If you think the only thing your superhero game needs is an overpowered super-person beating people up, your game's gonna flop, and you're gonna have a bad time. Apparently, you only get two super-strikeouts before you're ejected from the video game ballpark. Over ten years later, Superman has not starred in another video game. It wasn't even a sharknado, just a regular tornado. That all sounds great, but the game itself was terrible, featuring substandard graphics, awful controls, repetitive gameplay, and a main quest that featured a tornado as the final boss. This was the rare game where Superman was actually invincible you lost if you caused or allowed too much destruction to come to Metropolis. Then, in 2006, came Superman Returns, an open-world game loosely based on the Brandon Routh-starring movie. Despite a semi-decent attempt to get around the whole invincibility thing (by trapping Superman in a virtual-reality world laced with Kryptonite fog) its boring, repetitive gameplay, combined with ugly graphics and a lack of backgrounds, scream "incomplete game," making for a traumatic gaming experience few fans have recovered from to this day. In 1999, Superman celebrated 20 years of bad games by starring in Superman: The New Adventures, though it's better known as Superman 64, one of the most infamously awful games in history. God Mode's a fun cheat in otherwise-challenging games, but when the entire thing is God Mode, few are going to even bother. There would be no real limits, aside from Superman's own conscience, which doesn't often come into play when fighting the forces of evil. In addition, a truly authentic Superman game would sport dozens of superpowers, all of which can be used at virtually any time. Would you find a game appealing where Kal-El, the immortal alien with god-like powers, gets sent to an early grave by a common street thug punching him too much? If you said yes, quit lying.įor an authentic Superman experience, he would have to be impossible to hurt or kill, unless the bad guy's wielding a glowing green rock. And it's not just Kryptonite that can harm him: it's basically anything. In short, the most powerful hero ever becomes just another guy walking around in blue pajamas.
Get hit enough, and you either die or lose your powers. Game developers know this, so in most every Superman game, he suddenly has a health bar.