The Death and Return of Superman (SNES)
Superman is slow to move after missing so he’s probably gonna get hit. His hit range is weak, both horizontally and vertically (isometrically), so there’s a good chance he’s gonna miss. If he accidentally hits two people at once, for some reason one of them won’t stay in hit stun, and he’s gonna get hit. The enemies attack instantly with their long range attacks. Some of them–some super bosses, or just punks with weird chainsaws, for instance–are not really hit-stunnable, and just keep attacking as you hit them. If a flying enemy appears–which is almost a given in about half the waves of every room in most of the later stages–you have to stop fighting the guys on the ground and take to the air immediately, otherwise you’ll get strafed repeatedly; and then you do the same air wiggle routine twice yet again to KO the flying guy before you can maybe go back to the ground grind. The stages, especially the later ones, are long, with samey room-size areas of insta-spawn, insta-attack waves of the small variety of the game’s enemies. There are infinite continues–but you have to restart the whole stage. There is no difficulty setting.
It was excruciating and I finally had to save-scum the last third or so and it still took six hours. … There were times where the bizarre grind almost felt fun in a sickly way as long as I played by its don’t-actually-try-to-outpunch-anyone rules, but then it would do something mean like hitting me from across the screen for the bajillionth time.
In theory Superman (or whichever of the Supermen you’re assigned to play on a given stage) could fire back with his Heat Vision, only it’s a) incredibly slow and b) does like 2 pixels of damage. You can hold the fire button to delay firing it (even more…) but it doesn’t seem to do any more damage that way. …
Also the game starts to strobe the screen when smashing automated enemy defenses in flying stages late on, argh.
(Okay I was going to just not mention them but I can’t resist, the horizontal flying and shooting stages are awful; I suppose it could be an emulator thing–though I doubt it–but the game cannot keep up with animation and sounds so it feels like it’s falling apart as it sends the same flying robots at you again and again; you hold the fire button and sorta wiggle up and down and they kind of chunk apart and disappear; the game seems to know that the whole bit is a failure as it streams health powerups at you the whole time.)
(Okay well and in the rest of the game there’s the feature of throwing enemies into the background to smash the background section by section and reveal scripted powerups–which is a pain. Or constantly lurching into the air to fly up to the ceiling to see if they secreted a powerup up there. “Powerup hunt” is not a bullet point I felt I needed on my games but you sure get to do it here.)
