Poor old Superman. Computer games really haven’t been kind to him.
Having already gushed over the likes of Sonic and Zelda, I felt that in the interests of fairness, it was only right to flag up something a little less... accomplished. Something a bit less auspicious. Something that - in this particular case - wasn’t just bad, but memorably bad.
And that’s a distinction of sorts, I suppose. Just like the Police Academy films, it’s that kind of notoriety that, in some ways, makes a game great.
And in other (more accurate) ways, reeeeally doesn’t.
Thinking back, it’s a toss-up between which piece of work more spectacularly failed to do its subject matter justice; Taito’s Superman, or my Year 8 Geography project on Euro Disney (400 words, no pictures, and written during two non-consecutive bouts of diarrhoea). Superman probably just about sneaks it, as for all the ways in which it’s crap, it is at least definitively crap.
History is replete with examples of the sum falling hopelessly short of its component parts. Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s unprovoked assault on ‘Dancing in the Streets’, for example. Everything about that worked, on paper. In a similar way, and whilst it really shouldn’t have been, Superman was appallingly bad. And that’s saying something, because when you’re young, computer games – and arcade games, in particular – are all just supposed to be unilaterally awesome.
Two of my great passions growing up were computer games and stadium rock. Thinking about it now, sideways-scrollers went the same way as glam metal, at the same time, for just about the same reasons; they were colourful, and they were brash, but for the most part they just didn’t have any bollocks. There was no real soul there. And so, for every Final Fight / Guns N’ Roses, there were a hundred Superman / Poisons. The same mechanics, the same concepts, the same engine, all repeating to a terminal fade. Superman – stupid, lazy, thoughtless Superman - was one of the main symptoms of that particular malaise: what it did at least do, I suppose, was announce and embed some of the genre’s clichés, before they’d had actually the chance to become clichés.
Now before we get into this, just think for a moment of what the Man of Steel has to offer, from a purely developmental point of view. Flight, super-strength, near invulnerability, super-speed, X-Ray vision, telescopic, infra-red and microscopic vision, super-hearing, super-breath... The guy can fly into space. The guy once circumnavigated the globe so quickly, he actually reversed the passage of time.
He survived a nuclear blast.
He has flown into the sun.
“Faster than a speeding bullet!” goes the tagline. “More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”
Or, judging by Taito’s interpretation:
“Slower than generic street hoodlums! Easily damaged by bins! Struggles with fences!”
Even in the rosiest hues of nostalgia, even squinting through the myopic fog of Happier Days, Superman just sucked. It was an abominable mish-mash of inconsistencies, hellish monotony, and some almost Dadaist non-sequiturs. Unravelling across five stages – ‘Metropolis’, ‘San Francisco’, ‘Las Vegas’, ‘Washington DC’ and ‘Space’ – it’s less an arcade game, and more an attempt to test a) the limits of human endurance, and b) how many gallons of urine Taito could spatter upon the legacy of America’s favourite comic-book son, presumably without reproach.
The immediate and very obvious problem with Superman is that he / it could barely have been less ‘super’ if he / it had tried. When you’re playing a game with Superman in it, ‘super’ is something of an engrained expectation. Here, he basically looks like a bloke who’s looked after himself reasonably well, and just happens to have the ability to hover indefinitely. Rarely has a video game superhero looked less remarkable. The alleged ‘Ultimate’ Muffin I purchased from a Tesco Express last year delivered more authoritatively on its promise.
I mentioned sideways-scrollers earlier... Games like Final Fight worked because, when you’re dealing necessarily within a loose sense of realism, you can get away with just a ‘kick’ button, and a ‘punch’ button. It’s all grounded in the nitty-gritty and the grime of a organic street battle. You’re looking for a bit more from Superman, though. Heat-emitting vision and stuff. And even then, when he does, say, ‘kick’, it’s not some mighty mule kick, it’s not a vicious roundhouse to the chops; he looks like a Victorian beach spiv shoeing sand into the face of a rival lover. When he punches... Christ, I’ve posted letters with more ferocity.
Oh, but hang on, what’s this – if you hold down the punch button, he unleashes some sort of prototypic, Streetfighter-style energy ball across the screen... which – with an almost admirable disregard for continuity – is just about the only thing Superman has never done. And that’s just one of the sad, illogical shrugs that Taito flung into Superman, a game programmed with an almost visible sigh. What next? Spiderman summoning the Batmobile? The Silver Surfer enlisting the help of his friend and ally, Pedro the Uncircumcised Mule? Like John Goodman asked in The Big Lewbowski, “am I the only person who gives a fuck about the rules?!”
From the very start, Superman plays like a murder-suicide pact between Continuity and Attention to Detail. Just pick your mistake; they come bursting immediately to the surface, like some demented game of Whack-a-Rat. Maybe it’s the cooperative mode, where the ‘second’ player rocks up wearing red and grey, like some sort of mental Superman away kit. Maybe it’s the Las Vegas level, and the ‘COSINO’ in the background? Ambling through a space station, fighting off anthropomorphic pink bunnies? Or San Francisco, where Taito rejected every single identifiable landmark at their disposal – Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Lombard Street – instead focussing almost 70% of the level inside the city’s world-famous... sewers. And is if that wasn’t bad enough, once you’ve descended for what seems like three vertical miles, you come face to face with... a helicopter! Underground! Which you literally have to punch to death! And all this whilst you’re slaloming through meteorites, that appear to be falling from NOWHERE!
The biggest triumph, though - the geographical clusterfuck par excellence - is the Washington DC stage. Here, Taito at least made an effort towards some sort of contextualization, as Superman progresses past a slew of famous landmarks , including the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House, and finally... Mount Rushmore.
That’ll be the Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. 1,400 miles away. Why not, though? All bets are pretty much off by this point.
Where is Lex Luthor? Where is Bizarro, and General Zod? Why are you instead pitched against an inexhaustible supply of Turbo-Men, from Jingle all the Way?
Ultimately, Superman does for continuity what Salvador Dali did for right angles. And that’s the puzzling thing, because really, who’s your primary market for a game like this? First and foremost, you’d assume, it’s Superman fans. And it’s a fair guess that this group is going to overlap not inconsiderably with your generic comic book nerds, and comic book nerds are not exactly known for their tolerance of continuity errors. Seriously, guys – did you really think you’d get away with it?
To be fair, this was the 1980s, back when nobody really paid attention to anything. I can only assume that having unsuccessfully pitched Ricky Raccoon’s American Adventure in Space to some sniffed-up Taito executive, the developers slunk off, returning 50 minutes later having slapped a Superman sprite in Ricky’s place. “Kids don’t like raccoons. They like Superman, and helicopters,” the boss would have bellowed at them, like the editor of The Daily Planet. That’s the only possible explanation for the tides of incongruity swamping this game, because the Man of Steel is the only thing in the midst of this irredeemable tosh that could’ve possibly merited the licence. I’ve got images of Jerry Seigal and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, sat in the development meeting, heads in hands, one of them perhaps pinching the bridge of his nose, the other thumbing his temples.
As I recall, Superman found its home in many a cinema foyer, and I suppose in this sense achieved a fleeting moment of usefulness; a vapid bit of fluff, the video-game equivalent of talcum powder, there to soak up the minutes between buying sweets, and waiting for Ghostbusters II to start. Only 9 year-olds – with their sugary enthusiasm, and anorexic attention spans - could have stomached this... but even then, back in the day, I remember having some pretty strong inklings as to exactly how crap Superman was. No – not even the most determined of nostalgics could whittle something worthy out of this. A career revisionist couldn't alchemize this into something decent. Because at the end of the day, there’s got to be something noteworthy there. Something of value.
I mean, at least Police Academy had tits in it.
I mean, at least Police Academy had tits in it.
