn … RINGS!
Ah, here we go; the mack daddy of bad video games. Seriously, it hurts to even think about this one. It was so bad that to this day, it is STILL held as the benchmark for utter shit games (Yeah, that game may have sucked, but at least it’s not as bad as Superman on N64). Based on the animated series of the time, by all accounts, this should have been a good game. Nintendo was doing great things with exploration, action and platforming games in a 3D environment, and how cool should it have been to be able to finally fly over Metropolis in all its glory before swooping down to the streets to punch bad guys? But no, we got this instead:
Me: I want to go punch things and shoot lasers out of my eyes!
Superman Game: That’s so cool, and I bet it would be a lot of fun. Let’s fly through rings instead.
Me: Rings? Are you f*&#ing kidding me?
Superman Game: It sucks for me too.
Me: That’s all there is? Rings?!
Superman Game: Of course not, there are mazes too.
Me: F#^k you.
I am sure there are many of you who have N64s in the garage who didn’t play this game and are thinking that it can’t be all as bad as I’m making it out to be. Yes, yes it is, don’t test me on this. Don’t go look for a copy on Amazon just to try out and see. Seriously, your brain will melt through your eyes and you’ll want to wash your soul out with bleach.
Injustice: Gods Among Us
I was completely worn out on Superman after the N64 abortion, so I honestly didn’t pick up a game that featured him in it until Injustice. Despite the fact that it features all different characters from the DC universe, I fully consider it a Superman game because every event that takes place hinges on his actions. To those who haven’t played yet, Injustice takes place in an alternate universe where Superman, due to the Joker’s shenanigans, has caused the death of his family, and insane with rage, kills the Joker and then proceeds to take over the earth and rule with an iron fist (for the great good of the people, of course). Characters from our universe get transferred into the screwed up one and team up with some unlikely allies to topple Superman’s regime and restore freedom to the besieged world. As a fighter that has been heavily influenced by the last Mortal Kombat game, this stands as the best Superman game to date, and one that just begs to be played over and over again. What is truly enjoyable here is that whether you’re knocking someone through walls into other areas of the stage, or uppercutting them into the stratosphere before zooming up above and sending them crashing back into the ground, they made Superman feel powerful and like a complete badass — something that had been missing from his previous iterations in games.
So as you can see, there’s really only been one good Superman game over the last 30 years or so, and technically, it wasn’t even a Superman game, per se, since it wasn’t solely about him. Still, the Man of Steel remains as popular as ever, and I have no doubt that we will continue to see him make his presence known throughout the gaming world. Let’s just hope that this new generation of consoles will learn from the past and break the pattern of linking the name ‘Superman’ to the worst games you can find.