Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster are turning over in their graves at the thought of this travesty to the Man of Steel
First off let's get any prases out the way, Superman 64 is based of the excellent Superman: the Animated Series from the 1990s, which along with Batman: The Animated series spawned the legendary Justice League and Justice League Unlimated series and in terms of the sprites they do resemble their animated counter parts, but only bearly, and that's about all I can say that is good about this game.
The game begins it's slide into oblivion from the title screen, the music is bad enough to cause deafness and worst of all it's not even the Superman theme from the movies or even the theme song from the TV show the game is based on. But leave us venture further into the rabbit hole (help) the designers couldn't even program the Options Select screen right, when you use the options screen it should be as easy as pushing left or right on the D-Pad, however this is the N64 era so what do you use to change options: The Analoge Stick, and keep in mind the N64 is no Xbox or Playstation, where the analoge sticks are perfect, the N64's analogue stick is increadibly sensitive so unless you tap the stick gentelly it will flash through the options like lightning.
The plot of the game is fairly straight forward: Lex Luthor has kidnapped Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Dr. Hamilton and imprisoned them in a Virtual rendition of Metropolis and it's up to the Man of Steel to rescue them (yeah really original Titus) However the gameplay itself is down right abyssmal and that's being gental. When you see an episode of any Superman TV Show or a Superman Movie, what is he doing: Flying around Metropolis rescuing citizens, fighting criminals, aliens, robots, cyborgs, and Lex Luthor, or averting a natural disaster. In Superman 64 we get none of that, the levels are as linier as it gets, with no room for exploration and worst of all go in a pattern: fly through rings then an action stage, fly through rings then another action stage. However if you set the game to Easy the rings dissapear, so playing the game on the easy setting is your best bet to see anything outside of Superman hovering outside the LexCorps building.
Due to the overly sensistive analogue stick, flying through the rings is a nightmare, and if you miss a one or the other you fail the mission, and to add insult to injury you have a time limit. Worst of all is that there are no check points or save states (unless you use an emulater), you fail a mission you dont' start back at the beginning of the level you were on, you start back at the beginning of the last flying stage you were in.
Now let's talk more about the control, with Superman's flight power you expect to just hit a button, jump into the air and the analoge stick does the rest. Well Titus said why do it that way? Instead you have to hold the B button while moving the analogue stick, and correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Superman suppose to be "Faster then a Speeding Bullet" because in the game he's flying like he's on the blasted moon.
On the back of the box, one of the ads said: All the superpowers are yours. Titus should be sued for false advertising on that one, because the only superpowers you have through out the game are Strength and Flight, the other powers are only unlocked for a specific mission via a power up, and once again the designers messed up the controls, you'd expect to be able to select a super power with the directional pad and use with the A, B, or even the Z button but instead you have to press and hold the Right Bumper, yeah like Batman Forver for the SNES, you have to use the R button, which isn't even one of the buttons a gamer would expect is the trigger button, and even then it's so stiff you'll be lucky to get it to work, in fact even the A button, which is suppose to be the Action Button to allow Superman to pick things up and punch is so stiff it bearly registers.
Even worse then the controls are the back ground graphics. Metropolis is suppose to be this enormous high tech city with a huge population, instead we are given a bland background, with all the buildings hidden in mist, and only a few citizens, and Luthor's robotic henchmen "the Dark Bots" scattered about. Like stated before the buildings are hidden in the fog which makes it next to impossible to see them unless you've memorized where they are, this is partly due to the so called "Kryptonite Fog" which is in reality is Distance Fog and was used by the desigers to cover up the fact the draw distances in the game look like a five year old did them on Adobie Flash (word of advice to Titus, Distance Fog is used to ENHANCE the perseption of distance, not hide bad draw distances) also the name is just as confusing, Kryptonite is suppose to be toxic to Superman, therefore if the fog is suppose to be Kryptonite why doesn't Superman's health bar go down during the level (to be honest if they put that in the game the programmers would probably have been arrested for cruel and unusal punishment)
To be honest, this game is simply a disaster through and through, and just putting the cartridge into my N64 made me feel as though my console would hang itself just to avoid ever playing it again. This is one of those games where you only buy it if you want to own a complete N64 library, or if you're a huge fan of Superman, but even then I wouldn't blame if you burned your house down because just to get rid of it, believe me we'd all be better off if all copies of this game were fired into the sun