We’re doing a CROSSOVER with “‘Fun’ and Games with Matt and Geoff” because we’re talking about the 16-bit Death and Return of Superman beat ‘em up, baby!

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Transcription

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00:00
Geoff Moonen
Superman has been around for so long and has been so many things and does so much stuff that it's just like, it kind of becomes, have you seen my big fat greek wedding?

00:07
Case
Yeah.

00:08
Geoff Moonen
That whole, like, any word I will tell you is greek origin.

00:12
Case
Kimono. Kimono.

00:13
Matt Storm
Exactly.

00:14
Geoff Moonen
It's one of those, like, it goes on long enough that you can kind of half seriously do that. Any superhero. I will tell you why. It is Superman.

00:22
Matt Storm
Yeah.

00:22
Case
No, that is definitely the ethos of the Men of Steel podcast. I'm case Aiken, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, J. Mike Falson.

00:59
Jmike
Welcome back, everybody. So happy to have you here.

01:02
Case
Yes, we have died and returned. No, that's too far. That's too much of a bet. But we are back. We are back. And today we're doing a bit of a wrap up to our conversation about the death and return of Superman cycle. In this case, talking about the video game, because that is near and dear to my heart. It's actually my first way of experiencing this story. And so for that, we are joined by the hosts of fun and games with Matt and Jeff. We are joined by Matt Storm.

01:31
Matt Storm
Yep.

01:32
Case
And Jeff Moon.

01:32
Geoff Moonen
And hi there, everybody.

01:34
Case
And this is just kind of a wonderful conversation. It's a bit of a companion piece to what we did all last night, which is that on Matt's Twitch channel, we streamed playing through the death and return of Superman on Super Nintendo.

01:46
Matt Storm
Yep. And you can find that actually on the fun and games YouTube channel. We posted the VOD up there. By the time you're hearing this, it's about three weeks ago. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. I hadn't streamed in a while. And also, I don't know, the last time I streamed a beat him up. And especially when using game genie codes, you can kind of brain off talk on kind of thing.

02:03
Geoff Moonen
So you're saying this was the death and return of DJ Stormageddon's stream? Nailed it.

02:10
Matt Storm
Nailed it. I wouldn't use return so boldly yet, but it did remind me that there are other ways to stream besides me playing one game for 5 hours and burning out and not wanting to do it again for three months.

02:21
Geoff Moonen
If you need to, you can split off into a blue and a red stream.

02:25
Matt Storm
Exactly.

02:25
Case
He should get a black and silver stream so that they can really get that resurrection suit vibe.

02:31
Matt Storm
Exactly. I'll have to commission Aaron to do more variations on a theme.

02:35
Case
Yeah, I think your stormageddon shirt, just with black and silver as the option, would look pretty cool.

02:40
Matt Storm
It would, yeah. I'll take that idea into consideration. But, yeah, no, it was a lot of fun to play this game that I had probably rented at some point, but I don't think I ever seriously played and definitely never beat back when I had an SNES, good old blockbuster or Hollywood video here in New York, actually, we had a smaller version of Blockbuster called Hollywood Video. And that's often where I went because it was literally two minutes from my house by car. And my dad would take me, like, I'd ask him once a week, can I rent a game? And then I'd go, and of course, they'd not have any of the games that I want to rent. And so I'd pick something odd off the shelf that looked interesting, like this game.

03:16
Geoff Moonen
That's how a lot of old favorites were found for me, certainly.

03:19
Case
Yeah, yeah. I mean, were talking about this on the stream last night, and we're kind of just going to jump into it that there was a market for games that were just rental games, like games that you would have for that weekend, and you'd play and enjoy it and kind of move on. I didn't own this game back in the day, but I did rent it and I did beat it. But I beat it the way we did last night, which is that codes were available and I was able to play through. I didn't have a game genie for the Super Nintendo, so I think that the way I did it was like the health renewing code that I shared with you guys. I don't remember exactly, but it was one of those. So I had played through this whole game and seen it.

03:54
Case
And like I alluded to at the top of the show, this is the game that I first experienced the death and return of Superman cycle through, because this is the early days of trade paperback. So while I was aware in the media of the whole comic event, I wasn't actively reading Superman at the time. I mean, this was 1993 for the event, 94, when the game came out. So I was into comics at this point, but I was like, nine. And my path for comics was I got into Batman comics first because I was a huge fan of the ad and west show, and then the X Men cartoon came out, and that's how, like, segued into reading comics. But then I was really into Marvel at the very beginning of that whole phase.

04:34
Case
And the death and return of Superman was honestly one of the big things that brought me over to, like, I was very into teen superheroes because I was like a young person, and teen superheroes also looked like adults to me, but they looked like adults that were more like me.

04:48
Geoff Moonen
But they were still so old. They're 16, right?

04:53
Case
Representation matters, y'all. What about the 16 year old white boys?

04:59
Matt Storm
Yeah, right. There's not enough for us.

05:01
Geoff Moonen
Totally.

05:02
Matt Storm
Before we get too far, we should talk about the fact that this game was developed by Blizzard. You know, the folks who make Overwatch and World of Warcraft and StarCraft. And it was published by, like, Blizzard wasn't even big enough to publish their own games yet, which is just wild to me.

05:18
Geoff Moonen
Well, this was just after Blizzard had changed their company name. I believe they were called Silicon and Synapse. Before that they'd done some development, but this is sort of like a reconsolidation, a rebranding. This was their first big one. And Sunsoft had a history with, I mean, a great deal of publishing, including comic book games. Didn't sunsoft publish the NES Batman game?

05:38
Matt Storm
Yes, I believe they did as well. And also, fun fact. So this came out in 94 95 for the SNES and Sega Genesis. But also Michael Morheim, who is the lead composer on this game and has worked for Blizzard a long time, also did Blackthorn, another gigantic super Nintendo game that came out not long after this and went on to work on a ton of other Blizzard stuff. But the crunchy sound design and music for this game is very reminiscent of the beat them ups of the time. We mentioned on stream. Maximum carnage, some of the X Men games. It had that kind of synthy feel that a lot of the other soundtracks did back in the.

06:13
Matt Storm
This game, like when I played it on stream, just brought me back to a time and place that I remember quite fondly that I just don't think exists right now. There are beat them ups now, but this was an aesthetic and a time for video games, especially on the Super Nintendo, that some games have tried to recapture. But it's just, I think is wholly unique because of what we've talked about on fun and games a ton, which is like limitations and newness to the technology and all of that stuff, crafted these games that unless you intend to do it purposefully, you won't just get again by happenstance.

06:46
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, you're right. The indie space has had a bit of a resurgence or restabbing at the beat them up genre. I mean, the indie space has been going back to a lot of old, seemingly dormant genres and having some fun with it. I believe battle Axe is one of the games that was sort of a beat them up, and they're also based a lot on the kind of Capcom coin ops or the d d coin ops that like light RPG ish elements. And this certainly is not that, but also a lot of those are built on IPs that they made themselves for a lot of good and obvious reasons. But this one is based off of one of the most covered storylines or. Yeah, case, I have a similar history of comics in terms of.

07:31
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, I was like eight or nine when this happened. Seven or eight, I think. And I loved X Men. And I loved X Men comics. I didn't have a ton of them, but I loved the cartoon. And I would read my Disney adventures magazine that talked about different things.

07:43
Case
I forgot about that. Yeah. That's how I knew so much about both the fake Superman and then also when Batman had his back broken and Asriel took over.

07:52
Matt Storm
Exactly.

07:53
Geoff Moonen
I learned about Age of Apocalypse from it.

07:55
Case
Right?

07:55
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, like, sense memory, baby. Open it up. But not just those sorts of deeply journalistic places. The death of Superman was covered everywhere. It was definitely one of those big crossover moments into the mainstream. And so people were aware of it, even if they didn't. They knew the black cover that sold 5 million, 6 million copies. They know the image of Superman's cape as a mournful flag. But the storyline that came after, nerds know it. Here we are. But this game came out not long after the storyline and is probably the most faithful adaptation of such a storyline into a genre like a beat them up that I've ever seen. Does it make it a great beat them up? I don't know, but let's go.

08:48
Case
Yeah. Shockingly, one thing about when this game came out and this era was that this is the dawn of trade paperbacks, so there weren't very many at this point. When we did the Wonder Woman coverage, were shocked to find out that the contest was the first trade paperback ever done for Wonder Woman. The story where Artemis takes on the role of Wonder Woman. That's how early in trade paperbacks were. The death and return may have been the first trade, or maybe man of Steel, but it was extremely early in actually collecting it and putting those stories out there if you weren't buying the monthly issues at the. So, like, even if I had wanted to, I wasn't in the mode of reading Superman books when that story occurred, and thus I would have just missed it.

09:29
Case
And so at the time, the game coming out was like, one of the ways that you could actually find out about that kind of material. Kind of the same way for movie tie in games where it's like, oh, well, your parents aren't going to take you to go see Terminator two, but you can play t two in the arcade and so all of a sudden you can learn some of the story beats. So this was my way of finding out the story. And it's wild. One, how good they actually tell the overall narrative, and two, the fact that I then went back and had to figure out like, okay, wait, so is this the supposed to be that character? Is this supposed to be that thing?

10:02
Case
And some things are really faithful and others it's just like, oh, well, you're walking down the street and there's just a building in your way and you're just going to have to fight your way through a bunch of thugs who have Molotov cocktails. I guess that happens.

10:13
Matt Storm
Mohawks specifically. Jess said this on stream. It was a time for video game Mohawk punks. The streets of rage had it. They were just everywhere. They were really popular.

10:24
Geoff Moonen
Colorful hair, leather vests. Nothing under the leather vests. There was a very specific brand.

10:30
Case
Yeah, a lot of people watched the warrior. Yeah, we're like, yeah, let's just do that.

10:36
Matt Storm
Let's just do that thing.

10:37
Geoff Moonen
Let's just do that. Whether it's the warriors or the baseball furies, any of the groups, just like that, we're doing that now. Print it.

10:47
Case
So it was a lot of fun looking back at this game because it is surprisingly faithful in very specific ways. And the Blizzard team working on this, there's a lot of quality in weird spots and then a lot of clunkiness in this game. It's single player. We kept on venting about how that would have been such a huge fix for it all. The fact that there's only three enemies on screen at any given time is a big limitation of this game. Some of the level design is not great and the actual fighting system is overall interesting, but there's some clunky parts to it.

11:21
Case
It's so weird how there are things that they get so right and then there are things that are like, oh, this is just a rookie mistake here I've been trying to find online, does anyone know how big a game this was? Like how many megs of Ram or anything going on with that one? Because it's not on the Wikipedia page and it's making me curious.

11:39
Geoff Moonen
I mean, the ROM dump is two megabytes, but I don't know if that's.

11:43
Case
Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes enough sense. Which means this is a really small game.

11:47
Geoff Moonen
Yes.

11:47
Case
And I think that shows when you're actually playing it because there's a surprising amount of certain types of content and then a surprising lack of other types. The fact that so many of the things that you fight are like the same three Mohawk gang members on levels where it's like, why are they the enemies?

12:05
Matt Storm
Why am I fighting these people?

12:07
Jmike
Are the flying levels when everyone's a balloon.

12:09
Case
Right?

12:10
Geoff Moonen
The same cadmus robot balloon thing.

12:13
Case
But then they do things like have the flying levels. There's actually a decent amount of gameplay variety in here and some cool choices that they make in addition to then just cut and paste for so much of the game as well.

12:27
Matt Storm
Yeah, it's one of those things where I think games at this time, when you wanted fodder enemies to fight, I mean, I think of the ninja Turtles, right. I think the reason the foot soldiers were the common enemy is because they were so easy to pallet swap, that while there were some stages that had mousers or other things, the foot soldiers or the rock soldiers were the most common enemy because you could just change the color and you had a new enemy.

12:49
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, I was just doing a little more research. I'm pretty sure the file size for death and return of Superman was two megabytes. The typical Sega Genesis cartridge would go up to four megabytes, but also they would often have to charge more if those things were. So it might have been a budget concern, as well as the fact that I did some comparisons, and the SNES and the Genesis versions are fairly similar. The graphics edge out just a little bit on the SNES, and the music is different, but otherwise, they're largely the same as far as sprites and colors and everything else. So, yeah, it's probably just a two megabyte game. So they were figuring out how to make it fit and work to the best of their ability.

13:30
Geoff Moonen
And given, I don't know, the development time or the lead time that they had on the storyline for this, but given that it came out the same year that the reign of the Superman storyline wrapped up, that they probably didn't have a ton to work with there.

13:45
Matt Storm
Yeah, that sounds about right.

13:46
Jmike
Oh, my gosh. The processing power of these games, it's incredible.

13:51
Case
Well, and there are things that are really interesting in terms of the actual aesthetics. I still can't get over that. The first level, if they do it at all. I mean, clearly they just needed a tutorial level for you where it's like, here's your Superman thing. But they gave us this level, which is the man of Steel Morlock's story arc. Or like the underworlder story arc that is in the trade paperback for the death and return of Superman. But it's such a weird level because there's so few art assets for enemies to fight. And this one level has just completely unique villains that you would face for the rest of the game. For some reason, they might have been.

14:27
Geoff Moonen
Working with restrictions the entire time. And then when we need more and we have more space, and they made that first level afterwards or towards the end.

14:33
Case
Yeah, that's a possibility. It's also the only level that has a proper elevator stage. So it almost feels like here's a send up to the tropes of what a Superman beat him up should be according to what arcades at the time look like. And then the rest of the game is a little different. But yeah, they get some really good character sprites in there. Like, the Rambo character is a character from the comics, and it looks just like when Bakhtanov or when grummet draws that character. Like it's the blue Goat man character, and he looks perfect. And then you get claustro, and he also looks perfect. And in fact, I would argue, looks better than doomsday.

15:09
Matt Storm
He kind of did.

15:10
Geoff Moonen
Yeah.

15:11
Matt Storm
I mean, the sprite definitely had more detail. I think it's just interesting how Jeff and I talk about this and sometimes bicker about this with guests, even about how sprite art is better than 3d art. And I don't know that's necessarily true, but I feel like there's just something to the aesthetic of pixel art that look, I love the last of us, like anybody else. It's topical, it's timely, and those games look gorgeous, but there's just something about, it's like, yeah, it looks real great. I feel like there's more artistry to pixel art because you have to be more creative. It's that whole limitations conversation again. And I'm not saying that artists who create 3D rendered realistic humans aren't creating art.

15:50
Matt Storm
It's just, for me, I see the art in pixel art more because of the limitations in having to get creative on how to make things stand out.

15:58
Geoff Moonen
And I think that mostly plays through. If you're talking about likenesses, you can get extremely creative with 3d environments. But if you're trying to create some kind of a likeness, whether realistic or based off of a comic book or whatever else, I would wholeheartedly agree.

16:12
Matt Storm
Yeah.

16:12
Case
And there's something to be said for the uncanny valley in terms of like, well, if you're trying to make it look real, you're going to keep getting closer, but you have to do tricks to make your eyes not reject it. Versus pixel art, it's further away from that line, so it can just be fine. And this one's also not trying to look like a real person. It's trying to look like comic book art. There's specifically spots. The cutscenes that are in here are like, almost perfect recreation of panels from the comics.

16:37
Matt Storm
Absolutely.

16:38
Geoff Moonen
I mean, four or five of them.

16:40
Matt Storm
Yeah.

16:40
Geoff Moonen
Not many of them, but they are almost perfect. The ones that they have.

16:44
Matt Storm
Yeah. I mean, something that we talked about design wise, too, is not only is the pixel art great, and those stills are great, but the individual versions of super. Spoiler alert, I guess, for a very old comic universe.

16:55
Geoff Moonen
Oh, my gosh, for a nearly 30 year old storyline.

16:59
Matt Storm
God, I'm so old. Like, Superman dies and then other Superman rise in his place. And you could just do kind of colored palette swaps for some of these, especially eradicator, who has the same kind of frame as Superman, but they don't. They redesign the sprites for each character. Some of them are bigger, smaller. And we commented on how when you're playing as eradicator, all their super moves look different. They effectively do the same thing. They're a screen clear, but eradicator rises to the center of the screen, everything goes dark. It's just, that's the extra step that I think makes this game worth playing and experiencing, even if you're doing it with codes and game Genie, because those aesthetic choices are really great and really cool to see because most games of the time would just, it's a screen clear.

17:42
Matt Storm
Who cares what it looks like? But they really leaned into how each individual version of Superman would do those abilities.

17:48
Geoff Moonen
And there are different walk cycles, different attack cycles, different attack ranges, even that show a, we can sit here and kind of go, oh, they really couldn't create more art. They couldn't do whatever else. There's a very clear vein of love that goes throughout this and wherever it can show itself. Whether they didn't think it was important elsewhere, they didn't have the time or expertise or whatever else, certainly in the design of Superman and the four supermen of Steel, of Superboy, of Cyborg Superman, and of the Eradicator, that all show a clear passion for this. And if nothing else, it makes me wonder and hanker for something deeper, something more of this.

18:33
Geoff Moonen
It's been a long time since I've really delved into the death and return of Superman, but this is maybe like, no, you could make a really cool video game adaptation of this. Yeah, were doing that the whole time yesterday.

18:44
Case
Yeah. I mean, the main show here is definitely the fact that you get to play as all the different Superman, which at this time that was still kind of novel. We're not that far off from Street Fighter two not being able to play as the same character on screen at the same time. We are not that far away from moments where it was a big deal to have multiple characters versus now where you can have basically the same wireframe and then just different polygons like laid over in different skins. And the main effort is getting the animations and so forth, but that's not actually using the actual art assets for the characters and they're just being swapped in. In this case. Every single motion is its own level of work.

19:20
Case
Like, to create any of these characters is the same level of effort for each. There's no shortcuts you can make once you've made one.

19:26
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, and it's also a little different than something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where your four characters do play a little different. They fight a little different, certainly in the earlier arcade game, but you could choose who to be. Whereas each of these levels, it followed a storyline, it wasn't. You're dealing with this thing. Pick which character you may fight yourself later because of the story. It almost was the way that some modern fighting game story modes are, where. Here's the order of operations, here's who you are in it, and it's kind of bold. I definitely don't think that Blizzard was the first one to do it, but there again, it showed a certain amount of appreciation for the storyline and many signs that this isn't a lazy cash grab. None of this is half assed.

20:15
Geoff Moonen
Anything that fell short for other reasons, certainly not for lack of trying.

20:20
Case
Yeah. And of course, that's an argument for why the game is single player, which limits its fun as a game, but definitely makes it work better as a story.

20:26
Matt Storm
Yeah, I mean, we're at a time now where there's no shortage of Superman stories. And while Superman's solo games tend to all be not great, I'm looking at you, Superman.

20:35
Jmike
That's so nice of you to say it like that.

20:39
Matt Storm
But there have been good stories with Superman. We came on the show to talk about the first injustice. We will eventually do the second one as well. And both of those are incredible Superman stories and incredible fighting games where, yes, there are nebulous reasons why Superman can't punch through Batman's chest but still playing as Superman in that fighting game feels like you're playing Superman. Even though there's limitations, you still feel like the character. And at this time for the limitations had the fact that every character can fly, the fact that you could just avoid enemies by doing that. Sometimes you do feel like Superman in this game. Not on the same extent that I think a modern game could get it if they did it right. And there have games that have had the right idea.

21:21
Matt Storm
I still wish that the Brandon Routh Superman game, Superman returns your health, was the city's life, right? Like as the city got destroyed, that was your health bar. It's a good idea. That didn't work, but it's a good idea. And so I feel like this game just giving you a health bar and kind of not overthinking that side of it and making it video gamey, but otherwise you kind of feel like Superman, I think is really interesting. And honestly, it's why I don't feel that bad using Gintini codes because Superman is sort of invulnerable, but you still get knocked down, you still get hit. And that's Superman in the comics, right? He's not unhittable. He's not untouchable. He's just invulnerable. He still feels the pain. He still gets knocked into walls and thrown around and beaten. Mean.

22:08
Matt Storm
I think about the old Tim Daley cartoon, and I say old now because it has been a while at this point, but he got his ass kicked in that show sometimes, like beaten constantly. But the thing that made him Superman was that he got back up absolutely right.

22:26
Case
That's actually what I was going to bring up, especially with Justice League and Justice League unlimited. They had a basic tenet that Superman was allowed to get knocked down, but he always had to get up and hit whatever knocked him down in the first place. They could wharf affect him, but he always still had to be the one to get the actual win shot in, if that was the case.

22:43
Geoff Moonen
Absolutely. Superman was never the one of the grand strategist or the martial arts master, but he could get up. And it was a very believable thing of, you can see this invulnerable titan get knocked down, but just as believable that he's going to come back. I love.

23:01
Case
Yeah. And like, I didn't mind it so much at the time when this came out. It just was like, oh, yeah, well, that's how video games work. You have a life bar, right?

23:09
Geoff Moonen
It definitely smacks of that where there's all these little cool, I guess, innovations or keys to the character, but changing something up that fundamentally with no roadmap was probably like, I don't know, because, yeah, I can believe that Superman can go around punching street thugs if he were wanting to go around punching street thugs and not kill them because he pulls his punches. But you tell me a chainsaw is going to take him down. That's where I'm going to start questioning your logic about how this could work.

23:42
Jmike
Maybe it was a kryptonite chainsaw. Think about that.

23:45
Geoff Moonen
Lex Luthor would not be handing out kryptonite chainsaws to street thugs. This is not the gang that he funded.

23:52
Jmike
Maybe it was inner gang. How about that?

23:56
Case
Especially for the eradicator levels. I mean, this game could have gotten around it just by its selection of who to fight. And that's where it's like, the generic thugs are kind of the annoying part. Like, the first two levels, are you, well, first three levels, pardon me? Are you first fighting the underworlders, which they had some stuff like Claustro, while he's not in the same caliber as Superman, is like a big, imposing threat. And you'd be fine with seeing him knock Superman around a little bit, would have worked. Okay. And they had warworld weapons that was like its own plot thread that had already been set up. And then Doomsday, like Doomsday is supposed to be able to knock Superman around. So those levels where you're fighting Doomsday, that part is good.

24:33
Case
It's just like, well, it's weird that the wrecking ball that is just dropping up and down this section of construction site you're in is also hitting both you and Doomsday and actually doing some damage.

24:45
Geoff Moonen
Right.

24:45
Case
And then later, when you're fighting Cadmus, it's not that weird that they'd have some weapons that would actually work against, you know, when you're fighting all the world stuff later in the game that also makes so, like, if it had been, like, inner gang and it had been set up as like, here's some Jack Kirby esque kind of weapons that are from Darkseid or something, it would have fit fine. And then Superboy actually is vulnerable to fire and is a little bit weaker, and it would make sense. And same for steel. Steel actually has a whole plot thread in the comics with the, what is it, the toastbusters or the, like, those guns actually would have worked just fine for setting up characters as being vulnerable to those weapon attacks.

25:23
Case
So they could have pulled just a little bit more detail from the comics and gotten there. This is nitpicking in retrospect because there's so much they got right from the comics. Also like things like Superboy. I am so impressed in retrospect that they got right most of how his powers work. It's annoying that they just gave him generic energy blasts, but it's still not heat vision, which is what I would have assumed that someone going in blind would have done, but they knew not to do that. And those are good spots. Yeah.

25:49
Geoff Moonen
Whether that was people at Blizzard really knew their stuff or the folks at DC were doing a great job communicating with them. Whatever it was, there's knowledge here.

25:58
Matt Storm
Yeah, I mean, I will say that this game got forty s and fifty s back in the day. I'm pretty sure it was like middling at best.

26:04
Geoff Moonen
It's a generic beat them up in a time when there was so many.

26:08
Matt Storm
Right. But I'd say hindsight is 2020 because playing it with game Genie last night made me realize that aside from the unfair hits and the difficulty in getting a punch in on certain characters, like freaking Cyborg, who is just impossible to hit when he's a boss, but you're not that good when you're playing as like the worst thing about this game is how cheaply you die if you remove that. It's a genuinely fun game and has some really cool comic book moments. Like at the end of the game when you play the last stage as Superman, you don't get to play as black suit Superman, which is kind of a bummer, but they show black suit Superman fused with eradicator and become full Superman again.

26:46
Matt Storm
For a game that came out in the 90s, it was such a cool little cinematic moment that actually caught me by surprise. And this game is full of those moments. It is definitely not perfect, but I think what's fun about comic book games at this time, your maximum carnage, your adamantium revenge, your age of Apocalypse, and all of those games, is that they did enough nods to the comics that they felt fun. Unfortunately, game design logic at the time was we have to punish these players so they keep coming back the quarters.

27:17
Geoff Moonen
Y'all mentioning the fact that blockbuster rentals, Hollywood video rentals, the idea of there were games that lived off of getting rented for the weekend, it's like, yeah, that is kind of the weird charmelian evolution phase of arcade design reaching home consoles, right?

27:36
Matt Storm
Well, and you think this is born out of your metroids of the early days and now the Dark Souls games of now and elden rings and whatever the difficulty is, part of the design purposefully to add challenge and that there's old logic to apply. But these older games, they were just hard to be hard. So you would keep coming back. You think of the Lion King game and the Aladdin game and how later on Capcom and developers who used to work for Capcom said, no, were told to make these stages like this so people would struggle and keep coming back to the game and keep playing it over and over again because they couldn't get through.

28:06
Case
Yeah, like, look at the differences between the Contra games depending on which market you were at. Japan was like the two hits, right? And then they were all robots in. And like, the actual game was easier if you were not in those markets because they wanted Americans to waste their money.

28:22
Matt Storm
Well, and also think about how difficult the perception of difficulty at the time, too. And Jeff and I have talked about this before. In Japan, Super Mario Brothers two was what we got here in the States is lost levels because they just made more stages like Super Mario one, but harder. But they didn't think that the american market could handle it. So instead they made Super Mario Two, which I love, but is a reskin of a different game from Japan and is not the same game. And I think that there's a lot of that design flaw, but it did. I think I would not be surprised if games like this and other difficult beat them ups inspired the people who built challenges now making games now.

29:00
Case
Right.

29:00
Matt Storm
You think about the Scott Pilgrim game, which is a hard beat em up, but it's not impossible because you can get upgrades, you get money. This was difficult for the sake of driving you crazy. Now, games are difficult with more or less some semblance of logic. And as much as I pushed against games like Dark Souls, now, having beaten Dark Souls three and beaten elden ring with a lot of help, I understand the logic. And of course, beating all these Metroid games that are also incredibly difficult. There's not a logic through line to this game of it's just difficult sometimes to mess with you. And I think maybe there is a programming logic that we just don't see, but it definitely doesn't feel like it. No.

29:38
Case
And there's random levels that are way easier in the middle of the game than at the start and at the end.

29:43
Matt Storm
But I think as a whole, it's a game that really does pay homage to the source material in a way that we complain about a lot of. Like think about the Thor game for Xbox 360, or the Green Lantern game for Xbox 360, or all of these movie tie in games that are just to get a quick cash grab. Just said before, this is not that. And you can see it in the care of the level creation. Even I was shocked when I would throw enemies against the wall and the wall would crack or wooden boards would shatter or you dent like a metal gate. That kind of attention to detail doesn't happen in a cash grab.

30:18
Matt Storm
This was clearly the people at Blizzard designing this were fans of Superman on some level or another, or at least were in constant communication with the fans of Superman, the folks over at DC. And either way, created a game that aesthetically, if you're a Superman fan, is absolutely worth playing. And if you're a beat him up fan, is absolutely worth playing. But not without some kind of cheat code to help you get through it, right?

30:42
Case
Yeah. Infinite lies. There were a few moments where we started kind of just tanking shots and it was sort of like, well, whatever. I would say infinite continues definitely makes this game a worthwhile challenge. You'll have some stuttering points, but honestly, even if you're playing it with infinite life, even if you're playing with infinite health, like full on invincible mode, I think it's worth it just to see how they tell the story and what they do. It's remarkably compressed and they do a really good job having some of these really gorgeous environments. I think the first spot where I really took note of the design beyond just being like, oh, I like the sprites and stuff like that was the Cadmus stage.

31:19
Case
Like both the forest outside and then when they actually go into the clone banks and it's so cool looking, they've got all these glowing red tubes where they're growing people. And some of those people might be superboy. It's a very cool section to be in. You can see all this attention to detail that they're putting into what ultimately isn't a game element. It's just there for you to appreciate while you're looking at this kind of basic beat them up thing. But it's like, look how cool this thing is. Look at this comic environment that we're putting out there. The tree stuff is from Jack Kirby. All the cabinet stuff was like stuff he introduced in Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen back in the. That's such a fun detail just to be exploring in this game.

32:01
Matt Storm
I completely agree, and I think having now played through it also as a streamer, as someone who, I would use the term professional very loosely, but as someone who has streamed a lot of games, this was a fun ride to do with the three of you. As well, because in case you hadn't explicitly said it, when I streamed the game, Jeff, Case, and Jmike joined me for commentary and a as a streamer who is often used to streaming alone, it was nice to have other people to just talk while I was focusing on beating the hell out of cyborg. Wouldn't let me get a punch in edgewise, but these older games were a couple of hours long, and that was it, right? That was the style, that was the design. If you were good at them and if you could get through them.

32:39
Matt Storm
I remember the first time I played the Simpsons arcade game on Xbox Live with unlimited continues and finished it in an hour and went, wait. This game was so much longer growing up because I sucked at it and it took a lot of time and a lot of quarters. But that said, it makes for such a fun streaming experience. And while I may not rush back to keep playing Resident Evil two remake for a whole load of reasons besides it just being scary as hell is, this was a complete experience. We got to go on do the thing. This was case's idea. Like, we should stream this game. It's not very long. It'll be a fun companion piece to the episode.

33:10
Matt Storm
And it was, I think, because it's a complete experience under 2 hours, and it makes me curious about other beat them ups of the time that I loved. That took me forever to beat because they were really hard and what it would be like to kind of stream those games because also something we haven't really said here. So this is based on the comic run, which we did mention, but also at the time they did this with a lot of other comics, like specifically adapting comic runs. The most famous one, I think, and the better received one is definitely Spider Man. Maximum Carnage, which was an incredibly well developed and designed game, had multiplayer.

33:45
Matt Storm
And just like, aesthetically, the thing that case is missing here with the bosses, like, you gotten in spades in that game, you fought every villain and even others, of course, still have the generic thugs, but it'd be fun to revisit that and talk to some Spider man fans or maybe even get Yuri Lowenthal to join me, right. To talk about this classic game because he's a so fun, right. And I think this game opened my eyes to that. Just playing it recently, but also I think even at the time was very much, again, not the best of what had come out, but it's definitely not the worst. And it's still really well dedicated to the source material and I think movie tie ins and cheap rip offs were common at that time, too, I'm sure.

34:26
Matt Storm
But I feel like there was more care, because video games in the early days, if we didn't have an IP, we need to adapt something, anything. Let's adapt things. And also at the know, it's no secret that Marvel had fluctuations and DC had fluctuations in how profitable they were. So, of course, if a video game company wants to license their characters so they can make a thing, they're going to say yes, right? A paycheck is a paycheck. And so I think that this is an interesting age from that angle, too, that we'll never get back to. Right. There are less movie tie in games now because the industry has realized that creating your own stories with those characters are more successful. Think about the Spider man game for Ps two and Miles Morales. We're getting the sequel to that. They're making a Wolverine game.

35:07
Matt Storm
We had the Arkham series. We're getting Suicide Squad, which I am not 100% on board with the games as a service angle to it, but that's a different podcast. Sure.

35:18
Geoff Moonen
Happening, though.

35:19
Matt Storm
It sure is. Look, I will say watching that trailer, like, jumping around as King Shark had that kind of hulk ultimate destruction vibe, and I'm here for that. But all of this to, like, I think developers understand better now that original stories based on the characters we love with a new twist are more successful than like, oh, there's a new Batman game. Gotta. Gotta put out that new Batman game for the new Batman movie or whatever else.

35:44
Case
Well, and games generally have changed in terms of how much story there is. This game is, here's a straight up adaptation of the comic story. We're putting it out there, but by the time you get to, like you mentioned, Hulk ultimate destruction, its predecessor was just the movie tie in for Angley's Hulk. Like, it's the same engine that just refined in that game by that point, which was PS two, Xbox. You already had enough cinematics, you had enough stuff going on that you couldn't just do an adaptation of the movie without it being like a derivative product in a way, as opposed to a transcription of it. This comic is taking the story and converting it into a different format. It would feel like a crude translation.

36:21
Case
Like, it would feel like we're adding game elements, and then we're going to have, what, cutscenes that are straight from the movie, either using the actual voice actors or having them just do the same scenes. It would be weird. And so video games becoming more advanced have changed the types of stories you would do. And so the movie tie in game for Hulk was a sequel story. Like, it was set up as like. But the events of the movie occurred, and then you're following up from. And, like, I think that's roughly when you start to see movie tie in games be like, here's a side story. Here's a prequel story. Here's how Wolverine gets to this position.

36:51
Case
All those games are, while they're connected, they're not doing all the beats from the movie yet, but up until that point, that had just been kind of the de facto way to do it. Terminator, you're experiencing Terminator Predator games. You're doing the stuff, theoretically, from the game you were watching. Yeah. So it's fun to look back at some of these ones where it's like, well, the craft that's going into it is like, how are they adapting it? Yeah, it's kind of a middling, like, beat them up game with some interesting mechanic stuff that they're throwing in there. But then here's really cool levels, here's really cool sprite design. The stuff to enjoy isn't the story they're telling, it's how they're telling the story.

37:30
Geoff Moonen
Right. Which is an advantage that video games can have. The way that we appreciate the differences in the character design, the way that we see how they set up the fight or how long or short of a level is. Is there a boss there? Who are we fighting? Those are storytelling elements, or they can be if you choose to use them that way.

37:49
Matt Storm
Yeah.

37:49
Case
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some of the meat and potatoes of this game specifically. So you get kind of sort of six Superman to play, as in it. I say kind of sort of in that you get both Superman at the beginning of the game. In the end of the game, you get mullet Superman. It's the same sprite. They just swap the head, and then you've got the four pretenders.

38:07
Matt Storm
And it would have been nice if.

38:08
Case
They had, like, Supergirl or some other characters in there, especially if they wanted to do two player, but they don't.

38:14
Geoff Moonen
But it's still like, I wanted a booster gold level. Damn it.

38:17
Case
I did.

38:17
Jmike
I really did.

38:18
Geoff Moonen
I wanted a short level where he gets wrecked.

38:22
Matt Storm
Yeah.

38:23
Case
Or Green Lantern at the end would have been also kind of nice because those also could have had the same basic mechanics you're punching but with, like, a green fist instead of like.

38:32
Geoff Moonen
And what's funny is you both have a much higher and a much lower possibility of that happening if it were made today, because now people would go for the deeper cuts or the deeper immersion, but also licensing the characters as individuals gets more expensive. You might have gotten a better package deal back in 1994, but if you can only do three sprites on screen at a time, it's a whole thing.

38:56
Case
So I really liked the general gameplay as Superman, like that actual loop. I rather liked, like, the screen clear attack is probably too strong to have it be unlimited, and it would have been nicer if you could do it more. But it was always visually impressive, particularly the eradicators, I think was my favorite of those base. Superman and steel both do the same. They fly up in the air and come down and crash against the screen, and it's all fine. Cyborg has a grenade, eradicator flows up into the air. The screen goes black, except for his chest symbol, his glasses, and then the glowing hands. And then just everyone just dies.

39:29
Geoff Moonen
Oh, his glasses don't even glow. He just has kind of like a nozgul kind of only cowl hands and death.

39:39
Case
And then Superboy rises up, and Superboy is kind of lame. He rises up and his hands flash, and the screen flickers, which the boy's trying so hard. He's trying.

39:48
Geoff Moonen
He's doing his best.

39:49
Case
Look at him go. The eradicator is my favorite for two reasons. One is that it is actually three reasons. So one is that it is straight up the original panel where we first see him from the comics. It's like a perfect reconstruction of it, whereas all the others are just like kind of generic super actions to take. Two, it's the fastest of them all in terms of just like, he floats up really quickly and just like, bam, everything, as opposed to the longer animations of either throwing the grenade down or flying up into the air. And three, it's the most in character because he's the character who just burn everyone down with his fingertips as opposed to anything else.

40:21
Case
And then in terms of gameplay mechanics, it seemed like the only one I can say for certain is that steel had better reach than anyone. His hitbox was clearly wider with his hammer, but then Superboy seemed to attack faster. And then the other characters all seemed about the same. In terms of stats, I couldn't really tell.

40:39
Matt Storm
Yeah, a lot of it, I think, is aesthetics. It could be a trick of the animations. It's unclear what the advantages are with a game like this. When the Internet wasn't really a thing, when it was out, it's harder to find that information, although I'm sure it's been researched to death now, maybe. But yeah, I like the aesthetics, for sure. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but just the difference between the characters gave the game enough variety that I never felt bored. I mean, I also didn't feel bored because of the way were streaming it. But I like that all of the screen clears, all of the ranged attacks, all of the little things made each character feel like their own, even in a game where it was kind of just a generic beat them up as a through line. Yeah.

41:19
Case
Last night, when you got to the cyborg stage, which is the first Superman you play, you had noticed just how different the character all of a sudden was. Instead of heat vision, he had a gun for a hand, and the animations were notably different. Superman doesn't really kick, but then cyborg and Eradicator both have a lot of kicks in their portfolio. Eradicator has that really cool pile driver throw where he flies up in the air and then slams him into the ground. Superboy had a lot of really cool flips and stuff. While the enemies don't change up that much, like, at least your fighting motions do, which was a good band aid for it all.

41:55
Matt Storm
It feels different, at least. Yeah. Also, we talked about this a little before, but the different nods to the comic book are there too. Like, J Mike kept joking about Cyborg Superman sneak attacks, and every boss fight that you fight him, which there are several, after you quote unquote, defeat him, you knock him off screen, and then he comes back and potshots you off screen and then walks back over to you. He gets in that sneak attack, and I think that's really funny. Again, even with the limits of the narrative storytelling, they kind of put in those moments, they're just very fun and kind of goofy.

42:29
Geoff Moonen
Yeah. And if you don't notice them. And if you do notice them, cool.

42:33
Matt Storm
They're quick.

42:34
Case
Yeah. And it's fun that you get to fight most of these characters as a boss at some point. Like Steel is a fight that eradicator has to go through, which is a fight that happens in the comics. And then Cyborg obviously is the main villain of the story, so he ends up being a boss. Battle for multiple, actually, I think kind of all of them, because fight a version of the cyborg when you're steel, even though it's like him projecting his face into the walls of Engine City. So really every character fights him in some capacity.

43:04
Jmike
It would have been kind of cool to actually have Supergirl show up as kind of like a guardian angel type deal that shields you from lethal attacks occasionally.

43:13
Case
Yeah, I was thinking about that just from a general design standpoint. Like how you could do easy modes in games like this where the Superboy level is straight from his first appearance in the Adventures of Superman and in that sequence in the comics where he's like literally walking down this gang infested street. And it feels very video gamey in the comic as it is. He's actually being protected by the Guardian. Guardian is like up and taking out snipers and preventing different situations from hitting Superboy. And not to say he couldn't have succeeded, but he even comments in the comic, it feels like I'm on easy.

43:45
Geoff Moonen
Mode right now, which again, in a later game or a different or more development time or whatever. What a ridiculous idea for an escort mission where you're playing as the Guardian and you're Pac man twoing this shit and Superboy is just having a fun, sunny day walking down the street and you're taking out all the threats before.

44:03
Case
They can get well, I mean, think about that. You can bring a certain number of assist characters with you and they're just acting in the background to prevent. To take out certain elements that you'd have to face. I'm thinking of things like in Mega Man X two, where there's like that level where it keeps scanning you and the boss gets harder depending on how many times it scans you instead of the scanning mechanism, it was like, all right, well, I've got X number of people assisting. So even though it's not a team game or it's technically making it easier, and you could make it harder by having fewer of them selected. Like Supergirl.

44:36
Geoff Moonen
It's almost like an item.

44:37
Case
Yeah, exactly like Supergirl. Helping in Engine City, for example, would also be the same situation. So it could be your. It's like a reverse escort.

44:46
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, yeah.

44:47
Matt Storm
I mean, I hate to keep comparing it to maximum carnage, but clearly it's my favorite of these kinds of games. But they had characters. Yeah, they had helpers, a bunch of other Morbius, and you could summon them in and they would screen clear, essentially. And so this sounds like a similar idea. Like you could pick up a bunch of different assists and then trigger them to come in and either screen clear or protect you or give you limited vulnerability, invulnerability, things like that. And I think that would have been a fun addition to this. But again, as were talking before, resources are limited on a cartridge like this. And they already had a lot of stuff on screen, so I think adding might have been a challenge. Even if it were for limited. But I mean, that's just a common beat them up thing.

45:24
Matt Storm
I mean, you think about the special attacks that you had in streets of Rage or even in Scott Pilgrim more recently, you call in Knives Chow to attack for you and stuff. I think that, Jmike, this idea makes sense logically because it was just so core to this style of game at the time. And it is a little surprising that.

45:40
Jmike
It'S not actually in this probably budgetary restrictions.

45:43
Case
Right.

45:45
Jmike
And our lack of space on that two megabyte drive, ridiculous.

45:50
Geoff Moonen
You could do a lot on two megabytes. Mega Genesis game sometimes got as small as 128 KB.

45:55
Case
Well, and that's the thing, those games.

45:57
Geoff Moonen
Sucked, but they could do it.

46:00
Case
We talked about this on the stream, that the game being on both Super Nintendo and Genesis meant that they couldn't pull out all the stops to get the tricks to get the game down because they were developing for two different. Like, this isn't like a castle of illusions where it's like, I can't get over how you fit this game onto this cartridge kind of thing.

46:16
Geoff Moonen
And comparing the two a little bit, like I said, the SNES version has a few more scrolling layers in the background. The music is a little different. The Genesis soundtrack sounds like Genesis, which that's, again, to your taste. How do you feel about FM synthesis? Well, there you go.

46:38
Case
Matt, since you were the one playing it, which of the Superman did you have the most fun?

46:42
Matt Storm
Actually controlling the classic Superman was fun just because I love classic Superman of the Superman. But I would say that the easiest to control was eradicator because that special move and just the way he attacked. But also, I think I had the most fun with Steel just because he's kind of the broadest, biggest of the characters. And having that Hammer was very much like playing Don Natello in the old Ninja Turtles, which I think you made that comparison on, like, just having the. Made some stuff easier, but honestly, because of the flying assholes and everything else, it made some things easier and other things harder because he is slow and more purposeful.

47:19
Matt Storm
So I think Steel was my favorite, and steel happens to be one of my favorites of the Superman, but yeah, and then the classic also, especially in the last stage, when you reunite with Eradicator and become the full Superman and go through that last level, even though he plays identically, there's something about that kind of reinvigoration that was fun to play out at the end of that game.

47:40
Case
Yeah, I think one thing that they dropped the ball on is that pure Superman should have been a little bit more powerful. The first couple levels are weirdly hard compared to most of the levels when you're playing the impostors. And it would have been really fun if easy mode was that first two levels where you're playing a Superman until Doomsday shows up and then when you get him at the end, he's back to being like, full power and it's like, oh, I've been missing this because of the imposters. Just know each one shades less than the original.

48:08
Geoff Moonen
Yeah. A sort of taste of power thing which games have been doing forever and I haven't gotten tired of it yet.

48:15
Matt Storm
Yeah, I mean, look, they do it in literally every Metroid game. Samus loses all her powers and every time it's a different reason. And every time we go, yeah, sure, that's fine.

48:24
Case
Well, I mean, it's better than just like the start of super Metroid where it's like, I just didn't have it with me.

48:31
Geoff Moonen
I got here as soon as I could.

48:32
Case
Shit.

48:33
Matt Storm
Yeah. I mean, like Fusion and dread, it's life threatening situations that cause it. It's fine. It is what it. Oh, actually, I think Metroid prime also does. You almost get killed and then you lose all your. Yep, it's fine. It is what it. I mean, I think it would also made it feel more Superman.

48:53
Jmike
Right.

48:53
Matt Storm
Like, because of the kind of power creep in the DC universe, it's just fun for Superman to be powerful, but you only can really feel that if you lack that power for a period of time. Right.

49:06
Case
Yes.

49:07
Geoff Moonen
And that also plays into the idea of these four different figures showing up to try to fill the gap one way or another or certainly in people's hearts and playing as them. What a great way to feel the lack. Like, that's, again, cool storytelling.

49:24
Case
Yeah. Although then the weird part is that you play as the two most powerful of the pretenders for the largest share of those levels. Like, you start with cyborg and then you spend quite a bit of time as eradicator. And both of them are like, eradicator is arguably, like pound for pound in the same weight class as Superman, and then cyborg is just Superman but upgraded. So in both scenarios, it's like, oh, well, that's not quite that scenario, but steel is definitely weaker and Superboy is also definitely weaker. So it would have been fun to open with those two characters a little bit more and both of those would have justified, like street levels and stuff, but economy of storytelling here.

50:00
Geoff Moonen
Yeah. And because each of the stages you don't get to choose who you play as you are locked into whichever character. You could design the levels around those power sets and showcasing the similarities and differences. The idea of, yes, the storyline is three decades old. A lot of us know the twists and turns, even just the larger ones, but you can still play it up a little bit. Like, is the cyborg Superman, the real Superman? He seems to have Kryptonian DNA, all this stuff. You can have fun with that and design to what you're doing, you run into difficulty sometimes. If it's, well, you can choose who you need to be. So you need to be able to do this with everybody. No, you are Superboy in this level.

50:40
Geoff Moonen
How do we make that a superboy level is questions that need to be answered and they might not have had the time or the vocabulary to do that. We are looking at this nearly 30 years on.

50:49
Case
Yeah, but I was impressed with how they brought some of those story points into the levels.

50:54
Geoff Moonen
Oh, yeah.

50:55
Case
Let's shift from characters to stages, particularly for you, since you were the one streaming it. Stages that stood out. What was your favorite? And then what was one that was just like an interesting way to do that in this game.

51:09
Matt Storm
So, I mean, the stages, what was really great is the amount of detail they put in. Right. You could very much just kind of have a static background in these games and not do anything. But we commented on how the night sky in certain stages looked really cool. The cityscape when playing as Superman, I think in the second level, but I think my favorites was when coast City was burning. Whenever were there, the red kind of fiery sky that you often saw in Contra alien wars on the same console, like that kind of swirling effect was really cool. And like, the destructed rubble around you, all of that looked really neat. Gave you the feeling of devastation, which you don't always feel in those games. I think that the last stage is steel.

51:49
Matt Storm
When you're kind of like flying through to fight in the machine city, there's just so much going on. It's so busy, but it's kind of cool. The intricacies in the background that you can see and all the stuff going on, those probably are the two that are top of mind.

52:02
Case
Yeah. I would agree that the coast city burning stage is visually the most aesthetically pleasing of them all. Just the color of red they chose for the night sky looked so ominous. And, yeah, it had this radioactive to it that was. It burned my eyes, but in a way that it burned my eyes. The way that buffalo wings burned my mouth in a way that I really like. Incredible. And it had a really good elements going on, like the destruction spheres that they used to actually bomb the city were on the ground. And those are things that were dropping in the comics. And it was really cool that those were then the mines that you could step on and they would explode and they would leave craters in the ground after you stepped on them. That lingered, which was really cool.

52:41
Case
And then there were just skeletons everywhere. It's a really grim setting.

52:46
Geoff Moonen
Yeah. It suddenly became a horror game almost, in terms of the backdrop.

52:51
Matt Storm
Yeah.

52:51
Case
And I mentioned the Cadmus level also looked really good in terms of translating that. All the engine city stuff looked pretty cool. It looked very contrary once you were in it. There were some really nice purple and green glowing levels going on there that looked like generic alien level in a video game, but worked really well here. Those, I thought, were all good. Obviously, the game is mostly a beat them up. So there's a certain amount of like. Well, it's just kind of a backdrop while you walk in a three quarter overhead perspective from left to right. But I did rather enjoy that they mixed up the game.

53:21
Case
The fact that their shooting stages was really cool, like using Cadmus flying security guards, which are like, that the Cyborg Superman encounters to be like, here's why you have a shooter level that was pretty cool. The Superboy level where he's fighting the missile, I thought was a really good translation and subtly changing the narrative from the comic in a way that made it more video game like. In the comic, Superboy is hanging on to the missile and fighting for dear life to deflect it. But it's not him trying to catch it and deal with lasers that are shooting at him because he's trying to blow up the orbs that are attached to it to make it a less powerful payload.

53:57
Case
But the struggle is a very supermany type struggle where he's literally pressing up against it the way Superman's like stopping a train kind of thing and trying to push it. Know, it's very similar to the Superman returns airplane sequence or the similar sequence in the pilot for the animated series Superman. But here in this game, he's trying to catch up to it. He is attacking the gun turrets that are on it. He's trying to hit the rockets. It was a very video gamey level in a way that I thought was really pleasing and still fit the narrative in the same way. But it was better for a video game than if you were trying to push a rocket out of the way. That wouldn't have worked as a video game.

54:34
Case
It's more dramatic in a comic, or it would have been a dramatic sequence in a movie, but this translation was like, okay, it's different, but the same in all the ways that count. And I really like that.

54:45
Geoff Moonen
I'm now thinking of our conversation yesterday of just adapting Superman into older arcade games, and I'm just now imagining Superboy Missile Command. His sprite is so tiny, and he's just flying around just trying to knock these things out of the way.

54:58
Case
Our conversation last night where it's like, well, what if Mongol basically acted as Donkey Kong, was, like, one of the great conversation points?

55:07
Geoff Moonen
Yes, there's a lot one can do, and they didn't have that at the time. And none of us have ever actually made a video game. We have varying amounts of understanding of the difficulties and intricacies of game development, but we can all just sit here from our chairs.

55:24
Case
This might be a good point to bring up, like, things that were missing from the story. That would have been nice. I kept on venting during it that I wish Mongol was a boss fight in this game, mostly because in the comic, he is one of the two bosses that they deal with.

55:37
Jmike
The fact that war world guides everywhere.

55:40
Case
Yeah, right. Yeah, he's everywhere except the actual.

55:46
Matt Storm
Just more boss fights in general. Like you were saying, case we get a couple in the beginning, and then from there, most of the bosses are other Superman or then the giant face of Cyborg Superman. But it would have been cool to have Mongol or even maybe teaming up with the Justice League members to fight certain people. Like you fight doomsday twice, but having other bosses or even making up some bosses. They created a robot boss one stage, the Cadmus stage, and then didn't really do anything with that even. They could have just given us a really strong looking biker punk to fight. I don't know, just literally anything.

56:22
Case
Well, actually, the big thing is that they were missing characters that should have been there to be boss fights. And then they invented stuff like the drone. The drone could have been like Aron, which is like a super advanced clone of Guardian that they had introduced in that story arc, or just something from Cadmus. But I don't get that mad that the drone was there, but I get mad that the drone was there, but we didn't get things. Again, Mongol is the big one, but there's so many little fights that occur throughout the whole thing. Like, Guy Gardner could have been a really fun fight for the eradicator at one point, I will say it's probably good that they didn't have Cyborg Superman save Bill Clinton in this game because that would have made this even more.

56:58
Geoff Moonen
I mean, Bill Clinton showed up in games before. This is the thing.

57:03
Case
But, yeah, like Stinger, the Spider man knockoff that Superboy fights would have been a really fun boss encounter, actually. That would have been really fun making fun of all the Spider man video games at the time if that was actually what was going on. Like, if he played just like, maximum carnage Spider man, that's like, beat up Spider man.

57:20
Geoff Moonen
Now you're superboy.

57:21
Matt Storm
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah.

57:22
Case
I mean, that's what was going on in the zeitgeist at the time.

57:25
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, I'm trying to remember that. DC versus marvel, the matchups. Was it Spider man versus.

57:28
Case
It was Spider man versus super.

57:30
Geoff Moonen
That's right.

57:30
Case
And that worked really well because it was Ben Riley at the time. So they were both clones, which was really fun. And then when they did the amalgam between the two of them, they could have nods to both, like classic Silver Age Superboy and Spider man stuff. And then also the clone stuff specifically for Ben Riley and for Connell or really the kid because he wasn't Connell yet. He wouldn't be Connell until like, 97, 98, something like that. And then, like, 2002 was when he became Connor. Yeah. Mongol is the big one. Green lantern would have been fun to be there just because coast City is his city. But I do get that having all these characters might be a bit.

58:04
Matt Storm
Yeah, I mean, maybe.

58:06
Case
I still would love to see it. J Mike, so, like, I have subjected you to now months of the death and return of Superman stuff. Is there any big thing that stands out that you wish was in this game?

58:18
Jmike
I mean, I wish we could have gotten to see a little thing with head and shoulders. Fabio, Lex Luthor. Like a little screenshot. And like I said, I do wish, like, Supergirl would have been here as, like, an assist trophy type deal.

58:32
Case
Yeah.

58:33
Jmike
But other than that, from the stories, I think they pretty much covered what they needed to with this game. We don't need all the other side characters. It is a product of his time. This is 94.

58:47
Matt Storm
Super Nintendo game was 94.

58:48
Case
Yeah, it was 94.

58:49
Matt Storm
I was five so old. I mean, something that came up in the stream a bunch, j Mike, that I feel like you agreed with is that there was not enough Bibbo representation.

59:01
Case
Thank you.

59:05
Jmike
When you were fighting as Superman, I guess, or actually even steel, you could have had a storage you passed by that has, I forget the name of Bippo's restaurant you could have had that as one of the little Easter egg things that you're fighting outside of as you're going down the street. That would have been cool as a cool reference, but I think they did a pretty good job of keeping it small without doing too much.

59:36
Geoff Moonen
The largest, most epic story that they were trying to tell in comics at the time, two megabytes.

59:42
Jmike
Two megabytes.

59:44
Geoff Moonen
They did their best. And you know what? When you consider those constraints, very well done.

59:49
Matt Storm
Yeah, I think this reviewed poorly because of how damn difficult it was. I think removing that makes it a pretty fun time.

59:56
Jmike
I mean, it was made to eat quarters, right.

01:00:00
Case
On a console that didn't use quarters. It was made to eat razzles.

01:00:04
Matt Storm
Yeah.

01:00:05
Case
It was just this transitional game design thing. We also were inundated with these types of beat them ups. And now that it is not a genre that is so domineering, we can go back and be like, oh, yeah, it's fun to play these every now and then. Especially removed from it all. Yeah, at the time, again, I beat it with codes. And I think that is an experience that people undervalue sometimes just like, going through and seeing the whole of the game. It's the reason why people watch, like, let's plays sometimes you just want to see what the game looks like and not necessarily need to deal with the difficulty, like the arbitrarily high difficulty of the video game.

01:00:40
Jmike
A lot of those moves were so cheap. The Molotov guys.

01:00:46
Matt Storm
Oh, my God. Cheap from across the room with pinpoint accuracy. It's like, come on, man.

01:00:51
Jmike
The dudes, the claws.

01:00:52
Geoff Moonen
If you are going to take the name Molotov in the gang, your game better be on point.

01:00:58
Matt Storm
That's true.

01:00:58
Case
That's true.

01:01:00
Geoff Moonen
If you're going to be the guy who throws knives in the heavy artillery gang, you better be superhuman with those knives. And maybe they're superhuman with the Molotov. I don't know, comic books.

01:01:12
Case
That's true. Yeah. Secretly, he actually has very limited firepowers. So he doesn't have a letter. He just has the Molotov cocktails and then with his fingers sets the fire to the rag. That's like hanging out a little spark.

01:01:24
Geoff Moonen
There's much he can do. More than you can do.

01:01:26
Case
Yeah.

01:01:26
Geoff Moonen
Superpowers.

01:01:27
Case
Yeah. My superpower is that my fingertip creates a fire the exact size of a zippo lighter. Is that useful in combat? No. Is it useful for camping? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, man, those Molotov guys would have been perfect for Biba. Level. Exactly.

01:01:41
Geoff Moonen
Coming out. Defend the bar.

01:01:44
Case
Superman, favorite hero.

01:01:47
Matt Storm
Yeah.

01:01:47
Case
Yeah. I'm Superman. Bibbo and Dan Turpin. Level. They can have become streets of. It just becomes full on streets of rage at that point.

01:01:56
Jmike
That'd be amazing.

01:01:57
Geoff Moonen
You know what? I've been looking at this. I'm not disappointed, nor am I surprised. This is a lie. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm not surprised that the only Rom hack that exists for the death and return of Superman is an invincibility. So, you know, you can really feel like Superman or we can just use a game genie. But I feel like if we're ever going to get anything like this ROM hacking, and I don't know how deep that goes either, but it's probably out there in the subconscious.

01:02:27
Matt Storm
Yeah.

01:02:27
Case
I would love to see a ROM hack where they took assets from the Justice League task force. That's exactly what I was checking, actually.

01:02:33
Geoff Moonen
These are my tabs right now.

01:02:34
Case
Yeah. And just opened up the levels a little bit because there are some spots where it's like, well, it's cool that you can behave this way, but the game is already. It's cool that you can fly. Like, the flying mechanics are actually rather satisfying in this game once you get used to make sure you only double tap jump and don't triple tap by accident because the third one makes you fall. And the heat vision powers, blaster powers to stun foes and then move in quickly for attacks. Those are satisfying game loops that the game doesn't teach you enough to do or reward you enough, really. Once you get it down, your jump attack is really good. Your flying is how you can move across the screen really fast or just avoid foes.

01:03:09
Case
The stunning part is cool, especially once the motorcycle guys or the flying drone, not the flyers that shoot from above, but when a bad guy is riding on a space bike or whatever, the heat vision or your blaster power is the way to knock them down. And those are all very fun little moments that I wish the game built more on and then didn't have stages like where you're on a city street and you're just like, walking and then a building is just like, in your way.

01:03:33
Geoff Moonen
You got to leap them tall buildings in a single bound. Are you even Superman?

01:03:38
Case
Which, that is cool, but it's so weird that it's just like, oh, yeah, we're rocking down Broadway up. We've stumbled at the building that's directly at the center of Broadway.

01:03:46
Geoff Moonen
Okay, pretty much, yeah.

01:03:49
Case
But those game mechanics are pretty good. And I would have really liked a game that fleshed those out a little bit more. I like that we get those shooter levels. Those are cool. I really like the steel level where he's flying around and he's actually using his hammer as opposed to his gun while he's flying. That feels like a cool level that is very difficult to avoid the attacks. And if it was a little bit more labyrinthian, like, if you actually had to explore a bit in that flying mode, that would have been really like. Could you imagine a Metroidvania set in Engine City where you're like Superman, especially black suit Superman, getting powers as you. Oh, man, that is a game right there.

01:04:23
Geoff Moonen
It's you with the gun. It's the zero suit samus, part of Metroid Zero mission.

01:04:28
Case
Yeah, you get that and steel as your two characters that you can swap between, and they have different capabilities. And Superman gets powered up as he goes. Cool ideas that come from this game. This game has all these. The art assets are so good. There's several things about the gameplay that I really like, but then it's just kind of arbitrarily hard and it's like you can't avoid shots very easily. Like the shooter levels we noted, there's no way to better at them. You just kind of tank it. And either you have enough lives to get through it or you don't because there's no way to avoid them. If you shot down every single one, you're still going to take one shot per wave enemies.

01:05:03
Case
So some of those levels, they're just more waves than others and you're still going to get taken out by it all. So the game is actually rather pretty and that's the biggest reason to play through it all. And the storytelling is pretty good and it's kind of fun to play, but at no point does it make you feel like you have gotten good and thus rewarded for getting good. It just feels like, oh, well, it's just more of this game.

01:05:26
Matt Storm
I completely agree.

01:05:27
Case
Yeah. But it was rather fun to play through. Again, it's a game that I didn't feel the need to buy at the time, even though I was obsessed with 90 Superboy because it was like, yeah, once you played through it, you played through that game and it was cool to come back to it 30 years later.

01:05:42
Matt Storm
Yeah, totally. No, it was a great idea to play it on stream and I had a lot of fun with it, but it is sure a game that I'm like, I think I'm good for the rest of my life to never play it again. But I enjoyed my time with it.

01:05:53
Jmike
Gasp.

01:05:55
Case
Maybe in 30 years when you're pushing 70 and you're like, oh, this will, like, I remember back in marriage.

01:06:00
Matt Storm
Excuse you. I would be.

01:06:04
Geoff Moonen
Nice.

01:06:04
Case
That's why I said pushing. I didn't say you were 70 back in marriage. Yeah, I was able to play as the metropolitan kid. This is a lot of fun to rewatch. I would totally do this again. And like were saying with other comic book games or just like property games, I think that's like the big part where it's an adaptation of a thing that's really fun. The Simpsons beat them up is like a really fun one for similar reasons. And were talking about this on discord for other reasons today where it's like, oh, yeah, look at all the assets that they took from this exact snapshot of season one, season two, Simpsons. Here's the stuff. And what other games have changed as a result of time?

01:06:48
Case
Wildcats is a very different property than when the video game came out, or spawn is a very different property now, actually.

01:06:53
Matt Storm
I take that back.

01:06:54
Geoff Moonen
Well, let's play them. Edgy boy. Beat them up games from the comics.

01:06:58
Case
Yeah. There are so many fun adaptations and it's like, okay, well, how did they adapt this at this time? What is the cool art? What are the fun Easter eggs they're putting in there? What are all those things? As opposed to really focusing on the gameplay stuff? Because it's sometimes just fun to be like, oh, that was a creative thing that they did at this moment. They didn't have to be creative here, but they were in the spot and it's like, those are cool. And this was a good game for that. It's definitely not a game that I need to play repeatedly, but it was certainly a fun one to revisit and be like, oh, that's a really cool shade of red on that level.

01:07:29
Geoff Moonen
It's a useful historical piece.

01:07:30
Case
Yeah. I would definitely recommend anyone who is listening to this episode who has not played through the game or seen it or even played through it recently. Check out the YouTube video. It's really cool. I think our conversation was really fun during the whole thing.

01:07:43
Geoff Moonen
Watch our play.

01:07:44
Matt Storm
Yeah. Or you could play it yourself by totally legal means on the Internet like I did on my very special Super Nintendo.

01:07:51
Geoff Moonen
You can still get a copy of the game.

01:07:52
Matt Storm
It's out there in the wild somewhere.

01:07:57
Case
Yeah. So I had a really good time with this. I'm glad that we did this all. It was a lot of fun last night. I think people should check out that stream. I think that this is a fun post mortem from that stream. I think that, looking back, that this is how I was first given the story of the death and return of Superman. I understand, looking back, this is why I was confused by Claustro versus doomsday, because they look the fucking same, but it gets the beats really like, it completely sidesteps a bunch of story arcs. The whole world without Superman is gone. Superboy, you don't even play until the last quarter of the game. Like steal. Same deal, except he's a boss before that. But it does get all the big beats. It gets the whole cyborg.

01:08:36
Case
But Cyborg shows up and betrays everyone kind of story. And like, cocity is gone, and Cyborg betrayed the eradicator and then he betrays superboy. It just goes and then Superman shows up again. Except you don't get the giant robot that he pilots for whatever reason. You just have him show up immediately in Metropolis. And then they go to get this again. They get the big beats across really well. And that is actually impressive that they could tell that story so quickly. When we tried to do it on the podcast, it took us 7 hours. Yeah, goes to show, I guess so. Thank you both for participating in this. Matt and Jeff, thank you for having us. Yeah, pleasure, Matt.

01:09:17
Matt Storm
So this is your second episode where.

01:09:19
Case
You are not the editor, but we're coming off of you being the editor for all of this. And was there anything that really stood out to you from just listening to us talk for so goddamn long about the story arc that really stuck out when you were playing this game?

01:09:33
Matt Storm
Just the nuance of the storyline. Again, if I've read this whole run, it was a long time ago. I haven't read it recently for sure. And so there were a lot of smaller details about Bibo and about the eradicator and about all these different characters, both the Superman and others that I didn't really know or know, or even the Guardian and stuff like that. These characters that were kind of created for this run and to diversify this world while Superman was quote unquote dead, sleeping, taking a nap. And it was just really fun to kind of learn that. I mean, a lot of my comic book knowledge, especially related to Superman, Shazam, and anything adjacent, has come from editing the show, because I don't read a lot of comics anymore. I used to.

01:10:18
Matt Storm
And I recently got the Matt fraction Hawkeye run as a omnibus that I'm excited to read and excited to take a year and a half to read it because I just don't sit down and read comics or books that often anymore. They're not my premium choice of entertainment above video games and music. And I'm just slower at it. I'm not a speed reader on any level. But that said, this show while editing it was a great resource for learning that and it will continue to be. I'm excited to be a listener again of your show's case because I like them very much, but once I've edited them, I am not re listening to them.

01:10:51
Case
F that because editing them is basically.

01:10:54
Geoff Moonen
Listening to them at least a dozen times in practice.

01:10:58
Matt Storm
Yeah. So it's like folks asked, do you listen to side quests? No, I edit all of them and they are not long and I don't feel a need to revisit them. But sometimes I'll re listen to episodes of funny games or screensnarker stuff because I don't edit those shows, for one. And secondly, we bank especially funny games. We bank far enough back and I'm like, what did I say?

01:11:17
Case
Right?

01:11:17
Matt Storm
Well, I don't remember what this conversation went that kind of. Yeah, it's just, it's been fun to learn a lot more about Superman, a character that for a long time I was just like, he's cheating. He's invulnerable. And to get to learn his nuance and stuff has been really great because he is a really interesting, diverse character. And also, for me to not like Superman as a Jew also felt wrong after a while, I feel like it's just he is analog for my people. And so I don't think that there's, like a favorite moment or reaffirming. Actually, here's my favorite moment from the run, reaffirming. That guy Gardner is an asshole. And he's also the worst Green Lantern company. I'm an old school Hal Jordan fan. I'll keep saying it. We'll fight you all.

01:11:57
Case
Yeah. That is the one thing I really wish was in this game, which is that if eradicator fighting Guy Gardner and Guy Gardner being like, man, you really are the real Superman. I trust you. And then he's like, guy Gardner, what have I done? Fuck, are we the baddies?

01:12:11
Geoff Moonen
Now if this were like a fighting game and it's like the street Fighter breaks the car, it's beat up Guy Gardner.

01:12:17
Matt Storm
Yeah. Break guy Gardner.

01:12:19
Case
Yeah.

01:12:21
Geoff Moonen
That's cruel.

01:12:22
Case
Yeah. Jeff, you had read this long ago, but coming into it, did you do any prep for this game or were you just, like pleasantly surprised to be.

01:12:32
Geoff Moonen
Reminded of basically that I wanted to go into this a little blind once I knew that Matt was playing. If I was going to be the one playing, I'm like, let me do my research. But I've done most of my research between the finishing of the stream and recording this episode, which has been fun. But I wanted to see how much I remembered. I wanted to see how much struck me as a clear nod to the story, which is very helpful chatting with you all. But I wanted to judge it on its merits as the idea of I just rented this from Blockbuster. What have I got? And what we got was a middling beat em up that had a lot of clear love in it and is, yeah, a very worthwhile YouTube watch. I think it's a good historical deep.

01:13:16
Matt Storm
Dive, and it's probably a shorter watch than most listens of any episode of this podcast. So you're good shape.

01:13:25
Case
Yes. Well, we'll be wrapping this up in a moment. I'm really happy that we did this game. It was really fun to go back to it again. It is visually pleasing that I think is the biggest thing going.

01:13:37
Matt Storm
I'm a sucker for sprite art. It'll always be my preference to polygons, as I've expressed many a time. And the sprite work in this game was absolutely impressive. More than I expected, for sure. Without a doubt.

01:13:49
Case
It's not quite as big and bold as a final fight arcade game, but it's doing pretty good for a Super Nintendo game, especially a two Meg Super Nintendo game, two mega power.

01:13:59
Geoff Moonen
I think if they were able to break the repetitive nature of it, whether with different sprites, a different sort of level design, whatever, I think this could have really elevated it. But we got what we yeah, like.

01:14:09
Case
This is a game that really. I wish I could do another pass on because there's so many good elements to it all. And as it is, it's in the upper echelon of Superman video games, especially like pure Superman.

01:14:24
Geoff Moonen
And yet he clears it because we.

01:14:27
Case
Brought up injustice before. But that's not technically a Superman game, even if it's a very Superman focused Justice League game. And so if we're looking at pure Superman games, I'm not going to say this is the best, but it is, like I said, on the upper echelon of it all. We have talked in the past, and we've been meaning to do more video game stuff with you guys to do Superman games, but this is one that stuck out for me because it's one that I had access to in a time where I knew a lot about the character as opposed to the Superman arcade game, which I have played once or twice in later life, but wasn't a very early introduction for me to Superman.

01:15:01
Case
But I just didn't know as much about the comics at the time, so I couldn't even tell you what's going on in there. That would be like Superman trivia or would be fun in those regards because it's like from 89 or something like that and is just a very different kind of game. It is wild thinking about how much of my comic knowledge starts with video games because Spiderman happens the same way for me. Like the Spiderman arcade game was a big way for me to get into the character. And like I said, this is how I first experienced the death and return of Superman story, and it does a pretty good job of telling that story.

01:15:33
Matt Storm
Yeah, I agree.

01:15:34
Case
J Mike, before we go, is there anything that stands out to you that we haven't,

01:15:41
Jmike
I think we know most of the story beats game looked aesthetically pleasing for its time. I would give this, I want to say one of the best, if not the best, Superman iteration in a video game. I think.

01:15:54
Matt Storm
I mean, I'm inclined to agree because the only other Superman games I can think of are Superman returns, which is bad. Superman 64, which is really bad.

01:16:01
Jmike
Mountaintop with this game.

01:16:04
Case
Got to do a replay of the arcade game at some point and then see how that one holds up.

01:16:09
Matt Storm
That's the only one I could imagine that is anywhere near better.

01:16:12
Jmike
I think we hit everything now.

01:16:14
Matt Storm
I think we hit everything pretty bad.

01:16:16
Geoff Moonen
Yeah.

01:16:16
Case
Oh, God.

01:16:17
Jmike
As long as you don't make me play Superman 64 case, I think we're good.

01:16:21
Case
No, we'll make Matt play Superman.

01:16:23
Geoff Moonen
Play shadow Apocalypse.

01:16:26
Matt Storm
Right, exactly. I'm the sucker here. I'm going to be playing all the bad Superman.

01:16:30
Jmike
I would not let you do that to him.

01:16:35
Matt Storm
Thank you.

01:16:36
Case
Well, if we did, we would find cheat codes to make it.

01:16:39
Matt Storm
Not there is not possible. It controls. Like, the problem is the literal control of the game. Unless you could make someone play it for me, there is no way to make that game better.

01:16:49
Case
Isn't it also the timer factor because you're like dying from kryptonite gas. There's probably a cheat code to remove that at least.

01:16:55
Matt Storm
Maybe. I mean, cheat codes weren't as common by the time we got to PlayStation and 64. There was game shark, but they weren't like the pro action replay and the game genie were just not as ubiquitous like the early game genie.

01:17:07
Geoff Moonen
Well, usually you look up cheat codes, you're going to find the action replay or the game shark codes.

01:17:10
Case
But that said, we're probably not going to spend that.

01:17:14
Jmike
Don't you do it, Casey.

01:17:15
Case
Well, we'll figure it out. That's not the first on our priority list in terms of other things to play.

01:17:21
Matt Storm
For. Sure not.

01:17:23
Case
And it's not like we do get video games that frequently on the show. But this was a lot of fun. I'm really glad that we did that stream recommend people check out that YouTube video. I think that was a lot of fun. I hope we do this again.

01:17:33
Matt Storm
Me too.

01:17:34
Case
I think it was like just a ton of fun being like, yeah, for 2 hours we're just going to look at something weird. And it was fun. Really glad that this idea that we had been throwing around for six ish months actually happened. So thank you both for being here. Matt, thank you for all your time putting up with all of my bullshit. And Jeff, I am sorry for all the time you're about to deal with my bullshit.

01:17:58
Geoff Moonen
It's truth justice. I don't know. That'll be fun. Love it.

01:18:06
Case
All right, so before we go, give your plugs.

01:18:09
Geoff Moonen
Yeah, you can find me personally on twitter at jeff makes noise. Jeff is g e o f f. You can also find me on Twitch with the same name. As far as podcasts go, you can hear me on the certain POV network as part of the Fun and Games podcast along with Stormageddon here it is a conversational show about the culture, the history, the future of video games. We've had a lot of fun guests on. It's all about the celebration of gaming and what it can be and what it is for us. It's bringing your personal history through the lens of gaming.

01:18:40
Matt Storm
You can find me on that aforementioned show as well. You can also find a link to which I'm sure Case will include in the show notes because I'm calling him out now to our brand new Patreon, which Jeff and I started at the beginning of the year. It is to literally help support the podcast. All of the money goes right back into it. We have some incredible supporters already. Like one said, Case Aiken at the $10 level, but literally at any level that you can give, it's literally Patreon comfundinggamespod. And literally at any level, we appreciate the help and the support we're so grateful for.

01:19:08
Matt Storm
Our audience and those who are already supporting also rate and review not only this podcast you're currently listening to, but fun and games as well, because that also helps and costs you nothing but three minutes of your time. You can literally go five stars, great, good show, and then just move on. You don't even have funky chicken. Exactly. Besides that, the best place to find me while it still exists is on twitter.com dj underscores stormageddon. I also do a bunch of other podcasts. I host an interview series called cpov autographs that recently shifted to monthly. I host screen Snark with the incredible Rachel Quirky Shank, which is a TV movie pod that all of these folks have been on at one point or another. Also, of course, we just started season five of reignite.

01:19:46
Matt Storm
Frankie and I are taking on the dragon age franchise now. We are done with Mass Effect until Mass Effect five eventually comes out, which I am tentatively very nervous about, but we'll see how that goes. But we are starting with Dragon Age origins. We are as of when this comes out, like three or four episodes in and it's been a good time, it's fun to switch genres, switch games. I'm curious to see how this one evolves since the Mass Effect run over, four seasons did change quite a bit, and so this is a new way to head out. And then, of course, I'm the editor for the game Informer show, which is an incredible podcast from the folks over at Game Informer. I've been reading that magazine since I was a kid, so to be the editor for the show is kind of neat.

01:20:22
Matt Storm
Alex van Aiken is an incredible host, and they talk about the lady scamming news and then in the playlist what games they've been playing. I've been on a bunch of times, so you can start with those episodes if you're looking for a good place to jump in. And it's definitely worth checking out. And then I do a ton of other shit too, so just DJ underscore stormage again on Twitter are the best places to find me.

01:20:38
Case
I am a little disappointed that you jump ship from this Aiken to the lesser Aiken, but I understand spelled differently, actually. I know.

01:20:47
Geoff Moonen
And if any Superman game is one of your favorites, the fun and Games podcast feed does also feature a show called Sidequest that is different hosts talking about their favorite game, people in and out of the video games industry. And if Superman 64 is your favorite game and you really want to talk about it, by all means it's about celebration of gaming. And if you appreciate other sorts of deep dives into other nerdy properties. I also edit the Gum Jabbar podcast on lore party network.

01:21:14
Matt Storm
Yes.

01:21:14
Case
Yeah, which is a great show that I'm also a patron for.

01:21:17
Geoff Moonen
I hear your name all the time. Who is this case Aiken?

01:21:23
Matt Storm
Spread the love around.

01:21:24
Geoff Moonen
Cuisat's Hatterat. Patron of Gumjabar, Potter and family.

01:21:28
Case
Right? We got to support everyone.

01:21:31
Geoff Moonen
I love it.

01:21:31
Matt Storm
Yeah, it's true.

01:21:32
Case
Yeah. Everyone should check out all the projects that you're working on that I'm privately funding.

01:21:38
Geoff Moonen
The quiet patron of the arts. Once you do enough, it's going to be like a whole big supervillain turn. I'm really looking forward to it. My villain years, your max Lord villain years.

01:21:51
Case
And then my wife has Wonder Woman will snap my deck, and it'll be all. So everyone should check those things out. J Mike. Where can they find you and follow you?

01:22:00
Jmike
Oh, man. I have to go behind these guys.

01:22:02
Matt Storm
Oh, God. Well, you can find pressure.

01:22:05
Jmike
I know. Well, I'm still on Twitter for now. While it's still alive, while it's certainly on fire right now. J Mike 101. I respond to people, post funny gifts, crack a couple of jokes here or there. Those type of things.

01:22:17
Geoff Moonen
Love it.

01:22:18
Case
Well, I'm sure when it finally explodes, you will rock it away from the burning Twitter to bring truth, justice in the certain po way to whatever social media site we decide is the new place that we're going to be hanging out.

01:22:30
Geoff Moonen
Last son of Twitter hurtling across the blogosphere, where will he land?

01:22:36
Case
But for now, I am also mostly found on Twitter at case aiken. You can find me on Instagram at ketsukuado five because I am holding on to that damn aim screen name for dear life. I went through a panic attack last night on the Twitch stream. Like, should I change my Twitch handle to case Aiken so people actually know who I am? And I was like, I would have to risk losing the Ketzle coatle five on Twitch. Also, I was like, can't do it. Can't do it. Guys.

01:23:01
Geoff Moonen
Some folks go entirely by handles. This is fine.

01:23:03
Case
But yeah, so Instagram and Twitch, ketsuko, Adele five. Not that I stream myself. So you can find me on Twitch. That's all I will say. But everywhere else, it's at case Aiken, the show you can find on Twitter at pod. And you can find past episodes of this show over@certainpov.com along with fun and games, along with so many other great shows. Like the four of us. Here are the people who built this network. We had Ben and Addie with us, but fun and games coming on the network is how it became not just a spinoff of certain POV like how it actually became a collection of people working on stuff. And so I'm so glad to do projects with you both because it harkens back to the roots. It harkens back to the community that we've been trying to build.

01:23:46
Case
And we have so many great shows on the network now that we never would have imagined would have been part of it.

01:23:51
Geoff Moonen
Absolutely.

01:23:52
Case
Like, United States of women is such a cool project that I can't believe we have on here. Circling Cersei is another great one. So many incredible works by people who, it's amazing that we have them in our circle of digital friends out there. And so I really encourage everyone to check out all the stuff@certainpov.com. To check out more episodes of this show, to check out fun and games, to see the cool, creative things. All that's at certainpov.com or on whatever podcast player you like@certainpov.com. And in all of our show notes, you can find links to our discord server where you can interact with all of us directly. Please. It's a lot of fun. We have really incredible conversations because we've built out such a cool community.

01:24:30
Case
Like, the music channel has gotten huge and it's wonderful to see these really interesting conversations that just wouldn't have happened six years ago when we started this show. So it's awesome. I love this community. Please support it. And until next time, stay super man.

01:24:49
Jmike
Men of steel is a certain POV production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is scored and edited by.

01:24:58
Case
Jeff Moonit, and our logo and episode art is by Case Aiken.

01:25:06
Matt Storm
You can leave that in Jeff. It's fine.

01:25:08
Geoff Moonen
I do what I want. I edit now.

01:25:11
Matt Storm
Yeah, you are the editor. Now. The editor.

01:25:16
Case
Have you ever seen something in a theater that you just couldn't explain?

01:25:20
Matt Storm
Or have you ever thought about if dying really ain't that bad?

01:25:24
Case
And do you spend sleepless nights wondering exactly what happened in Natalie Wood that.

01:25:28
Geoff Moonen
Night on the boat?

01:25:28
Matt Storm
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it's time for you to exit stage death.

01:25:34
Case
Exit Stage Death is the chilling true stories behind your favorite Broadway shows, releasing biweekly on Tuesday starting May 24.

01:25:42
Matt Storm
So if you want to find out.

01:25:44
Case
Which Broadway House is the most haunted, talk about what killed our favorite Broadway flops and learn about out the murderous.

01:25:50
Matt Storm
Path of mama Rose that took gypsy Roselee to stardom.

01:25:54
Case
It's time for places. Actors. Thank you, places.

01:25:57
Matt Storm
It's time to exit stage death.

01:26:05
Case
Cpov certainpov.com.

Overview:

●      The meeting discussed the Men of Steel podcast wrapping up their conversation on the death and return of Superman, focusing on the video game adaptation. Hosts Case Aiken and Jmike Folson were joined by Matt Storm and Geoff Moonen from Fun and Games with Matt and Jeff for an engaging discussion, mentioning streaming gameplay on Super Nintendo and shared insights into experiencing the storyline through video games.

●      Delving into nostalgic experiences with renting games like "Death and Return of Superman," they highlighted its significance when it was released in 1994. The conversation explored the game's development, including its faithful adaptation to comic storylines, unique character abilities, and attention to detail in level creation, despite challenges faced by developers due to limited resources.

●      Overall, the meeting provided valuable insights into creatively adapting comic narratives into video games and reflected on nostalgic gaming experiences from past eras. The participants praised the attention to detail in level backgrounds and character powersets, acknowledging technological limitations of the time and discussing potential enhancements to gameplay mechanics and storytelling elements based on the comics lore.

●      The discussion revealed a deep appreciation for sprite art and translating key story elements from 'The Death and Return of Superman' comic arc into a video game format. Participants shared their experiences with playing older arcade games like Contra, expressing nostalgia for classic arcade games and how they influence their understanding of popular characters. The meeting concluded with reflections on community building within podcast networks like CertainPOV, encouraging listeners to explore various shows hosted by network members.

Outline:

●      Chapter 1: Discussion on Video Game Adaptation (01:16 - 37:49)

●      01:16: Emphasis on the significance of video game adaptation in storytelling.

●      10:44: Exploring the narrative differences between movie tie-in games and their adaptability.

●      36:05: Evolution of video game storytelling due to advancements in technology.

●      37:25: Appreciation for unique storytelling elements in video game adaptations.

●      Chapter 2: Analysis of Game Design and Story Elements (40:36 - 57:53)

●      40:36: Evaluation of the game's narrative limitations and fun elements.

●      42:21: Incorporation of enjoyable and goofy moments in the game design.

●      49:50: Discussion on character design and economy of storytelling.

●      57:53: Completion of the story analysis with a focus on completeness.

●      Chapter 3: Stage Design and Storytelling (51:01 - 55:24)

●      51:01: Highlighting the intricate details and background elements in stage design.

●      54:34: Comparison of dramatic sequences in comics and movies to game adaptation.

●      55:24: Addressing missing elements from the story adaptation process.

●      Chapter 4: Reflections and Recommendations (1:06:42 - 1:26:05)

●      1:06:42: Reflection on the nuanced storyline and engaging gameplay elements.

●      1:09:01: Recommendation for viewers to explore the game through a YouTube video.

●      1:25:28: Introduction to a new podcast series "Exit Stage Death" and its release details.

●      This outline provides a structured overview of the key discussion points in the transcript, focusing on the critical aspects of video game adaptation, game design elements, stage storytelling, and reflections on the gameplay experience.

Action items:

●      Jmike

●      Look into how big the game was (05:39)

●      Consider adding Supergirl for assistance in-game (41:12)

●      Respond to people, post funny gifs, crack jokes on Twitter (1:22:06)

●      Matt

●      Take the idea of a Booster Gold level into consideration (32:07)

●      Explore the concept of having assist characters with limited abilities to support gameplay (44:24)

●      Jeff Moon

●      Do more research for the game before playing (49:35)

●      Consider changing Twitch handle to match other platforms (1:22:58)

Notes:

●      🎮 Discussion on Video Game

●      Video game holds personal importance

●      Use of game genie codes for enhanced gameplay

●      Splitting into blue and red streams for different perspectives

●      Working with restrictions and limitations

●      📚 Storytelling Elements in the Game

●      Focus on how the story is told rather than the story itself

●      Importance of storytelling elements like bosses and side quests

●      Designing levels around power sets

●      🧩 Game Design and Level Creation

●      Creating levels based on power sets

●      Exploration of twists and turns in gameplay

●      Intricacies in background design

●      🌟 Engagement and Community Building

●      Encouraging audience to rate and review the podcast

●      Promoting interaction through social media and Discord

●      Building a strong community

●      🎤 Podcast Production and Promotion

●      Mention of podcast episodes and show notes

●      Links to Discord server for direct interaction

●      Editor transition and call to action for listeners

●      🎭 Closing Remarks and Sign-off

●      Transition to closing the meeting

●      Acknowledgment of the team and their roles

●      Invitation to visit the podcast website