Playstation 2 - Superman Returns

Format
Playstation 2
Publisher
EA Games
Developer
EA Tiburon
Country of origin
US
Genre
3rd person adventure

Superman Returns

By David Rasmussen
7th May 06

Superhero games are not the easiest thing to recommend by far when it comes to genres.
For every Incredible Hulk : Ultimate Destruction there’s a Hulk movie themed game.
For every Champions style X-Men Legends games there’s a (bleep)y beat-em-up Fantastic Four game.
For every third person shooter wonder like The Punisher there’s a retarded fighter like Marvel Nemesis : Rise of the Imperfects.
And in contradiction to the very excellently done MARVEL Comics Spider-Man movie games there’s bad DC Comics games like the evil Prince of Persia ripoff known as Catwoman, or the dead fish known as Aquaman. Basically for every step forward the genre takes two steps back.
That brings us to another year, and another year of games based on comics, which brings us to the coming comic book based movie event of the year : DC Comics’ Superman Returns.

Yes, believe it or not DC Comics is about to hit gold once again with it’s second strong release of the 21st Century in Superman Returns… which almost didn’t happen since the movie was trapped for years upon years in the hellish Hollywood realm known as “Development Hell”, where it languished until DC/WB FINALLY got their acts together and put together a movie that was 1) within a logical budget, 2) had a winning cast (or so we hope), and 3) is guaranteed to build hype and fan(atical) interest months before it even sees a single theater screen.
However even if DC/WB finally did get their acts together bringing Superman Returns to life they should be cained for taking so damn long that both Christopher Reeves and his wife passed away without even having the chance to see the 21st Century of the Superman franchise in theaters! Thanks, guys!! (Note the sarcasm in that thanks by the way…. P.S. WB and DC, try to at least get Wonder Woman the Movie out while Linda Carter (The Silver Age celluloid Wonder Woman) is still around if that is, you know, not too much of a burden on you exec types).

Anyway since we’re about to see the release of Superman Returns that means we’re practically right on top of the release of the “Official Video Game“ of the Superman Returns movie. However if you think that you‘d get some sort of information on the game, even at this late stage of the game, well keep wishing. We‘re practically there, with the movie due to release in two months, and so far EA Tiburon (the branch of EAGAmes who will be handling the game) are rather mums on the whole affair!
Oh, and when you see the screenshots for this movie (if any exist) with this first look then it’ll be my first time too seeing them, promise.
It’s not like we don’t have anything to go on though, because while we don’t have much to go on at least we have small bits and pieces about the game to go on. I know, that mostly means absolutely positively nothing, but at least we have this to go on so I guess we can‘t be chosey about info we have.

The first word on the game spans from back in October of 2005 (about half a year ago)!
Sure, we can’t get up to date information but we can find something that is half a year out of date!
Anyway, sarcasm set aside for now, you might not have expected (or even anticipated) that EA Tiburon would be pegged by EAGames to handle a game like this. Eh? Why? Well because if you are a fan of the NFL franchise of video sports then you might know EA Tiburon best for their yearly butchery and overall screwing over of the John Madden football franchise. After all how many of you just LOVED that Madden NFL ’06 game -- let alone holding your collective breaths for Madden NFL ’07!
Yeah, now that EASports has no fears of competition or you defecting over to another company for their NFL game to play games like ESPN NFL 2K5 (because of EASports exclusive license to Official NFL games) they have no reason to innovate or keep the Madden franchise relevant. Anyway it wasn‘t like you would have had a choice of ESPN NFL 2K6 what with ESPN and 2KSports divorcing like they did.
Anyway long story short it’s kind of sad enough that EA Tiburon seems to fear competition in the NFL football franchise, what with EASports having to get a “free pass” from the NFL in order to keep the Madden franchise relevant. So with that in mind just how worst can it be when you expect EA Tiburon to crank out a competitive relevant super hero game when they don’t even seem capable of cranking out a competitive relevant NFL Football game without cheating!? Are you cringing yet? I am.

What we do know about the Superman Returns game is the following… which, sadly, isn’t much.
1-As you probably already guessed you can expect a glut of Superman Returns releases when the game finally hit the store shelves this Summer. Besides probably seeing a Superman Returns game for all handhelds (GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS and PSP) as well as for the present generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox and probably GameCube), this will be the first super hero movie themed game to branch out onto the next gen of consoles, mainly the XBox360.

1a-Sorry, no mention of a PS3 version that I could see of it. If you waiting for something to verify when you’ll be able to get your hands all over Metal Gear Solid 4 : Guns of the Patriot, KillZone 2, John Woo’s Shakedown or … well… MGS4 is the real big anticipated game of the PS3 right now… well, sorry.

2-The game’s plot twist might either make or break the game.
Huh? How so? Well the game will not 100% take it’s marching orders from the movie, but it also will not take 100% of it’s orders from the comic genre either. The game, it seems, will be a mix of both the movie plot and (quote) “60 years of comic book content”… unquote. Now whether or not that forms a rich detailed content blessed environment or a convulsed mumble jumble of film and comic contradictions that frustrate and irritate more than entertain remains to be seen. Pray for blessed and entertaining.
Also pray that this isn’t some sort of bizarre boring button masher (ala Fantastic Four), which is so what the world of super hero games does NOT need.

3-The game will NOT follow the recent trend set by other movie games of late by releasing two weeks prior to the movie’s release. Apparently in an attempt to make sure nobody gets wind of the movie before it comes out the people at EA Tiburon are going to sit tight on the game until the movie hits on June 30th, 2006, insuring that nothing is spoiled before the movie releases (which might be good since it’ll allow for hype for both the game and movie to build to a fever pitch which should have crowds of fans lining up around the block for both the movie and game release).
To this end, as you can see as you read this, EA Tiburon is tight lidded on all the aspects of the game, though I have a feeling that E3 2006 is going to force EA Tiburon’s hand and some practical information (not to mention a playable demo) will become available by then… maybe.

3a-Strange. First notes I saw about the movie had an Early June release. I guess they’re lining the movie up for a Independence Day/Fourth of July long weekend run. Figures.

4-The talent gene pool of the game is supposed to be superior, according to one of the few words officially put out by the gang at EA Tiburon. Anyway according to the original article writer I’m using as my source here, it seems one person at EA Tiburon (one Steven Chiang) was hyped about the game even way back then in October of 2005!

Steven Chiang (EA Tiburon)
"We have assembled world class talent at EA Tiburon to deliver this blockbuster experience and we are thrilled to team up with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Comics and have the opportunity to demonstrate our creative and technological expertise in the action/adventure category,"
"We are creating a game that allows players to experience a real sense of flying, and master Superman's unrivaled super hero powers in order to save Metropolis. Only Superman can meet challenges of this scale."

5-And thus we come to the promise of greatness.
Let’s see : Real sense of flight, full access to Superman’s full powers and abilities, and a challenge worthy of the Man of Steel. We got it all here… but if you’ve seen past Superman game release hype then you’ve heard this all before, so there’s really nothing new in a game studio promising Krypton whenever they move to release a Superman related video game!
Real sense of flight? Heard it before. Mastery over Superman’s amazing powers? Yeah, yeah, who doesn‘t promise that in their flavor of Superman games. Challenges in the game worthy of the Man of Steel? Been there, done that, gimme a break.
Promises, promises, promises. Sure, we get a ton of promises but for all these promises we’ve been “graced” with some truly unfulfilling promise breaking games like Superman 64 (Nintendo 64) for starters, which promised much and delivered nothing. And while the PS2 and so forth have had a few Superman releases between then and here I can’t think of any which has been a perfect example of what a game can do with the Man of Steel yet… but maybe this will change everything!

After all considering we got a fair experience with the Batman Begins game I’m hoping that we at least get as good an experience (if not better) with Superman Returns as we did in Batman Begins… for the first play in anycase. Mind you I just said the FIRST play, it’s replay value which concerns me.
If there was any real problems with the video game version of Batman Begins, that problem may be that the game had practically no replay value. Batman Begins was nice, but the game’s story was way too strictly structured which meant the game would play out the same way over and over again with no chance of divergences or different happenings to keep you coming back to play the game over and over.
This strict inflexible gameplay kept Batman Begins from achieving a truly excellent grade as far as super hero games goes, and if Superman Returns follows suit then it will suffer in the same way as Begins.
Of course if the game was more of a freeform world of possibilities like Incredible Hulk : Ultimate Destruction we could be seeing the best Superman game to date, which would be solid.
That is, of course, IF it is done that way.

I mean we should have no problems with the movie so why should we have problems with the game.
The movie itself is solid, right? From what we know of the movie we’re hyped about going out and seeing it so why shouldn’t we be hyped about playing the game?
Yes, if you are wondering I really am endorsing the Superman Returns movie at this early stage without seeing the movie. After all Superman Returns creation pretty much put a cloud of doubt over the possibility of X-Men III being good when DC lured Brian Singer away from that movie to do their movie, so I should hope the movie is solid. And, lest we forget, Christopher Reeves widow gave her glowing approval to Superman Returns star Brandon Routh’s portrayal of the Man of Steel before she passed away so that has to be some proof positive of the greatness that this movie is, right?

And that is, as they say, is that. No more, no less… almost.
In an attempt to distract fans from the fact that WB/EA Tiburon don’t want to say a thing about the game (at least they don‘t want to say anything of substantial value that‘ll tip their hand in term of gameplay), a solid list of voice talents from the movie who did the game voice overs has been made available. And yes, like Batman Begins you’ll see that the movie’s talents have agreed to take the March of the Movie Talents and migrate from the big screen the the video game console… only without the threat of freezing, or the need to procreate while doing the voice acting.

Here we go, the cast of Superman Returns the game version.
Brandon Routh as Superman/Clark Kent
Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor
Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane
Parker Posey is Kitty Kowalski… eh? I should remember the name but the character eludes me.
And Sam Huntington as Jimmy Olsen.

Yeah. Notice that no talk about villains past Luthor is made here.
Ok. If you remember past years of Superman theatrical movie rumors you’d might remember that a few names were floated about as enemies in the movie past Luthor from time to time.
One name mentioned time and time again would be Brainiac, another being (believe it or not) Doomsday. However I doubt we’ll see Doomsday since, well, people these days seem they’d probably rather forget the Doomsday “Death of Superman” gimmick thing since they only brought up a Death of Superman thing in the movie once years ago and never spoke of it again.
As for Brainiac? Mind you they mentioned him in context of things like “The return of the bottle city of Kandor” and other things that just aren’t happening, so take that with a grain of Kryptonite as to whether or not you‘ll get to see Brainiac in the movie. As to whether or not the original choice for Jor El (Anthony Hopkins) is still in the movie or not remains to be seen. I think he left, but I could be wrong.

Otherwise the hype is the same spiel from six months ago.
Real sense of flying. Full access to the powers of the Big Blue. A true challenge worthy of Superman. If I didn’t know better I’d think EA Tiburon’s broken record attitude hides an inferior game that they are embarrassed to talk about. Come on! Please don’t promise us the same empty promises without proving your promises are more than just words and not much else. And while you’re at it promise something different that we haven’t already heard, otherwise we will have lots of promise and zero to show that it’s nothing more than lip service we’re being served up by EA Tiburon!

I could talk the talk about what we want to see out of Superman Returns but that means nothing if EA Tiburon delivers nothing of what we want and sticks us with an inferior game! So I recommend caution when it comes to Superman Returns! Do your research, check up on it as much as possible, and look before you leap and expend $50 for a game you know little about.
Yes, it’s a brand new 21st Century Superman, and while we hope he lives up to the fine caliber of the Superman franchise, who had such Supermen who had portrayed him in the past as the Golden Age Superman (George Reeve) and the definitive theatrical version of the Man of Steel in the Silver Age Superman (Christopher Reeves), but don’t go jumping on top of the game version like it was a hand grenade just because you’re hyped about the movie! Reviews will be coming soon so stay tuned!

-- David Rasmussen 7th May 06

Playstation 2 Superman Returns Images