Superman, The New Adventures of (Unreleased)

Every so often Game-Rave.com takes a step outside the variants and long boxes to explore games that never made it to public hands, or at least in American gamers’ hands. Join in as Game-Rave explores legends and tales never told. In this exciting episode, Superman finally comes home to the PlayStation.

Overview

May 29, 1999…it’s a day that so many people would like to forget, one that others lament, and a moment those YouTubers who thrive on being angry at things thank the heavens for. That day was the initial release date of The New Superman Adventures – or more commonly known as Superman 64.

Few games in history have the reputation that Superman 64 has, and it’s development history is one buried in disasters, problems, and involuntary design choices. In an interview with multiple sources, Titus founder Eric Caen admitted that the two main problems with the development were that they were too ambitious for the then modern day hardware while the rest was surrendered to DC Comics and Warner Bros. creative control. What makes the situation more tragic is that the cartridge isn’t alone – the game was originally planned to have a PlayStation release as well sometime after the N64 version.

Based on the PlayStation’s hardware limitations however, some minor changes would have to be inevitably made – this included removing the entire outside city sequence, reducing Superman’s adventures to nothing but indoor events. In reality, this isn’t that shocking since the N64 version had to rely so heavily on fog to hide pop up issues and the like.

Metropolis in it’s fog-free original render.

To add more problems to the PlayStation’s woes, according to internet sources the events of the Columbine School Massacre, which happened a month prior to the N64 version’s public release, would see DC Comics and Warner Bros. demanding that all human villains and real world weapons be removed from the final product. It was okay for Superman to punch real folks in the cartoon, but here in video games he’d have to stick to virtual villains.

That meant the Sony release of Superman was going to be a completely different beast from it’s original incarnation, and if Titus and developer BlueSky were going to have any chance of repairing the situation, they would have to do it fast. More on that later in the article.

For now, let’s dive into the game. First up, controls. 

The controller is used in standard mode, with almost every button having a function. Starting with the basics – Up and Down will move our hero forward and back, while left and right will turn him in the appropriate directions. Hitting Select will cause the game’s resolution to switch back and forth, while the Start Button pauses the game. Here in the Pause menu are a cornucopia of developer tools, tricks, and notes. The most amusing being that the camera angles are called Default, Dad, and Dumbass. There is supposedly a way to turn off Superman’s clipping and make him invincible, but I couldn’t get anything to work. I’ll leave this section for the more technically minded.

Over on the thumb buttons, X is used for Punching, interacting with in-game characters and objects, and advancing dialog boxes. Circle will spin Superman 180 degrees, Triangle allows you to switch between Super powers, and Square activates the chosen power. Back to those in a second.

The shoulder buttons are assigned in sides – the Left shoulder buttons will move Kal-el up and down and in and out of his flight mode. The right shoulder buttons make him dodge left and right to help avoid those pesky kryptonite bullets. These dodges also work mid-air. Speaking of flight, there is some sort of air punch / air dash that he can use to destroy enemies, but it’s not consistent in the game play.

Going back to Superman’s abilities – he has the option of Super Speed where he’ll pause for a moment and then burst ahead. Heat vision, which he’ll use to melt down robots, and Ice Breath. With his freezing breath, you can frost over enemies, spider-webbing and doors to make them extremely fragile, as well as freeze door switch panels permanently on to solve puzzles. It’s also extremely important to note that civilians are susceptible to Superman’s powers. If you accidentally aim wide with the heat beam, you can unintentionally kill an NPC. If you do, it’s end of the level and the player must restart from scratch. 

If Superman is hit by an enemy’s kryptonite bullet or anything else covered in the element, Superman loses all of his powers and gains a health bar. If he is hit while under the influence of kyrptonite, he will only have 3 to 4 chances to regain his strength back or he dies.

While waiting for the effects to wear off, he will only be able to walk and punch, at a much lower damage scale. Where he could once knock out an enemy in 2 punches, it could now take up to 10.

Along the way you will find two types of power ups – timer bonus and power bonus. The timer bonuses are gold in color and add a set-amount of seconds back on the clock, usually in 15 second increments. The silver power-up improves Clark’s abilities. These come in Double and Triple Flavor, but disappear if old red cape gets hit. In my play-throughs, I only came across 2 or 3 total of these icons.

Finally, there are in-world objects that for the most part, would probably have been handy in a final release, but here in the photo they don’t do much, and in one case, you don’t even know what it is. The objects you’ll come across like the dumpster or the crate are able to be picked-up and thrown at people. The previously mentioned mystery comes later in the game, when a character gives you something that will help you, but it’s never visually explained what the item was.

Level specific triggers, switches, and machines will all come into play as well, mostly used for opening doors or lowering shields. One of the more confusing ones is a small yellow laser beam found in certain doorways. If you walk through them and they turn blue, they’ll activate or deactivate a room in the area.

For a break down of the levels, head over to the screenshots tab.

Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty. The million dollar question is “Did we as a gaming community lose something of value?”

Yes – empathetically, hypothetically, and absolutely yes. It’s very rare for lamented video games to get a second chance on life – Titus and BlueSky software took critical feedback of their game – during a time when there was no such thing as instant feedback or console game patching – and tried to correct their source material.

This path would lead them through essentially three incarnations of the PlayStation edition, and what they tried to accomplish is tangible in the prototype. What was once a foggy, washed out, and mind numbing experience had been replaced with vibrant colors and rich hues. Superman is no longer a Simon Says play-style, but now more of his own speed run against built-in timers.

Level design is more thought-out, using multiple paths and vertical areas to allow Clark some room to explore rather than just flying through some rings. Admittedly, I can’t fully review a prototype since it is eternally a work-in-progress, but there is one part of the game I’d like to focus on that helps explain one of the biggest problems with Superman as a video game character.

The guy is a walking talking GameShark code. In his purest form, bullets bounce off of him, he has x-ray vision, can fly, and according to lore he’s so strong he’s been known to accidentally leave finger indents in objects. How as a game designer are you supposed to get around that? This struggle has been with Superman through every game he has ever solo’ed, with many designers deciding to weaken his abilities or make them powers ups, which defeats the purpose of being freaking Superman.

Titus’ second take on it was almost perfect except for the fatal flaw I alluded to on Twitter. Having already stripped Clark of his true flying abilities by trapping him inside buildings, the act of completely locking out his powers when hit with a kryptonite bullet or object reduces a god-like alien to just being some Cody clone in a cape. Being affected by kryptonite in-game reduces you to an overdressed and underpowered boxer.

That’s what ruins the experience across all the Superman games. His own strengths as a character ultimately become his biggest nemesis in trying to capture them in-game. Had the damage only weakened his abilities, and not completely locked him out, there would have been more strategy available to player, who is instead reduced to walking up to people and slamming the X button while they wait for the powers to return.

As a game of what would have been, the PlayStation version of Superman held promise and more than likely would have found a foothold where the Batman games couldn’t.  For as dented as the Superman game is, even in prototype form – it’s still lightyears better than Batman Beyond and Gotham City Racer. There are internet ramblings of a full, finalized retail equivalent ISO being out in the world, but it appears Titus founder Marc Caen squashed those rumors with his “75% complete” comment. Which brings us full circle back to that part about the sad ending.

According to Marc, the PlayStation iteration was coming along fine – but by then Titus had lost the rights to Superman and all related characters back to Warner Brothers and DC comics. With no money left and no way of getting the rights back, Superman was quietly and unceremoniously laid to rest. It was truly a Darkseid to the hero’s legacy.

That was terrible, I know.

So there you have it. One of the PlayStation’s saddest tales finally brought to life. I wanted to give a huge shout out, thank you, and high five to everyone involved in this incredible project including VGPC for providing the game to review, all my Patreon members specifically Mike MG who helped me understand the developer lingo, and of course you. I am extremely honored and humbled to have had this chance and look forward to more prototypes and unreleased games as they come.

Check out all the tabs in this article for some amazing developer content and images.

The prototype can be downloaded from here:

https://archive.org/details/SupermanUSABeta1999-10-29

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