Setting aside my review series for a moment, I thought I would take a look further up to the late 90s turning my attention to a truly infamous game well-known amongst the retro gaming community. Superman 64 was released in 1999 by Titus for the Nintendo 64 (proud to place ’64’ at the end of half their games) and is recognized as one of the worst games EVER made. Quite rightly so – in my opinion, taking into account time periods and quality of gaming at that era, it is actually a more terrible game than ET for the Atari 2600. How could this possibly be justified? And how could a single game tarnish the reputation of one of the greatest superheroes ever to be designed? This is among many of the burning questions about this game I’ll be getting to the bottom of today.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, a comedic, foul-mouthed, retro game reviewer (deliberately boiling his blood with a line-up of woeful titles and peripherals from a variety of consoles) whose videos can be found online, has not omitted Superman 64 from his line-up of the unappetizing. There are plenty of critical flaws to pick out of this game; so many they are barely worth looking for. Such faults in the game mechanics The Nerd rightfully points out include over-responsive controls, repetitive gameplay and bugs and glitches around every corner. His rants are not to be ignored by your average retro-gamer; amidst the ongoing cursing and non-stop bad language is some genuine insight.

 With respect, however, I wasn’t overly impressed with the review as a just explanation of Superman 64 and its flaws. It was funny first time I watched it, as was the intention of the video, however when you actually get down to the game itself there is a lot more that can be said about it. James Rolfe (the actor and writer behind the AVGN series) spent the first part of the review talking about Superman for the Commodore 64, pretending that’s what he thought all his requests to review ‘Superman 64’ were talking about. Amusing, but it left less time to talk about the actual game in question. Also, regardless of how much time Rolfe had spent playing this, he reviewed only a speck of the gameplay, with the intention of reviewing it from the beginning to the ‘had enough’ point, a system which he adopts in some of his videos as opposed to playing the whole game and giving it an overview.

To be honest, I don’t blame Rolfe for doing it like this. Superman 64 is very difficult, barely worth spending your time on, and requires a lot of patience. Myself, I have got much further than The Nerd appeared to have got, and take my word for it that he seems to have missed out on some real horrid gameplay. So if you really want a review that shows the true grit of this game and goes in-depth as to why it should be classified as the single, solitary most awful game of all time, you’ve come to the right place.

Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch nemesis, has trapped Superman’s friends in a virtual world, among them Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, forcing Superman to enter this virtual realm in the quest to rescue them. You are placed in the middle of the air with a procession on rings which you must supposedly fly through. Flying through the maze of rings will then present you with a brief side-mission, which if failed, takes you back to the rings again. After repeating the process of rings followed by a side mission several times, you will eventually be required to traverse an indoor mission situated in a large building, where you’re given an objective to follow until you can then exit to continue with your insufferable ring courses and side missions. Superman’s powers, such as super-speed and super-breath, come in the form of pick-ups which can be found throughout the game.

Although it doesn’t sound all that terrible, the people who made this somehow managed to screw everything up. Yes, they managed to mess everything about this game up; they sure left no stone unturned for things to pervert with their technical menace. Let me give you some examples involving the hovering rings. To start off with, your controls are unbelievably sensitive and unreliable. Add unreliable controls with the N64 controller analog stick and BAM you have a practically uncontrollable game. Often, you never know when tapping the stick will make you turn softly or take a lunge in an undesirable direction. Not only that, but the game lags and un-lags frequently and unexpectedly, making your flight rhythm and speed difficult to keep. These all adds up to a terribly designed game by any standards, and that’s not even mentioning the rings themselves. In the majority of these kinds of games, going through rings are usually some sort of practice module, and they are also often spread out fairly apart to give the player a chance to get from one to another to apply the controls and get used to them.

But Superman 64 is no such game! Going through them is like sticking to a path. They are so damn close together they force you to navigate a specific route with little room for error (I think you have a maximum of four rings you are allowed to miss). And it’s so pointless as well – while Superman’s friends are at the mercy of his greatest enemy, he’s curving around buildings, negotiating invisible roundabouts and mountains like a stunt plane. The course doesn’t care to direct you towards your objective, it takes you on some kind of insane detour which seems to never end and curves around every which way! There isn’t even an explanation – you aren’t collecting important items, or trying to catch something, or escaping from something, or rescuing anyone – you are quite literally twisting and twirling through a seemingly infinite waltz of mysterious hoops with the dodgiest controls on the dodgiest controller. Can things get any worse? Oh yeah, they can. Later in the game the rings start to move up and down, left and right, and there’s always a strict time limit, which can range from two minutes to SEVEN minutes. And this isn’t even the worst part, the ring challenges are the BEST part of the game…!