Superman

Superman: The New Superman Adventures Brainiac: "In short time, your fate will be sealed, Superman." Protagonist(s): Superman Genre(s): Action-adventure Platform(s): Nintendo 64 Release: NA: May 31, 1999 EU: July 23, 1999 Developer(s): Titus Interactive Publisher(s): Titus Interactive Country: France Series: Superman

"This game doesn't even qualify as s**t! It's like the equivalent of s**t takin' a s**t! This is unspeakably, shockingly bad. It's sickeningly loathsome! It's a f***in' suffering to the mind! It's a bunch of f**k, and it doesn't belong on this planet! Somebody's gotta take care of it; this is a job for the f***in' Nerd!"

— The Angry Video Game Nerd

"Mais c'est HORRIBLE ! Comme Batman, le meilleur détective du monde, Superman, l'homme d'acier invincible, et le meilleur jeu auquel j'ai joué aujourd'hui, c'est ça ! Aquaman ! Enfin, vous savez ce que ça veut dire ? Ben, c'est qu'on est mieux... sous l'océan !

"

— Joueur du Grenier

Superman: The New Superman Adventures (commonly referred to as Superman 64) is an action-adventure video game exclusively for the Nintendo 64 based on the DC Comics superhero of the same name and the animated series titled Superman: The Animated Series. It was developed and published by Titus Interactive and released in 1999.

Plot

Lex Luthor has created a virtual Metropolis, and trapped Lois Lane, Professor Emil Hamilton, and Jimmy Olsen inside. He then forces Superman to face the challenges of the virtual world to save them.

Gameplay

The game is divided into two types of levels, flying and mazes. Each involves clearing objectives and puzzles within time limits. In flying levels, players navigate Superman through a track of rings, then Superman must complete a different objective, like lifting cars or fighting an enemy. In maze levels, Superman must complete a specific set of puzzles, usually searching for key times, killing enemies, and escort missions.

Development

The game started production in 1997 from a three game deal between Warner Bros and Titus Interactive, as this title was the second game in that deal and it originally started out as an open-world game with numerous destructible levels and was based on Superman: The Animated Series. However, the original licensing team at Warner Bros behind the deal were fired for unknown reasons and was replaced by a new one that had zero knowledge about the Superman franchise and hated Titus Interactive, as they tried to give the license to EA and had forced several limitations upon the team during the development process, as they were paranoid with the team doing something with Superman that felt out-of-character in their eyes, and Titus tries to prove them wrong by showing them comics from the early to mid 20th century that showed Superman did do the things that they wanted him to do when making as it was clear that the new licensing team had very little knowledge about the character, and they still forced limitations onto the team as the game was changing drastically into a completely different game that the team envisioned. Several features were cut and the game went from an open world game to a puzzle game, as the team were trying to please Warner Bros for changing the game to their likening, and Titus had to release the game for the Summer holiday as cheaply as possible and didn't have time to polish the game or playtest it for the general public to play, as it was made with a very low budget and wasn't finished yet at that point. After release, Titus were planning a PlayStation version with different gameplay as their third game, but the license expired and it got cancelled as a result, despite being almost complete.

Why It Wastes Everyone's Time

1. Executive meddling: This game is a prime example. As mentioned above, Titus originally envisioned the game to be open-world, and even made a lot of destructible levels, but Warner Bros. was paranoid about Titus taking on the project and told them exactly what they wanted while watching the game through a microscope. They're the reason why the game takes place in a virtual world, not allowing Superman to fight real people and having to pick up icons to use his powers. They had no creative freedom and them being so busy trying to please Warner Bros. is the reason for many of the problems below.
2. The notorious ring levels. The most hated thing in all of Superman 64 is that most of its levels rely on flying through rings to get to the end of the level, which not only does not make sense at all, but also is extremely annoying, due to the controls being an absolute disaster (more about it below). Most of the time, you will fail to pass through a ring, and increase the chances of failing the level for each missed ring. Some ring levels even have the nuts to make you start right next to the end ring, which is just unfair, and is the overall reason why the ring concept is just awful and should´ve never been on this game in the first place.
3. Players have to repeat the previous ring-flying segment upon failing the objective that comes immediately after, which is likely to happen due to the unforgiving time-limit in virtually every level and the fact that mission objectives only stay on-screen for about a second, giving the player no time to adapt. After a certain amount of tries, this stops occurring and players actually start at the mission instead of having to "solve the maze" again.
4. Superman has been heavily nerfed for no reason, other than to make the game more accessible for new players, which unfortunately doesn't do the game any justice, since he doesn't have any of his powers from the comic books at the start of the game, and many of them deal miminal damage to enemies (who are way more stronger than Superman himself) and he can get killed very easily due to how frail he is, and since most of the game is very badly programmed and doesn't accommodate Superman's playstyle very well, it makes playing as the titular hero an absolute nightmare.
5. The controls were heavily criticized for being very unresponsive, making the ring stages extremely difficult. Because of the many ring stages, this made the game extremely frustrating, which becomes worse as some rings are moving. Superman goes off-course too easily. Darklordjadow1 developed a method to make Superman somewhat easier to control, which is to spastically twitch the analog stick rather than holding it in the direction one wants him to move.
   • The controls aren't any better in the other sections, they are still unresponsive, and are worsened by the awful animations, mainly punching, and the disastrous frame-rate.
   • Superman walks way too slow, making it completely abysmal to progress, and basically forcing you to fight through the game.
   • This is likely due to the fact that the game uses tank controls in order to mimic the success of Resident Evil at the time, which is rather ill-suited for a puzzle game like this since it limits the movement of Superman to prevent the game from being too easy, which wouldn't be a problem if the level design wasn't so bad to begin with, and since most of the game itself is very linear, it results in the game being almost unplayable due to the awful tank-like controls that make Superman move sideways in order to move, with him stopping in order for him to move in the other direction just like the characters in Resident Evil, with level design that isn't suitable for that control scheme in general.
6. The practice mode is also flying through rings, except without the time limit. Unless you're playing on easy mode, in which case, the rings don't exist, making it completely pointless.
7. Very short draw distance, due to hardware limitations. The game claims that "kryptonite fog" covers the world, except it doesn't excuse the indoor levels having the same short draw-distance as well. By the way, kryptonite is highly radioactive and poisonous, and that much kryptonite fog found in the game would cleanse virtual Metropolis of all life, including Superman himself, in reality, it's that the game has abysmal programming and an extremely weak engine.
8. The collision detection is so bad that it makes the game basically an older cousin of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but much worse. Superman can get stuck on buildings he's several feet away from, and he can easily become out-of-bounds in the indoor levels. By the way, when trying to go too far in outdoor levels, Lex will say, "you're trapped in my world, Superman."
   • In some places, the game actually glitches allowing you to pass through solid walls.
9. The frame-rate is a performance disaster, as the game's performance slows down and/or accelerates all the time, especially in the ring stages, which shows how poor the coding of this game is, and most of the time the game cannot even reach 25 FPS. Super Mario 64 on the other hand had even better performances than Superman 64, and will always run at 30 FPS perfectly, with even better graphics.
10. Overuse of Awful Escort Missions. Both Jimmy Olsen's and Lois Lane's roles in this game are mostly resorted to nothing but tedious Escort Missions that suffer from severe Fake Difficulty and suffer from extremely slow pacing due to their atrocious AI, which obviously makes their missions easily some of the worst in the entire game, and there's another Escort Mission with a random citizen in the Subway that's even worse than the Escort Missions with both Lois and Lane themselves, since the AI for the citizen is far worse than Lois and Jimmy which is proven further by the linearity of the Subway level itself, and since all of the Escort Missions tend to last way too long and lack clear focus, it makes the puzzle aspect of this game far more hindering than good and prevents the game from being enjoyable in the slightest.
11. In order to finish the game, you have to play on Hard Mode (or Superman Mode as it's called in this game) as the two final levels in the game aren't available in the other modes and are only available in the aforementioned Hard Mode, and it's nothing short of impossible as the game is already unfairly hard in terms of difficulty and the Hard Mode makes the already unforgiving difficulty even worse, and guess what, the final two levels are by far the worst levels in the entire game as one of them is another tedious and annoying ring level while the other one is literally a long, cryptic maze with way too many exits and portals that are leave to false exits and has the player literally place a bomb in the Regenerator room and leave in a few seconds on a minimal time limit, which makes actually trying to complete the game an absolute nightmare which is made worse by the already abysmal ending (as mentioned with WIWET#25 below), which renders the game nothing more than a waste of time just from how frustrating it is to play overall and thus is why so many people consider it to be one of the worst video games of all time.
12. Unbearably awful graphics that looks only little better than in Bubsy 3D. It's worth mentioning that the game came out in 1999, everything has no detail whatsoever, the models look like awful action figures and move like those too. The color palettes are dull and ugly to look at, and the game looks like it's completely made of cardboard because of the ugly polygonal graphics. There are games on the SNES and the Sega Genesis that look a lot better than this.
13. Half of the levels in the game have the player "solve Lex Luthor's maze", which consists of flying through rings, protecting civilians, defeating enemies, and picking up cars, and that's it. Even worse, the game moves the rings at certain points, however, the ring stages feel pretty much the same.
14. The other half of the levels involve solving extremely long and nightmarishly cryptic puzzles or labyrinths with no clues, and filled with trial and error, with each worse than the last.
    • At some points the game outright lies about what you have to do, this is noticeable in the stage where you fight the parasite.
    • The game lacks any direction of what to do at this level, and it forces you to do an insane amount of stuff to get to the end, like how in the last level, you have to use super breathe to freeze Jimmy and Lois, so they can cross the hazardous walkway safely.
    • There aren't any checkpoints at all. If you fail, you must go through the entire level again.
    • Every object that can be picked up by Superman explodes. This can cause players to unintentionally harm themselves and take a huge chunk of Superman's health.
    • The final stage has a puzzle that not even with trial and error can be solved, you pretty much have to get lucky as you need to cross teleport hatches and make the number on the screen equal 2000, but there is no way to even know which teleport hatches do what, and the stage is so confusing that memorizing it is impossible.
15. Awkward attacks where Superman randomly flails his arms to attack, they had a weird range making them a nightmare to use and his only other attack is the heat vision which can't be used once the heat vision meter reaches zero. He can also ram at his opponents while flying, but due to the abominable controls, this is extremely hard.
16. If you fail a level, you can either press A to restart the level, or start to quit the game, and return to the menu screen. The problem is that there is absolutely no confirmation message before quitting the game, meaning that players can accidentally press start in hopes of restarting the level only to get sent back to the menu without warning.
17. The enemies besides the bosses are random black figures or lame robots, with some of them shooting projectiles that can destroy Superman.
18. An insane amount of glitches due to being released in an apparently unfinished state, such as lifting invisible objects. Some of them allow the player to skip levels, then others can screw with the physics of the game, and there is another in the final stage that can kill Superman without him being hit by anything, even with an invincibility code, making the final stage pretty much practically impossible to beat. The player can also go through walls frequently and cause the game to crash for no reason, causing the game to be rendered unplayable.
    • Superman can still take damage and get killed after completing a level, and dying after that leads to failing that level despite already having beaten it, requiring a complete restart of the level.
19. Horrible and repetitive sound effects, mainly in the puzzle sections when fighting enemies. For example, Lex's laughing sound is extremely awkward and sounds like it wasn't even done by an actual human. Also, the gun sounds that you can hear when you are near to the end ring in the ring levels are annoying.
20. The gameplay overall is mind-numbingly repetitive and boring at best and outright insufferable at worst. The first levels rely on flying through rings, then do the challenge, flying through rings again, do the challenge again, and so on. The next levels are mostly on the puzzle sections made of ugly mazes and it's so difficult to understand what to do to get on the next section without watching a walkthrough video of the game.
21. No replay value whatsoever, there isn't any unlockable content, the multiplayer mode is completely unplayable (see WIWET#28 below), and the game forces you to play on hard mode to really beat the game (see WIWET#10 above). The majority of the issues that the game has are what makes it totally irritating, and can make the player not want to play it again.
22. The soundtrack is incredibly generic, and not even the default Superman theme is included, although this could be because of the game being based on the cartoon series instead. It is so bland and repetitive, that, you forget it's there 90% of the time.
23. The Subway is easily the worst level in the entire game, due to how confusing it is to roam around in, since despite being linear, it has several branching paths that the player can get lost in very easily due to the terrible draw distance, and there's also the train that can ram into Superman to hinder his progress and is tricky to avoid due to the terrible controls. There's also another Escort Mission in the level and it is terrible as usual with the old man being way more slower than either Lois or Jimmy and it can get annoying quickly. So much in the level happens that it can make the game even more frustrating and make players quit at that point, especially in Hard Mode.
    • Superman in the level is likely to run into dead ends and backtrack to previous areas in the levels, which is impossible due to the terrible draw distance and bad controls.
    • It also feels like a cheap ending on Easy and Normal Mode since it's cheapness can leave people sour when they've finished the game on said modes like the rest of the game, making this level even worse.
24. The bosses themselves are pathetically easy to defeat; even the game's normal enemies are harder to defeat than them. Most of them simply walk up to Superman to attack him, and it only takes a few punches to defeat them, this is an insult knowing the villains they have, one of them is Darkseid, who is a character that's even stronger than Superman in the animated series. This is like an Avengers game where you can easily defeat Thanos.
    • The only exception to this is Brainiac, the final boss, who does not have any A.I. at all, so he does nothing.
25. The game itself isn't very faithful to the cartoon really, since there are only a few references here or there, and absolutely nothing about the gameplay replicates the fight and action scenes of the show itself, and Superman is downplayed to be a generic main playable characters and is toned-down in comparison to how he was portrayed in the cartoon. In fact, the plot doesn't even follow the animated series at all and is entirely original, and the game doesn't tell anybody about the lore of the entire series, nothing at all that indicates it's an adaption of Superman: The Animated Series, making this game more of a generic Superman title rather than a video game about the cartoon, something that the cancelled PlayStation version was actually better at doing in general.
26. Very glitchy demos, where the A.I. that is supposed to control Superman to make him fly through rings completely messes up after a few seconds, and starts flying at random directions without the ability to detect walls, making Superman hit into walls very often. Sometimes, the A.I. can make very awkward moves like flying in circles, etc.
27. The ending is even worse than the "you're winner!" endings from certain NES games, with Lex Luthor literally mocking the player and cutting to black.
28. Awful and low-quality voice acting that sounds like it was recycled from the show's VHS copies.
29. Superman has to pick up special icons to use his powers, like his heat vision, super breath, etc, which is extremely stupid as they can also be hard to get, due to the aforementioned controls, and the powers have limited uses.
    • It is possible to find an X-ray vision power-up in the sixth level, but all it does is revealing that there is lead in the wooden crates, which the player throws at Metallo to deal extra damage to him during his boss fight. Outside of this level, the power-up does absolutely nothing at all.
    • You must also blow tornadoes with the super breath, but this attack has barely any range at all.
30. The game's credits don't list any testers, proving or suggesting that the game wasn't even playtested when rushing it out for release.
    • In fact the game doesn't list any lead designers at all.
31. The multiplayer mode is somehow even worse than the single-player mode:
    • The mode can only be found by plugging in a second controller and selecting New Game.
    • The first mode, called battle, has both players flying through a level trying to gun each other down, but because of the horrid draw distance, it is almost impossible to see the other player. It does not help that both players have tons of health and the weapons deal very little damage, overall making the mode unplayable.
    • The second mode, called race, does not explain how it must be played and uses the rings mentioned before.
    • Superman is not even playable in any of the modes.
32. Awful level design, since most of the levels are either way too big or too small for the player to roam around in, and have very poorly-placed objects around them that prevent Superman from going to the next area in that same level, and half of them are so poorly programmed that you can actually fly around the city when the mission wants the player to do something else that contradicts what the player wants to do instead of that simple objective, making the game confusing to navigate through in all of the levels thus far.
    • In fact, the final level has so many rooms that it's almost impossible to get to it the exit in time before the timer runs out, and since it's so poorly-designed that it adds even more Artificial Difficulty to the game, it makes the level a massive chore to get through in order to complete in time and get to the ending because of how bad the gameplay is in general.
    • As mentioned above, The Subway is the worst level in the game for numerous reasons and is a lackluster way for the game to end in both Easy and Normal Mode.
33. Massive plot-holes:
    • If Lex Luthor created a virtual world that he could control, why didn't he just take away Superman's powers?
    • After Superman defeats Darkseid, one of his strongest opponents in the cartoon, he throws him into a jail cell, which would make no sense, as Darkseid would just simply break out of it with his godly powers.
34. The game originally came bundled with a comic book intended to explain the plot, but the comic itself is just as bad, it had a story that made no sense, villains that didn't exist in the game like Jax-Ur or Bizarro, and in some points, it contradicts itself, more specifically with the creation of the dimension of the Dark Shadows.
35. It ruined the Superman brand's reputation amongst in the video game scene and while Atari/Infogrames' Shadow of Apokolips was an improvement, it wasn't enough to raise the low bar set by this game, and later titles like Factor 5's Superman: Blue Steel were cancelled. It also made Titus Software a major laughing stock, and since the game was so poorly-received that it became one of the worst video games of all time, most of Titus's later titles like RoboCop would go on to receive the same notorious reputation that Superman 64, it ended up causing many of them to sell poorly and ended up resulting in the studio's closure in the mid-2000's and are only remembered as the studio behind this atrocity of a game, and since most of their other games aren't very well-known by the gaming community, and it's actually the main reason why this game ended up being so bad to begin with, the other being it's troubled production.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The leaked PlayStation version is more vastly superior as it plays more like an action adventure game.
2. The music after you defeat Braniac is great.

Reception

"What were they thinking?" The Shit Scale Games that are debatably bad High level of shit contamination The very high category The severe zone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Major code red 👆 This game/console belongs to the "Severe Zone" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

Superman 64 was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews from both critics and players alike. It is often known for being one of the worst games of all time and won several awards for that title. Despite the negativity, it was a commercial success and a top seller in North America. Now the game is often considered to be the worst superhero game and even one of the worst Nintendo 64 games of all time.

Reviewer Darklordjadow1 made a four-part review of the game, with the first being the comic book review, stating that he wanted to show the entirety of the game so people could know just how unbelievably awful the game is. By his own admission, he spent months struggling with the game, and had to resort to cheating with a Gameshark Pro because he kept losing due to game-breaking bugs. After reviewing the game, he made it a running gag to take jabs at Titus Software in future videos.

Seanbaby ranked the game 7th worst game of all time in The 20 Worst Video Games of All Time list.

The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed the game and questioned the purpose of Superman 64, wondering if it is "some sort of insanity test".

Trivia

• There was going to be a PlayStation version, but due to Titus Interactive's Superman license expiring, it was never released, and was cancelled in 2000. However, there is a playable prototype.
• Beta builds are actually more playable than the finished product, and the unreleased PlayStation version was revealed to be far more technically competent.
• Even though the official title is "Superman", it is commonly known as "Superman 64", likely due to Nintendo's marketing strategy of placing '64' in the title of many of its games on the N64.
• As of 2017, the game holds the Guinness world record for the lowest-rated superhero game, citing its Gamerankings aggregate score of 22.9%.

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