To a lot of people, DC’s Superman was and still is a symbol of virtue. A powerful and heroic figure who, out of love for the little blue planet that gave him a second chance at life, uses his godlike abilities to protect the weak and punish the wicked. The character of Superman has undergone many revisions, re-imaginings and reevaluations over the 85 or so years since his debut. However, for all the many different things that big chest-emblazoned “S” has come to represent over the years, there is a certain population amongst whom it only heralds one thing: Terror.
I was one of the unfortunate many who played Superman: The New Superman Adventures (most commonly known as “Superman 64”) when it was still relatively new. I wish I could say I was one of the unfortunate few, but that would be a bit disingenuous – the truth of the matter is that despite its questionable quality, it still managed to sell reasonably well. How much of that was out of genuine interest or a perverse fascination, I can’t say. What I can say is that I was at least a moderate fan of Superman as a child and thought that being able to play as him on my fancy new Nintendo 64 would be a lot of fun. As an adult, I’m not especially fond of the character – and I don’t want to wholly attribute that to my time with this game, but…
So what is it exactly that makes Superman 64 so horrid? Is it the poor controls? Is it the sparse and unappealing presentation? The preposterous scenario? The irritating level design? The haphazard programming? The laughable combat challenges? Or is it the complete and utter waste of a well-liked intellectual property that should have been a prime candidate for video game-ification? The answer to that question is all of those things, which conglomerate into some kind of frightful chimera. Most grim of all, though, is surely how devoid of joy the experience is, with bugs and glitches that are more likely to infuriate than entertain, and missions that will spit at your attempts to take any kind of shortcut. Even those who gain sick joy from watching disasters unfold before their eyes will likely find little to enjoy here. Trying to wrest love from Superman 64 is like trying to squeeze water from a stone.
As a personal note: In retrospect, one particular aspect of its infamy really tickles my funny bone. The game had a rather poor draw distance that was masked by a sickly green “Kryptonite fog”, the developer’s means of explaining away the technical hiccups and the weak-feeling Superman you were given the reins to. It’s worthy of at least a derisive chuckle, but just a few months prior in that same calendar year, another game was released that utilized a very similar tactic. Needless to say, it went over a little better by comparison.
As of 2024, tearing into “The New Superman Aventures” just feels like shorthand for not having a whole lot of interesting things to say about video games as an art form – like waiting until the schoolyard bullies stop pestering the little orphan kid so you can creep over and make an ironic “your mom” joke. It’s well-documented that the game is bad. It’s indelibly bad; it’s certifiably bad. It was bad twenty-five years ago and it’s bad now. It will, barring some grand and catastrophic shift in perception on what’s valued in gameplay, never be broadly considered good. But the devs weren’t some Lex Luthor types wringing their hands and preparing to unleash a devious prank upon the unwitting public - they were just ordinary people who were dealt a crappy hand and had to make the most of it, or at the very least just needed to make it to their next paycheck. In light of that, I no longer see the point in dangling its desiccated corpse in the middle of the town square, as it would likely only be for the benefit of ignorant younglings and the local drunkard. If you have any doubts that its unfortunate reputation is well-deserved, you can dig up its grave any time you choose with a few mere clicks. The only thing it’ll cost is a bit of your time and perhaps a crumb of your sanity.
If there’s any one takeaway about Superman 64 for me, it’s how effectively it demonstrates the kind of legacy a broken game used to be able to leave. In an era of constant disappointments, games are consistently released in sorry condition only to be patched or reworked into a (hopefully) acceptable state over time. Hell, even as far as older experiences are concerned, people are now making marked efforts to improve games that they’ve deemed as just needing a bit of love. It can be hard to remember that there was once a time where releasing a game to the console market wasn’t something you could easily just “take back”. Over the last decade, we’ve typically associated miserable experiences like our on-trial Titus offering with budget Steam bloat or the innumerable “free” games flooding mobile marketplaces. As for the bigger players in the gaming landscape, any blunders are promptly picked to pieces on social media and all the noise surrounding it could ward off any potential buyers. Any ado about any given title is quickly swept away by the next mass of mediocrity. Back then, though, things were a little different. Devils in disguise generally had equal billing with the winners on your store shelf (at least until they hit the clearance bin), and unless you were Internet savvy or subscribed to some of the gaming circulations of the time, word of mouth was all you had. You could arrive at the shops with your Christmas money in hand, go “ooh, Superman!” and bring it home without a second thought. And once you slotted the game in and experienced that pain, pain was all that remained. Hopefully you rented it – if not, then hopefully you could return it - and you could tell your friends about it to spare them that dismal fate. But there was still no reversing what had been done. There was no hope of a patch, no hope of updates – no hope of it getting better. Superman 64 ala 1999 is a static creation, incapable of change, incapable of learning. That gray cartridge stands as a monument to the hubris of mankind, and even once the very last one has rotted away, unable to be played, the ghost will still exist through swathes of reviews, anecdotes and archival sites… And most importantly, the memories of those unfortunate enough to have been trapped within that virtual hellscape.
WELL DONE, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOUR FRIENDS OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE…
BUT IN THE REAL WORLD, LEX IS STILL THERE.
I was one of the unfortunate many who played Superman: The New Superman Adventures (most commonly known as “Superman 64”) when it was still relatively new. I wish I could say I was one of the unfortunate few, but that would be a bit disingenuous – the truth of the matter is that despite its questionable quality, it still managed to sell reasonably well. How much of that was out of genuine interest or a perverse fascination, I can’t say. What I can say is that I was at least a moderate fan of Superman as a child and thought that being able to play as him on my fancy new Nintendo 64 would be a lot of fun. As an adult, I’m not especially fond of the character – and I don’t want to wholly attribute that to my time with this game, but…
So what is it exactly that makes Superman 64 so horrid? Is it the poor controls? Is it the sparse and unappealing presentation? The preposterous scenario? The irritating level design? The haphazard programming? The laughable combat challenges? Or is it the complete and utter waste of a well-liked intellectual property that should have been a prime candidate for video game-ification? The answer to that question is all of those things, which conglomerate into some kind of frightful chimera. Most grim of all, though, is surely how devoid of joy the experience is, with bugs and glitches that are more likely to infuriate than entertain, and missions that will spit at your attempts to take any kind of shortcut. Even those who gain sick joy from watching disasters unfold before their eyes will likely find little to enjoy here. Trying to wrest love from Superman 64 is like trying to squeeze water from a stone.
As a personal note: In retrospect, one particular aspect of its infamy really tickles my funny bone. The game had a rather poor draw distance that was masked by a sickly green “Kryptonite fog”, the developer’s means of explaining away the technical hiccups and the weak-feeling Superman you were given the reins to. It’s worthy of at least a derisive chuckle, but just a few months prior in that same calendar year, another game was released that utilized a very similar tactic. Needless to say, it went over a little better by comparison.
As of 2024, tearing into “The New Superman Aventures” just feels like shorthand for not having a whole lot of interesting things to say about video games as an art form – like waiting until the schoolyard bullies stop pestering the little orphan kid so you can creep over and make an ironic “your mom” joke. It’s well-documented that the game is bad. It’s indelibly bad; it’s certifiably bad. It was bad twenty-five years ago and it’s bad now. It will, barring some grand and catastrophic shift in perception on what’s valued in gameplay, never be broadly considered good. But the devs weren’t some Lex Luthor types wringing their hands and preparing to unleash a devious prank upon the unwitting public - they were just ordinary people who were dealt a crappy hand and had to make the most of it, or at the very least just needed to make it to their next paycheck. In light of that, I no longer see the point in dangling its desiccated corpse in the middle of the town square, as it would likely only be for the benefit of ignorant younglings and the local drunkard. If you have any doubts that its unfortunate reputation is well-deserved, you can dig up its grave any time you choose with a few mere clicks. The only thing it’ll cost is a bit of your time and perhaps a crumb of your sanity.
If there’s any one takeaway about Superman 64 for me, it’s how effectively it demonstrates the kind of legacy a broken game used to be able to leave. In an era of constant disappointments, games are consistently released in sorry condition only to be patched or reworked into a (hopefully) acceptable state over time. Hell, even as far as older experiences are concerned, people are now making marked efforts to improve games that they’ve deemed as just needing a bit of love. It can be hard to remember that there was once a time where releasing a game to the console market wasn’t something you could easily just “take back”. Over the last decade, we’ve typically associated miserable experiences like our on-trial Titus offering with budget Steam bloat or the innumerable “free” games flooding mobile marketplaces. As for the bigger players in the gaming landscape, any blunders are promptly picked to pieces on social media and all the noise surrounding it could ward off any potential buyers. Any ado about any given title is quickly swept away by the next mass of mediocrity. Back then, though, things were a little different. Devils in disguise generally had equal billing with the winners on your store shelf (at least until they hit the clearance bin), and unless you were Internet savvy or subscribed to some of the gaming circulations of the time, word of mouth was all you had. You could arrive at the shops with your Christmas money in hand, go “ooh, Superman!” and bring it home without a second thought. And once you slotted the game in and experienced that pain, pain was all that remained. Hopefully you rented it – if not, then hopefully you could return it - and you could tell your friends about it to spare them that dismal fate. But there was still no reversing what had been done. There was no hope of a patch, no hope of updates – no hope of it getting better. Superman 64 ala 1999 is a static creation, incapable of change, incapable of learning. That gray cartridge stands as a monument to the hubris of mankind, and even once the very last one has rotted away, unable to be played, the ghost will still exist through swathes of reviews, anecdotes and archival sites… And most importantly, the memories of those unfortunate enough to have been trapped within that virtual hellscape.
WELL DONE, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOUR FRIENDS OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE…
BUT IN THE REAL WORLD, LEX IS STILL THERE.