That's Really Subpar, Superman

Over the last forty-three years of home video games, there have been a multitude of titles based on the adventures of Superman, with several of these being utterly horrible and none being any better than adequate. The recent discovery and release of the Playstation version of Superman, alas, does not break this streak.

Developed by Vectorman creators Blue Sky Software but ultimately shelved by its publisher Titus, Superman for the Playstation was rumored to be the game Nintendo 64 owners should have gotten, with more complex gameplay and missions that go beyond flying through hoops obscured by a Kryptonite fog. While it does deliver on those promises, the Playstation version of Superman is hardly a high point in the system's library, pinned to the ground by slow, tedious gameplay and visuals that don't do justice to the 1996 animated series that inspired it.

Thank goodness for that.
(image from YouTube)

Years ago, a friend of mine described a different game, Cosmic Chasm for the Vectrex, as "process oriented." "Shoot waves of ships, drill through barriers, navigate to the center of the cavern, plant a bomb at the fusion core, escape through the exit, and sign papers in triplicate detailing your mission," he lamented, joking only about the last part. (I've played this game too; signing the papers at the end of a mission would have been the most exciting part. It's no wonder that when it was ported to arcades a year later, they streamlined the controls and trimmed away its excesses.)

"Process oriented" perfectly describes Superman 32. It's so rigidly tied to procedure that it makes Cosmic Chasm look like a non-stop thrill ride. The first stage alone has you unwinding a Gordian knot of tedious tasks as you climb to the fifth story of a parking garage, where Lois Lane awaits. Paths are blocked off by Kryptonite force fields, so you find generators, destroy them all with your ice breath, and proceed to the next floor. Women are held behind burning hot walls, so you use your ice breath to cool down the barriers, punch a hole through them, rescue the hostage trapped inside, but oh! You can't rescue her until you find a health pack, which is behind another Kryptonite force field, which can't be removed until you destroy the generators on that floor. Repeat until the unrelenting boredom threatens to send you into a coma.

I'll save you, uh, Lois?
(image from Stranno)

Eventually, after dozens of hot walls and trapped hostages and health packs and power generators and keys to unlock doors but the doors require five keys and you can only hold one key at a time because Superman's outfit doesn't have pockets and oh lord just shoot me now, you find Lois Lane. She looks more like the Lois Lane from the 1950s Superman television series with George Reeve, but whatever, I'll take any Lois Lane at this point as long as she's not played by Amy Adams. You scoop her up in your mighty Super-arms, and instead of punching a hole through the wall of the parking garage and making a hasty escape, you have to fly down five floors to the exit, while avoiding security droids and roving Kryptonite orbs. 

Of course, a Superman game has to have Kryptonite. It's the only check on his considerable powers, and without them, the game (and frankly, Superman as a character) would be dreadfully predictable and boring. Here, Kryptonite temporarily neuters the man of steel, robbing him of his abilities for several seconds while assaulting your eardrums with a droning dirge that will make you hate the stuff as much as he does. Here's the twist, though... in this game, Kryptonite is even more dangerous to humans. If you happen to be holding Lois while touching any green radiation, including the orbs that move back and forth through tight corridors, the mission instantly ends. Sure, you'll be sent to a continue point, but it takes you back to the third floor, before Lois and before the gauntlet of walls, generators, hostages, health packs, keys, and doors that you didn't want to finish in the first place.

I tapped out at this part, but there's someone on YouTube named Stranno who finished the entire game, no doubt risking his sanity in the process. What I could glean from his playthrough is that Superman 32 takes two hours to beat, doesn't substantially improve after the first stage, doesn't use the proper voices from the cartoon series, and makes Superman's ice breath the only power with any practical use. Also, there are boss fights, but they're very stupid boss fights. Fly up to one of the villains from the cartoon, punch him in the face a couple of times, get hit with a Kryptonite beam while he runs away, repeat.

To be fair, Superman 32 is better than its Nintendo 64 counterpart, and it is important that it was preserved. Evidently the person who found it was hounded so much by hordes of entitled gamers with the gimmies that he deleted it from his hard drive out of spite. He recently had second thoughts and pulled it out of the abyss with recovery software, and he deserves a lot of credit for making that decision... even if the people who demanded it didn't necessarily deserve it. However, as a game, Superman 32 just barely crests over the high watermark of average that has defined Superman games for nearly a half century. Play it if you're bored (and you want to be more bored), but there's more excitement packed into the late 1990s Superman cartoon that spawned it.