The Death and Return of Superman (Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis, 1994)
In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment of Warcraft fame released a video game adaptation of Superman’s most exciting storyline: the one where he makes a porno with Big Barda. Wait, no, “Death of Superman”. Only it’s more like DEATHS of Superman, because I keep dying every five seconds in this game. I never saw past the third stage as a kid but, through the magic of cheating, I’ve just played through the entire game and I’m here to tell you about it.
LEVEL 1: SIEGE OF THE UNDERWORLDERS
Like all the “Death of Superman” collections, this game starts with a mostly unrelated story about the time some ugly mutants living in the sewers caused a massive blackout in Metropolis to try to take over the city.
“Now that we cut off the lights, no one will know we’re ugly!”
It’s up to Superman to solve this crisis via punching. Technically you can also shoot heat vision blasts, but all they do is stun the enemies for like 20 milliseconds, so they're pretty useless. The first level features several Underworlders from the comics as enemies, like Rambeau, another Rambeau who’s red, and several more Rambeaus who were always standing outside of frame in every issue, apparently. (To be fair, the Underworlders were originally created by Dabney Donovan’s cloning experiments at Project Cadmus, so I guess it makes sense that each one would have several spares.)
The hardest enemies in the level, however, are the boulders that occasionally fall on you out of nowhere. They instantly knock Superman down, so they must be full of kryptonite or simply magical. Forget Doomsday, I want Superman to fight the dickhead wizard who keeps teleporting boulders over his head.
Then comes the first boss, Clawster from the Underworlders, who’s a big wuss in this game. The fact that he looks a lot like Doomsday (both are big monsters with bony protrusions all over their bodies) must have been confusing to non-comic book readers. I bet a lot of people thought he was Doomsday’s little brother, thus explaining why Doomsday is so upset at Superman.
I wonder how many kids thought Clawster WAS Doomsday, assumed they'd just beaten the game, and returned it to Blockbuster. Considering how hard this thing is about to get, that might have been for the best.
LEVEL 2: DOOMSDAY IN METROPOLIS
A WLEX presenter informs us that "not even the Justice League” has been able to stop Doomsday’s march to Metropolis. Damn, if even the likes of Blue Beetle, Ice, and Bloodwynd couldn't stop him, this must be a job for Superman.
As the level starts, you're assaulted by Doomsday's classic henchmen: Chainsaw (a punk rocker with a chainsaw) and Molotov (a punk rocker who throws Molotov cocktails). Okay, they're not actually in the comic, but they SHOULD be. They spend the whole level beating the crap out of Superman, making them more powerful and effective than 90% of DC supervillains.
If you somehow manage to get past these superpowered punkers, you finally reach Doomsday, and he's tough as hell. But, if you try hard enough and beat him, you get to... die anyway. This leads to what has to be the saddest "LEVEL COMPLETE" screen in all of gaming:
"GOOD JOB! YOU’RE DEAD!”
LEVEL 3: ASSAULT ON CADMUS
After a beautiful 16-bit rendition of Jon Bogdanove's cover for the first "Death of Superman" collection...
...that WLEX presenter from before tells us that four mysterious Supermen have popped up in Metropolis. We are briefly introduced to each one, and then you get to play as the Cyborg Superman as he barges into Project Cadmus to steal Doomsday's body. These flying levels are my favorite part of the game, because they are very easy, and I’m very lazy.
Unfortunately, you then go into Cadmus and have to fight those stupid flying guards of theirs (the same ones who tried to help Superman during his fight against Doomsday in the comics). They keep shooting lasers at you from above, making it impossible to fight any other enemies while they’re up there, but they’re also hard to reach and will immediately fly back up when you knock them down. Also, there’s a crapload of them, so this gets pretty annoying. I'm surprised Doomsday didn't ragequit the fight halfway through Superman #75.
This level's boss is some weird floating robot that I've never seen in any Superman comics, and I've read like all of them (someone correct me if I'm wrong). They could have used Cadmus’ Guardian, Dubbilex, Director Westfield in a robot armor, or even the Newsboy Legion, but no, they went with this:
On the other hand, that background with all the clones is kinda neat. You can even kill the clones by throwing guards at the wall! The Cyborg's mass-murdering career had to start somewhere.
LEVEL 4: THE LAST SON OF KRYPTON
This is where the developers straight up ran out of ideas and started recycling stuff. The setting for this one is the same as level 2 (only it's night now) and the enemies are once again Chainsaw and Molotov, who are probably just distraught over the death of their good friend and mentor, Doomsday. The only fun part is that, since you're playing as the Eradicator and he has no regard for human life, you can toss these punks off buildings now.
(Actually, you could probably do this while playing as Superman too, I just didn't think to try it.)
Oh yeah, the Eradicator’s special move is kinda cool too. Specials are limited attacks that get rid of all enemies on screen. Superman punches the ground at super-speed and the Cyborg just throws some bomb, while the Eradicator does THIS and apparently scares everyone around him to death:
This level's boss is... Steel? Presumably the idea is to recreate the Eradicator/Steel fight from Man of Steel #24, but without the context, it looks like they just ran into each other on the street and started fighting.
After you beat him, Steel is all like “no, no, fighting is bad” and the Eradicator agrees, even saying they should "watch over Metropolis" together. That lasts like two seconds, because then this happens:
I didn’t cut anything, that’s the entire sequence. I'm glad the death of millions of people was depicted with such nuance and sensitivity.
And then... a lot more stuff happens, but this post is getting too long and I don’t wanna flood everyone’s dashboards, so click “keep reading” to keep reading (ALSO, NOTE: The next parts include some GIFs with flashing lights.)
