Oh, look, we’ve finally made it up to episode 50. Damn, that took longer than it should have. For perspective, we’re up to the Summer of 2008 in AVGN history. At this time the show was a major hit, and showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, production at this stage began to ramp up!
In this particular episode, James decided to tackle games based on Superman. Yep, that Superman. Keep in mind, this is from just before the sudden absurd popularity in superhero themed media, and I don’t recall anything relating to the “man of steel” being released around this time like with Rocky and Indiana Jones previously, so this was simply his choice, it would seem.
We start off with Superman on the Atari 2600, a rather ambitious title for the console which, like many 2600 games once you know how to play it kind of works, but it’s a hell of a mess to look at, and has plenty of quirks. It can be fun, but for the Nerd it seems to be mostly frustration. Away with it.
We move on to Superman on the NES and oh man, this is not what one would expect.
Seriously, you’d think Superman would be some kind of action game, but nope.. this is almost more of an RPG in a way than an action game. You wander around, talk to people, trigger plot points by conversing with people and taking certain actions and, yeah.
Also, the damn thing is done in what amounts to a chibi anime style. WHY? Why is it like that? Seriously. That’s beyond absurd jumping and everything just being otherwise odd. I mean yeah, it’s Superman, but man, it’s it’s own thing.
So, long story short, the game is frustrating and strange, really. A comparison is made with Castlevania II (the legendary “Don’t look into the Death Star or you will die line” is mentioned) but that comparison just shows how strange this game really is!
Eventually, by the time the game starts talking about the stock market, James has enough. This kind of stuff isn’t what the NES was for. Who would enjoy this? Really? Even I want to know, who exactly was this game made for? Maybe the bushes outside of James’ apartment!
The video ends with the Nerd looking at some of the messages he’s gotten over the past few months regarding a common review request: “Superman 64.” I’d like to point out the “quality” of the messages he received — it’s quite telling of the audience of the time, but were not here to focus on that. The next episode is going to be “Superman 64!”
Final Rating: 3.5/5
This was a good episode. Good enough. The jokes were funny, the frustration felt right, editing was good, and the games shown certainly had their share of quirks, but like so many AVGN episodes the game didn’t provide as much as it could have in the way of material to work with. The giant people and the stock market rant really top things off, but in a way the episode existed as a gateway, almost as filler for the inevitable Superman 64 review to come