Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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 (MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU CUNTS!)
AWFUL GAMING
Superman 64
Developer - Titus Soft
Publisher - Titus Soft
Genre - Adventure
Year - 1999
System - Nintendo 64
Oh god, you all know this one dontcha? Well.....let's be honest, if we're gonna slam down bad games, we need to do this piece by piece. And that is what I can do. We're gonna go through our four parts as always in reviewing a game like any other to truly estimate how bad this game is.
Many MANY people have told of this game, and well rightly so, it's next to ET as the worst videogame ever made. But how truly awful it is, is something I must tell you.
Story - The story of this game is Lex Luthor has managed to create a virtual fake Metropolis and trap Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Professor Emil Hamilton. Superman must traverse this virtual foggy Metropolis and deal with a variety of Lex Luthor's traps and puzzles in order to stop him. At least this is as far as Wikipedia can tell me because nobody has ever gone far enough into the game and managed to make any sense upon exiting it, so we must take Wikipedia's word for it.
Seriously, they've thrown five names in there from the comics and I appreciate them knowing who Jimmy Olsen is (I'm not a Superman fan myself but I'm a bitch for accuracy), but this is just so vapid. There's little explanation even for how Luthor made a virtual Metropolis, other than being a humongous trap for Superman...which would actually seem right.
Graphics - Ahhhh yes. In the days where making blockiness look less noticeable was a champion thing, this game decided to almost proudly bear it. Superman looks even more chiselled to the point of chin-scraping himself, the city itself looks incredibly....well empty. And I mean very empty.
Here you expect a bustling gorgeous metropolis that Superman has lived in the past 60 years of his career, and it's about as alive as one of Hitler's paintings. But at least Hitler had some variety of colours (ironically you may say) in his paintings whereas Superman 64 is....all blue, grey and green.
 (AND SHOCKING PURPLE IF YOU EVEN DARE TO GET HI-QUALITY PICS!)
I mean my god, the draw distance is horrendous in this game, the worst you will ever see in your life. Draw distance is basically how far in the distance the console can create from the game, to give the feeling of expanse and a wide world.
In the days of the SNES, games such as Secret of Evermore did it beautifully when handling a more 3D-styled landscape like on the map with a smooth reeling of what came from beyond the pale horizon. In the upcoming days of 3D and to this day even we get the odd stutter of trees suddenly appearing out of nowhere before us.
Superman 64 at the very least tried to cover up its abominally bad draw distance that only allowed two buildings per the distance of say, a suburban street road in real life with this blindingly irritating green fog, which the developers called Kryptonite Fog. For a good reason later on.
Gameplay - Here is what makes the game truly the worst game of all time. The story is forgiven despite simplicity, the graphics, even at 1999, people had problems with 3D and even though they were bad even for the time, if a game is greatly fun, that should not matter much. But no.
Here my friends, is the gaping Kryptonite wound in the body of the game. The controls.
First thing is the flying, the iconic power of the main Kryptonian himself. Flying you would think would be a rather okay affair with just the joystick working in a sloppy slippery Ace Combat fashion.
But it's much more than sloppy. It's fucking black ice. Superman goes insanely all over the place at any touch, but this is counteracted by his incredible ineptitude of subtlety when he flies like a bar of soap the weight of a brick.
Think about it. Heavy....but slippery. Can you imagine if an 18-wheeler was like that, FLYING, through a city? A city admittedly devoid of people where there's never more than three buildings within one motorway of each other, but still!
But oh no. It gets worse. Now imagine controlling Superman the brick soap truck through RINGS at every single level. And not like 20 or something. But 72 rings.
 (All I wanted were five golden rings, but you had to go fucking overboard didn't you?)
Seventy. Two. Rings. With a time limit of a few minutes, which is so tight in retrospect that if you miss ONE single ring (and you will many times) that you might as well restart because you will NEVER be able to expertly swing around the ring and get through the course with enough time. It becomes an absolute chore of muscle memory to fly through all 72 rings PER LEVEL, and what is the reason for this???
To get Superman his powers back. Seriously. He actually needs to, for some reason, have to do fucking dolphin tricks to get back all the powers that make him not Man but Superman. That's.....incredibly bullshit considering who he is, considering these powers are built IN him, regardless of Krtyptonite fog.
Not that you'll even get far enough into the game to get past this anyway when the other controls are fucking horrendous on their own. Superman barely WALKS on the ground, with the pace of a tight-skirted 1950s executive.
He also punches with a weird mallet arm fashion like a sentient slot machine and lifting anything is for some reason so oddly difficult to pull off in this game, like I can't even begin to explain HOW you do it, but it's not even a matter of lifting a car by being near it and tapping B, it's something oddly more complex and specific to LIFT A FUCKING CAR.
There's also some maze sections but unless you get very very good enough to overcome the frustration or find some sort of level skip, you'll never get to those parts and they're just arbitrary maze puzzles that I don't give a fuck about enough to tell you because fuck mazes.
Music/Sound - Here is the only bearable part of the game, which is like saying the only bearable part of a war is being in the hospital. The music is....actually kinda decent.
That makes no excuse for the rest of the game but the music actually is not only not THAT irritating but also the kind of music you expect from Superman, that sort of "feeble attempt good animated series style" orchestral feel that shows the tiniest sliver of quality....which is unfortunate given this game because had the rest of the developers given as much effort as their composer they could have made something halfway mediocre.
 (We're sending this game to Hell, just like Spiderman did to his marriage. Literally.)
Even if the music is rather repetitive about the same kind of vibe (seriously the strings seem to have the same kind of range boy bands have with their voice), it is still enough to not add even FURTHER irritation.
However I will note they did not use the Superman theme in this game. I wonder why.
Now that we have come to the end of this review, let me say a few personal things.
1. Why is it that Superman, THE iconic superhero with so many fantastic abilities and 70 years of backstory, has not been able to produce one actually GOOD game compared to Batman who's had a similar length of time and has no superpowers, and Spiderman who's been around even less and has less powers and got around three or four great games?
2. Superman 64 is definitely the worst game of all time, because ET was a movie-based game on the Atari. Movie-based games rarely ever work, and this was a game for the ATARI which really didn't have much to go with at the time, but ET was not alone in causing the downfall of videogames, even if it is victimised as one of the bigger parts.
Compare this to Superman 64 which was made in 1999 on the Nintendo 64 and is unplayable, barely watchable and based on the definition of a superhero who has an absolute treasure trove of ideas to delve into to create a game. It pretty much proves Titus are incompetent if they can't get something out of that.
3. If you think I just go off and review games I never played, then allow me to prove to you that I DID play Superman 64 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJqbHhiVto - From 1:30 to 3:30 with a bonus of destroying the game at the end, enjoy me trying to play the worst game of all time over the course of twenty minutes before I couldn't last anymore.
And if you wonder why I said there are 72 rings per level, that's because I COUNTED THEM. You can actually see me counting them on the third gameplay part of that vid, the reason my friend was talking over was so you didn't hear me counting them. That was how bored and frustrated I was with that game, I was counting the motherfucking rings and now you must suffer my accent as proof I played this fucking game and wrote this review for you bitches!
So thank you and good night!
Fun and Innovation - 1
Replayability - 1
Gameplay - 1
Presentation - 1
I'd have given this all zeros but that would have made Bubsy 3D look better, so fuck it."Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto  Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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Rank: The Number 12 Personified
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The best gift of all is the gift of "lulz". I know you told me this review was going to be...painful, more or less, but you did us all proud by reviewing this craptacular game anyways...and then burning it. XD DredNaught wrote:In regard to the ladies... or lack thereof: Just remember that it's about quality, not quantity. And when you do meet a lucky lady, don't be a fool, wrap your tool!
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Rank: Fuckstick
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Yeah! You swear that game out of commission FinalGamer! You do it!  Quote:Razor: As hard as one might try no one will ever be able to pull one over on Super Penguin. Backpack of Win
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Rank: Fecal Impaction For the Win!
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That is so not a Scottish accent. Don't you fucking lie to us! silverwasp wrote:Be careful what you wish for... I have 10 younger siblings and I am only 20....
Yes.... Same parents WarMachine wrote:meh...maybe if he hadn't been handed a burning house he could have done great things, but right now he has won the Prize for what? Damage Control?
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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Location: Scotland, Geographical Penguin Shit
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HolyJaw wrote:That is so not a Scottish accent. Don't you fucking lie to us! Correction, it's a Scottish redneck accent, accompanied by a Spanish one! "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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