The Death and Return of Superman (Super NES, 1994)

 

Interesting game here that I've been wanting to look at for ages. It's basically the Superman equivalent to Maximum Carnage, a beat-em-up with a super high difficulty level. Not a particularly great game, not a particularly fun game, but dammit it existed. I played it like 25 years ago, so I barely remember what happens. Let's find out.

"Greatest hero of all time" is debatable. Most folk would probably say Spider-Man or Batman. I mean, if we're talking Christopher Reeve Superman specifically, you might be onto something.

Personally I'd say it comes down to either Reeve Superman, Bale Batman, or Downey Iron Man.

This game follows the Doomsday storyline from the comics, along with various other storylines that I'm completely unfamiliar with. Wonder if we'll see Evil Superman?

This game is much darker than the usual Superman fare, and has a BLOODY S-SYMBOL in the backgrounds of level titles.

The gameplay is super-basic beat-em-up style. Superman has punches and throws. No real kicks, because he solves his problems with THE PUNCH. The only real interesting thing here is that if you press a direction while throwing, he'll toss his foe in that direction. So you can slam foes into objects in the background (no Mode-7 foreground throws, alas)

The A button doles out eye-lasers that look more like Mortal Kombat fireballs. They do...almost no damage and I'm not sure what the point of them is.

Also the enemy lineup in this game is bizarre, a bunch of weird-ass aliens.

Press jump twice and you can take flight, soaring around over the battlefield. It's good for a quick breather and doesn't serve much purpose otherwise, because Superman is still locked to whatever screen he's on until the enemies are defeated. He's the strongest being on Earth but even he can't get past the tyranny of INVISIBLE WALLS.

First boss is this Clawster weirdo. As a kid, I thought this was Doomsday in another form or something.

As is beat-em-up tradition, Superman has a super-attack. Press X and he'll dive-punch the ground, doing heavy damage to all foes onscreen. However he can only do this a few times (one for every red orb he has) and doesn't get the charges back when he loses a life like you do in most games of this type.

This strangely Nuclear Man looking news anchor sure isn't giving us a vote of confidence, is he? The Justice League hasn't even tried to stop it yet! Fake news!

Doomsday is... not really what one would expect. He's another weird-ass monster, and wears a diving suit for some reason. THIS is the guy who defeats Superman?

Level 2 is probably the last level that most players actually get to play through. The game is THAT difficult, and level 2 is obscenely long. It's a construction site full of molotov-throwing punks.

Here's Doomsday, and he's a big ol' bastard. Much tougher than Clawster (who?)

He has this giant Mortal Kombat uppercut, and generally going toe-to-toe with him is a bad idea because he can knock Superman on his ass.

A credible threat to Superman... this is why Doomsday was the bestselling Superman comic of all time by a large margin.

I launch flying punches from a safe distance to whittle him down.

But wait! That was just the MINIBOSS of level 2. For some inexplicable reason, they didn't split the second half of the level off and make it level 3, despite the first half being as long as level 1 was. So good luck making it to the end on one continue.

Players should get ready to see this screen a LOT. There are infinite continues, at least. So what killed me? Doomsday? Nope, the endless parade of street punks eventually whittled me down to nothingness as the level just went on and ON.

Get to the end, and it's a Doomsday rematch! That's right, two bosses in one level! Not sure what they were thinking here.

Win, and Doomsday gets up and knocks out Superman before he keels over. This is what happens when neither guy wants to put the other one over clean. It's like watching Hulk Hogan vs Sid Justice.

It's worth noting that Doomsday was also killed in the exchange (or at least incapacitated indefinitely). Since nobody can beat Superman, they needed to have him also slay his killer, because otherwise the rest of the Justice League wouldn't have been able to credibly take down such an opponent afterwards.

OR they could have built someone else up to Superman's level, but that's crazy talk.

Superman: "What would you have me do, put over Bret Hart??"

Some sexy woman tries to bring Superman back to the world of the living, but to no avail. Where's her other leg?

From here on out, you play as a bunch of pretender Supermen. Well, in theory. In practice, most people didn't get past level 2.

As for the pretenders, there's...

...Cyborg! A guy who appears to be the legit Superman, but was reconstructed with machine parts. No relation to Cyborg, that other guy from the DC Universe. Basically a Terminator ripoff.

This whole thing with the pretenders is like when Bruce Lee passed away and a bunch of pretenders started showing up in the Hong Kong movie scene with similar names like "Bruce Li"

Then there's Eradicator, who is...some guy with similar powers to Superman who wears glasses and can throw fire. I'm gonna call him Clerk Kint.

But wait! There's also Superboy, an X-Pac esque lil' bitch. He's a teenager with similar powers to Superman, and some think Superman has been reborn ala Search for Spock.

Wait a minute... why the hell do all these randos have super powers anyway?

Finally there's Man of Steel, a...man made out of literal steel, who swings a giant mallet. He's just a dude in a suit of armor.

Cyborg is first up, and his first level is actually a lot of fun. He flies and shoots lasers at drones, turning this into a shooter level. Too bad most players never got to see it.

.......AND NEITHER WILL I, as this game is already inconveniencing me enough and I already finished it back in the day. To the Youtube!

Going to have a bit of a quality dip now, but it's better than me playing this infernal game again. In any case, Cyborg beating up goons is more of the same, only now the game has introduced these super-annoying flying goons that can be hard to hit.

Cyborg fights through Cadmus Lab to find the corpse of Doomsday, which I guess somebody was keeping on ice. Probably Luthor (who never actually appears in the game).

Annnnd that's it for Doomsday, he's gone from the rest of the game. Weird, I figured he would have shown up again, but nope, he's done already.

For a minute I thought he'd get thrown into the sun and return as Nuclear Doomsday at the end, but nope.

Next up is Clerk "The Eradicator" Kint, as he beats up endless waves of punks in the streets.

That's...basically all there is to this game, just seemingly-endless waves of enemies that you gingerly fight through while trying not to get hit AT ALL, since the stages are so damn long and there are no checkpoints. Combine all that with the depressing color palette and this isn't really an enjoyable thing to play through.

All of that said...the music is very good and the game is moody in an interesting way. It might be worth a try for huge fans of Superman.

Eradicator takes on the Man of Steel! From here on out all of the boss fights are the pretenders battling each other.

It's cool how Man of Steel's mallet has some sort of rocket-boost on it. Probably the best character out of the pretenders, because he isn't just a Superman-Lite, he's his own dude with different powers.

Coast City? What is that, like, Boston or Philly? Cause Metropolis is clearly NYC.

Whatever city this is, they just JOBBED IT OUT.

Eradicator is on the case, as we get another shooter level (which is probably when this game is most fun).

At the end, he battles Cyborg, who apparently destroyed Coast City so he could build a new machine city there. Cyborg gets the better of Eradicator, and that's it for Clerk Kint.

Eradicator was basically just "Superman with sunglasses" anyway. Now that he's gone, Cyborg is going after Lil' Bitch.

Superboy is the fastest of all the characters, and probably the most boring too. Well, Vince McMahon probably gets a kick out of him.

"It's LIL' BITCH!"

The Boy Wonder basically replays the last few levels and takes on Cyborg in the ruins of Coast City.

Then when he thinks he's won, Superboy turns around and poses like the Lil' Bitch that he is, and Cyborg blasts him!

Now Cyborg has Superboy in bondage in his lair. My God! What is Cyborg going to do to him!

Cyborg: "Have you ever been someone's sub, Superboy?"

Superboy: "No! What are you doing with that whip! No!"

Elsewhere, the real Superman just sorta...decides to come back to life lol

Yep! There he is!

"I'm back!" he says while everyone wonders what the hell is going on.

We had to sell more comics, you see, and none of the pretenders were catching on with the public.

The next few levels, which are also the last few levels, have this pretty good music track. It gets a bit repetitive (considering you're gonna be listing to it for like 25 minutes straight IF you get through all these levels in one try, and a lot longer if they take multiple tries) but aside from that it's a triumphant, memorable track and probably my favorite thing from this game.

Cyborg has constructed a fortress made out of kryptonite, so Man of Steel goes in there and clears the place out (as he has no weakness to kryptonite). This means fighting lots of Warworlders and robots.

That's right, robots. At least the fodder enemies varied up a little bit towards the end. I remembered Darkseid being in this and the alien menaces being his goons, but nope. No such luck. Aren't the Warworlders the soldiers of Darkseid? ...I'll admit I know very little about the comic universe, and any google searches for these terms bring up a zillion results from modern comics (aka not pre-1994) which doesn't help.

A quick shooter level has Superboy shooting down a missile launched from Engine City (Cyborg's new city) towards Metropolis.

Superman and Man of Steel do the legendary Predator Handshake.

It's actually kind of cool how Superman, Superboy, and Man of Steel formed an alliance to stop Cyborg. Too bad Eradicator just sorta got squashed and sodded off.

Man of Steel takes on more trap-filled rooms as the above theme continues to play on.

Boss fight...that isn't with a pretender? It's the core of Engine City, a giant terminator-head.

The last level has Eradicator surprise-returning! ...to job out again. Cyborg blasts him and he flies into Superman, who gets his powers back from...combining with Eradicator, I guess?

This leads to one final level, with Superman ending the scourge of Cyborg at the end. This game HAS to have some sort of record for the most times you fight the final boss, because I think I fought Cyborg like eight times during the game.

That's it for this one. No Darkseid or Luthor or anything else happening, that was it. No wonder I didn't remember how the game ended, it was just lame ol' Cyborg.

Decent game, and while I don't think it's as good as Maximum Carnage, it's okay for what it is. Too bad it's so difficult and so bereft of checkpoints, though.

We've got some Nintendo Power coverage. They do a good job hyping up the Superman Pretenders and making them all seem like a big deal (they even have their own logos). However they kinda knew it was a bit much, and threw in that "Super Hero Overload" line.

As a kid, this coverage made me actually interested in the pretenders, and the Doomsday comic. Never did get it though.

Totally missed getting a shot of Sentinel, which is noteworthy because it's one of like...two non-pretender bosses in the game outside of the first two levels.

I think Lil' Bitch was supposed to be another Kryptonian that got jettisoned from their home planet at the last minute. No word on if the rumors are true that he went on to be Luthor's fluffer.

The drama of the game is whether or not Superman will return and be playable again at the end, which of course, he is.

Well, the game is what it is, good to finally take a quick look at it. It probably won't be soaring to the top of anyone's "best SNES game" list any time soon though.

To calm down after having to play (some of) this, I need to de-stress by looking at pictures of Aerith.

There we go, that's better.

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