Smellier than a steaming turd! LETS PLAY SUPERMAN ON THE NES!

*SIGH*

Welcome to LETS PLAY SUPERMAN FOR THE NES!



The title screen isn't that bad really. Superman flies and strikes a heroic pose. Or at least one that says "Hey, I'm here now. How ya doin'?"

If we let the screen idle for a bit we're treated to the intro:



OH MY GOD ITS THE CUTEST LADY LIBERTY EVAR...but wait, since when has the Statue of Liberty been in Metropolis?



Thanks for the heads up. But what if Zod is just missunderstood? Maybe hugs are in order?



I am! But how did she know?!



Screw you American way! FUCK! YOU!



I guess that explains how she knows Supe's secret identity!



Creepy!



And welcome to the Daily Planet which is apparently staffed by all of four people.

Lets talk to Perry first:



Or maybe we'll MAKE the news! Doh ho ho ho!

And might as well talk to Lois while we're over here...



You want to come with, Lois? No. Well okay then. More Pulitzers for me.

And finally, lets talk to Jimmy before we hit the streets:



Kiss my Kryptonian ass Jimmy.

Lets get out of here and get down to some super mannin':



Or get shot right out the door. Ouch. Metropolis be a dangerous town! Lets see if we can't clean it up a bit!



At this point I should explain the controls.

Up - Jump (yes its as annoying as it is in every game that does that)
Left/Right - Duh
Down- Enter doors/bathrooms/subways/etc
B- Selected Super Powah (I'll explain those in a bit)
A- What I assume is a punch and not a stroke

Select- Map (thanks for making this info redundant Lois)
Start- Super Powahs screen

Lets go into that booth here...





And tada! Superman! Supes is actually faster and harder hitting than Clark, which makes it a total pain when you lose enough health to revert back to Clark Kent. Yeah I don't

get it either. It'd be like if you snuck up on a non-suited Tony Stark and hit him so hard with a chair that he reverts to being an alchoholic. But anyway.



See that blue thing floating in the air? Thats (what I assume is) kryptonite. Blue (white?) restores your health. Green reduces it. And red reduces it a bit and makes you flash

for a moment. If theres any other effect from Red Krptonite I haven't noticed.



And heres a subway entrance. Lets take a quick ride...



Oh well okay. See if I ever save YOUR ass. JERK. You know what? We don't have to take this shit. We can FLY.



Nows a good time to explain the (almost worthless) super powah system:

X-ray vision- allows you to see invisible enemies in some areas
Flight- Duh
Spin- Allows you to tunnel into the underground in some areas
Heat Vision - Self explanatory. Also runs out too quick to be of real use
Breath 1- Shoots little puffs of air that defeat certain enemies
Breath 2- Freezes some enemies in their place so you can smack them around. Should freeze other enemies logically but it totally doesn't

It should also be noted that the symbols by each powah are the same as the power ups you'll collect to recharge Superman's abilities.

With Super Flight selected lets bring up that map screen:



The little red blotch (which is supposed to be the Superman logo) denotes your current location. The tracks mark subways. The big black dots are areas where you can use the

flight power. A filled in orange dot marks where you can fly to. Right now we can go to Mt. Royal or Metropolis Park. Lois said thats where some shit is going down, so we'll

head there. But not without a bit of walking to the first big black dot... which I'll spare you because every area until we get to the park looks like what we've already

seen...so fast forwarding a bit...



Up up and away!



Weeeeee!




Well that was fun! You know what might've been more fun? Letting us control Superman during flight. But whatever. Lets take a quick crime fighting break before getting down to

the nitty gritty of this level.



Superman stops in a random building and fights some generic thugs. As the last one goes down...




Ouch! Superman shows no mercy! And who the crap is Zaora?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaora#P...s post Crisis.

Guess this game takes place post crisis. Hey, lets go kick the crap out Zaora!

Exploring the buildings around Metropolis Park eventually leads us to this one:



The little green guy here is impervious to Superman's punches, leading one to quickly flail through the list of super powahs hoping to find one thats effective. "X-ray vision?!

Can I Cancer him to death?!"



As it turns out, the last powah on the list is the one thats effective. Super Breath 2 go! The little fuckers can still hurt you while frozen in his tracks (thanks busted

collission detection!) so any frozen enemies must be beat down carefully. Superman is sort of a pussy in this game.



Down and down the stairs we go, encountering more of these multicolor booger men as we go. Sometimes they'll stop on the stairs, making it impossible to hit them with super

breath 2. Which means getting close enough to make them leap up and attack which in turn means you'll be taking a lot of nigh unavoidable hits before you reach the boss.



I actually reverted to Clark Kent on my way down, which would have made the boss a much, much bigger pain in the ass. Fortunetly I made use of the unlisted super powahs of

"reloading a save state" and "hitting up google for some goddamn Game Genie codes". So that won't be happening for the rest of this Lets Play. Being almost totally invulnerable actually

makes this closer to how Superman is supposed to be. It might actually make the game fun! (spoiler: No, it does NOT)



Eventually we reach Zaora, who has generic mobster henchmen instead of booger men protecting her. I would have taken a screen shot but that would have meant replaying the level.

But no. No I'm not doing that.



In fact, fuck this battle. EYE BEAMS GOOOOO!



And Zaora goes BOOM!

Wait, Daily Planets?!



Okay while I guess thats that.



OR IS IT.

Superman may be able to beat the stock market... but can he defeat a subprime mortgage crisis?

- Eddie

The NES Superman is a game that should've been awesome with its world map and super powers, but was unfortunately stunted by being a piece of utter crap with bad design choices. I'm glad someone's finally LPing this, because I never went past that Zaora lady.....who for whatever reason has an eyepatch, leotard, and whip in this game. I'd pay money for a Superman Metroidvania that wasn't shit, though.

I've always wanted, and will continue to want, Superman being guided by the adorable, sentient Statue of Liberty to make it into official canon.

I think game designers have been putting Superman in the wrong genre. Imagine playing out his life: You start out as a kid on a farm, gradually discover your various powers, fight tougher and tougher opponents, and by the end you're knocking over mountains with your bare hands. Sounds like an RPG to me.

SD Statue of Liberty is a pretty awesome liberty to take with the license.

I am loving the little comic drawings you're peppering throughout the LP, this looks like it's going to be fun.

Honestly the game isn't nearly as bad as its reputation would leave one to believe. Its at least playable (so much more so than say...Superman on the N64 was, which deserves every bit of shit thats heaped on it) but there were so many concessions made to make Superman a feasible video game character, things like the limited use and context sensitive super powers, that it just brings the whole thing down. Coupled with the poor collision detection its almost downright fatal in parts. I haven't even gotten to the worst of it, some of which we'll see in the next update. Oddly enough, the structure of the second level is much better and your goals more clear than in the first. It actually gave me some hope before I started the piss poor third level.

But thats getting ahead of myself. Glad you guys are having fun with it so far!

This game is kind of excellent, sometimes. It's got free-roaming gameplay, optional sidequests, and some basic stat-boosting going on. I had the most fun flying around to all of the civilian areas just to see what everyone had to say, because the dialog is just so bizarre.

Too bad the gameplay is mostly poop. Good luck.

Man, whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Wow, this is one of the first NES games that I had, back when my parents picked them out instead of me asking for specific games. I never got any further then acquiring the subway pass and really had no idea what was going on.

Do you ever wish somebody would go back and fix almost good games like this? Hack them to make their hit detection consistent, remap the controls to something sensible, rebalance special power usage and damage and that sort of thing?

OH MY GOD a witch doctor shrunk Superman's head and we know he's not invulnerable to magic!!!!

But other than that he looks pretty happy. He's even going

Better question: why did she shout it for every tourist on the island to hear?

And why does Superman look like Suppaman?

Either Lois' dialogue boxes are coming out of the wrong character, or she's staring in mute horror as Clark's obsession with her finally annihilates the last remaining bits of his sanity.

They do it all the time, though it's mostly done to RPGs. There are a ton of bugfixes and gameplay mods out for FF6 at least.

This LP kicks ass, especially the custom art.

Also, I support the idea of a Superman RPG (old-school, not action)

In this case it might be easier to redraw the sprites in Astro Boy: Omega Factor if you just want a good Superman game...

There is something to be said for fixing broken old games, though. I've been playing a Final Fantasy hack that fixes the bugs and retranslates the names of enemies and spells. It's good.

I'd wish they'd go back and fix 'em all the friggin' time, dude. Especially since I've been playing Avalon Code (more) lately. That game's just a search engine option/higher code cache/no MP penalty for moving codes away from being better than it is.....maybe ditch the bitchy spirits acting like an invisible wall that doesn't let you go where you want all the time as well, but that's more a linearity thing.

This is looking hilariously awful. But what's with the line

breaks?

An unfortunate side effect of typing this up in Notepad. I'll fix it before the next update.

Protip: Wordpad.

I think I'm going to enjoy this.

Don't listen to the haters! Regular ol' Notepad is the best. Between it and Firefox's spellchecker I don't need another program to do my LP! Except Pixlr. And Infraview. And ePSXe I suppose.

- Eddie

Phht, Microsoft Word 2003 is all I need.

I do recall a rather peachy Colossus of Liberty from Kid Dracula that could give her a run for the money. I just can't find a pic for comparison.

I have an unhealthy love for this game, mostly for the reasons others stated. It actually does a lot of things right.

Although every time I've played it, I get absolutely stuck on one level because I cannot figure out where to go. I should pull it out and play along with you.

I like to equate this game with Who Framed Roger Rabbit on the NES. Both games have these quite huge, open worlds that allow you to go all over the place. The problem is that there isn't much to DO in these big worlds. They just stick you in a large landscape without many markers and expect you to just walk through all the buildings and figure it out for yourself. Once you've beaten the games once, you can breeze through them in about 20 minutes. It feels like they spent all their time making the world, which means all these different powers/power-ups aren't ever used.

I can't wait for the first time you take the subway. I love seeing the midget Superman patiently riding the subway amongst larger humans.

Alright, I figured out an angle for this lets play that won't be boring as hell, so expect updates to finally resume next week.

Right, so where the fuck where we?



Oh right. I'd balk about the idea of stocks being a plot point in an NES game but



Yeah.



So talking to the usual suspects...Lois suggests we go to Senneville to learn about stocks. Well OK. Jimmy gives us a subway pass. Because. Well I guess it wouldn't hurt to have it. Perry tells us to find out why stocks have fallen so much. If this were Wall Street Kid I imagine it'd have to do with economic downturn and inflation and the state of over seas trade but this is Superman, so its probably Gorilla Grodd with a Stock deflating ray.



Alright so lets do that Superman thing we do. By which I mean ride the subway.



Only not! Because HA HA. For some reason the game didn't give me the pass when I talked to Jimmy. We don't HAVE to use the subway I think (because he's Superman and can fucking fly) but this might bite me in the ass later if I don't get it, so...



Back to Perry who gives us a password and then tells us to get the fuck out of here. Jimmy isn't around, so I guess I'll try to use the password and see if that fixes things...



....it does NOT. Luckily I pinched a password from the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of this game and can continue on. And funny thing, you start off level 2 with the subway pass already in your inventory, which means you can completely ignore Jimmy here. In fact, fuck you Jimmy

Haha! Superman is so tiny compared to the passengers on the bus! This is about as whimsical as the game gets past Adorable Lady Liberty, you know, even if its probably accidental. I can't imagine anyone involved with this game having fun.



So we exit the subway and...oh! Why hello racist caricatures! Also there are some dressed like Super Mario. DELIGHTFUL!



Eventually, if you dick around Senneville enough you'll find the FBI inside a building. They give you some direction on what to do next. They also don't seem to communicate very well to each other, since one doesn't know whats causing the stock slump while the other clearly states its Dragon's gang.

Hey guys, maybe go arrest Dragon? No? Well okay.



I walked all over this cunting map, trying to figure out what to do next. I visited EVERY building, checked every sewer. Road the subway, flew around. I beat every bad guy, including invisible ones that you're not supposed to learn how to beat until level 3.

I got fucking nowhere. The thing is though, that I have managed to beat this level before while doing my test play. Maybe its a glitch, maybe the game has become aware of my pain and now just delights in it. Maybe I never beat level 2 in the first place and me thinking I did was just a result of me banging my goddamn head against the wall. Who knows! Gamefaqs was no help. Its faq for the game was just as vague as the fucking hints the game gives you.

I thought the Angry Video Game Nerd was joking when he said the game was unreviewable, but he wasn't. It totally ISN'T. What gets me is that I had some funny stuff to say about the rest of the level! Theres a point where you capture some bad guys and you haul them off to jail. AND THEY'RE REPRESENTED BY A CARD IN YOUR INVENTORY. Seriously, I think they just edited the subway pass. And after you deposit them in the Police station ATM or wherever, the police tell you they can't find Dragon's lair (tee hee). AND THEN IT TURNS OUT TO BE LITERALLY TWO BUILDINGS AWAY. I was gonna do a drawing of Dragon walking his dog past the station as the police say they couldn't find him, it was gonna be GREAT.

Also, this guy:



I mean what the fuck! And the worst part is, is that even if I manage to find the magical hidden trigger that will let me finish this level, theres three more to go! Three more levels of frustrating shit like this! Why am I doing this?! Why was it so hard to make a decent Superman game? Batman has starred in plenty of good games! ARGH.

I HATE MEEEEEEE



We'll be right back.