Superman N64 ReviewI must be mad, truly I must. I watched the AVGN review of the game, and I didn't dare touch the game, but for some reason, I got my hand on a copy. And I played it. My N64 might never feel clean again. This game is just....just....words are not enough. This game should not have been released. The people who made this should be hung, drawn, and quartered. Everything the Nerd said about this game is true, and a thousand other things as well. It's just....it's hard to think such a game can even exist. It's worse than GhostBusters for the NES, and I hate that game to the nth degree. Well, lets see what this game has to offer. You know, I like the fact how the cart hasn't even got the name of the game on it. That's always a good sign....
Well, as the title screen opens up, I already feel I am in a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation. Look at those cheesy effects. You have a choice between a new game, loading a game, options, practice mode, and a biography, which tells you about all the.....eight to nine characters including enemies in the entire game are. The story is that the infamous Luther Lex has captured your friends and has trapped them in a virtual world, with a huge over dramatic portal to add to the cheesy-ness of it all. You can review the story and controls from the menu, but if you do, then every page you go through will give a over dramatic "DRUHN!", which is ok for the first page, but happening every page just is noisy and annoying. Is this really necessary? So to save your friends, you don't go to Luthers corporation as Clark and dig dirt on the place to make him get arrested for kid-napping people or clever stuff like that, nooooooo, that would be too sensible. You, as Superman, decide to go through the portal and rescue them yourself. *slaps forehead hard*....no plot holes in that what so ever.
So how do you save your friends? Well, since your trapped in his world (Gee, I wonder how that happened....), you follow by his rules. So you must do what he says, which was why it was a bad idea to go in there in the first place, but did you listen? And what does he want you to do? Fly though rings. Yes, fly through rings. Fly through rings.....no mater how many times I repeat that, I can't get over how stupid that is for a Superman game. The controls are awful. They might seem fun for the first half an hour, but the controls really do catch up after a while, and you start to feel the chunky movement of each control. It's painful. Just thinking about it makes my insides scream as they attempt to tear itself apart because of the slow agony these controls create. It takes forever to turn around when you are standing still, and his steering is so bland you might as well go around the earth instead of turn around. There's enough time to make a mistake here and there, so long as your a little careful, you'll have some time to spare at the ending ring, which is fair, I suppose, and you can miss up to three rings in total before there's that annoying "Luther Wins" sign. Be prepared to see it over and over and over again. After you go through the rings, there will be instructions on what the next task is, but the thing is, it disappears before you can even read the first word. As you only have like six seconds to do it, then your most likely going to get a game over. Now, the instructions tell you that you can read the last wall of text by pressing the R button, but the fact that there is such a command means that the developers thought "they'll never read that in time, shall we make it last on the screen longer? On second though, they'll be fine. Just add this command here." So, question.....why don't you just make it last longer in the first place? Even still, by the time you press R to read the instructions in the first place, you'll be left with less time to do all that.
You then have to kill some enemies that will no doubt appear later on as the main enemies, take a car around and stop some hurricanes where your friends are in danger (but you don't take them to the real world for some reason), each event is followed with a rings section, where you must fly though rings. I don't mind the rings part, just.....WHY!?! Why must I fly though rings? It doesn't tie into the Superman series at all, it seems degrading for a person that is known as the "man of steel", and it just makes an excuse to use the flying ability. There is no reason for it other than to be annoying. Is Luther saying "go though the rings, Superman, You know you want to. Don't stop if you want to save your friends!" He must really like people going through rings. Wonder if he was a good at the hula-hoop when he was at school. Also, you know how they say Superman can jump buildings in a single bound, well, in this game, you can jump while you are on the ground, but not very high. So much for jumping over buildings....
Then after all that.....Superman Wins? Not Lex Wins? But.....Superman Wins? Did I finish the game? I didn't..... -_-" No, apparently, that was the first level. The next level is a little confusing. It seems like it's taking place outside the virtual world, while the game says it is in the virtual world. If this level is in the virtual world, then Luther could control everything, which means he would always win (which is why is was a bad idea to go in there in the first place like I said before!). but if it isn't and the level afterwards
is in the virtual world, then why would Superman be going back and forth into a place where Luther want him? I need a bus to drive through these plot holes.
Wait, why does Luther need a virtual world anyway? Granted, he could use it to plan his attacks on the city, and Superman could be the fail safe for his plans, and then could work around it. But if Superman is already
in the virtual world, then why not just launch the attacks with Superman out of the way and trapped in that virtual world in the first place? Did the developers even think this though?
Anyway, this level makes Superman 64 look more like a game. You have to stop Luther from blowing up a dam. This is were the controls go from being annoying to being as painful as being punched in the face my Superman himself. You fight mainly robots in these kinds of levels. You punch a robot, it doesn't show any signs that it has taken damage, you punch it again and it blows up, dealing a chunk of damage to you. You punch another one, then knowing it'll blow up if you punch it again it'll blow up, you pick it up and throw it away instead.....where picking it up with cause it to explode. So then you think, screw it, I'll just pick it up, and throw it away. You do so, it hits the wall, and it doesn't blow up. you go to do it again and.....it blows up in your face
again. This game is one massive troll. It's not like the cardboard boxes blow up or anything.....wait.....they do?!? The cardboard box blew up in my face as I was trying to get it out of the way. One one hand....How is that fair??? On the other, I have to hand it to Luther for thinking about things just in case Superman came along. I would make my cardboard boxes blow up if I were an evil villain, it would be the last thing they would expect. And just so matter of fact, it was!
The level drags on even more as you progress, adding the factor of back tracking and things that aren't explained. You need to use your freezing breathe to stop the bombs at the end, even though freezing them doesn't indicate that they have stopped working. Oh, and if you die anywhere in the level, that's it, you have to start all over again from the beginning of that level. Man, this game is annoying. That's it, I'm done with that game. I'll use a cheat to skip the levels. There are 13 levels in this game, almost half of them are flying through rings stages. I'm almost certain it should be a bonus stage for an extra live or something (even though there aren't any lives in this game), not used as the main story. Sadly, it isn't. What's more, you have to complete the game on "Superman" Mode to get access to the last level, and the ending. That is just stupid! So if you play the game on easy (and I wouldn't blame them), and they told you you had to play that level on the "hard" mode, where the only way to do so was to play the whole game again on the hard mode, went though all that, just to play it on hard mode for the last level? I've seen the ending, and it is, without a doubt,
the worst ending to any video game I have ever played. Seriously, it's like a thousand troll faces and a middle finger to the player. This ending really does want you to take down every name on the credits list and hunt them down for such an abomination of a game. Sure, the music is pretty cool (if very limited), and the graphics are rather nice, but everything is just....like a modern Toad reviewing GhostBusters for the NES while effortlessly beating me in Mario Kart 64, it's a nightmare that should have never existed.
Overall, I give this game a 2.3/10 It is by far the worst game I have ever played. It's a pile of circuitry created by the Devil himself, used only to turn men insane and cause them to be babbling idiots, stuck in terror and horror alike. Sometimes I think to myself, it wasn't that bad, was it? And the answer to that question is always the same:
You know it was that bad, don't kid yourself into playing it again or even thinking for a second it was good. Nothing people say will make it fun or enjoyable in the slightest.
So yeah, take it from me. If you want to play this game.....don't. Just, don't. Save your sanity. If you see this game, just run away and don't look back! Why are you even on this page of the game? Get out before it's too late! It's too late for me, save yourself!
Graphics
5 Sound
7 Addictive
1 Depth
2 Story
1 Difficulty
7
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