EA popped in the other day to show us how Superman Returns is progressing, and, as it turns out, it's chugging along quite nicely. There haven't been many new additions to the gameplay side of things, so the mechanics that we saw at E3 are the same as we remembered them. The major differences come from the level of polish and detail infused into every pixel - Superman Returns looks spectacular even if it plays like half a dozen other games based on comics.

Metropolis itself is really starting to live up to its starring role as the main victim of the game. A sprawling 80 square miles of skyscrapers and industrial factories, developer EA Tiburon had to comb through ancient tombs back at the DC offices in New York to construct the first-ever official complete map of the mega-city. Dotted with destructible goodies that Superman can grab and throw around, Metropolis is the focus of the entire game - serving as a health bar for the indestructible Man of Steel (because he's indestructible, duh). While we already knew that the goal is to keep the city from harm, we learned that rescuing Metropolis-ites (Metropolitans?) and delivering them to a hospital or an ambulance (or even delivering the ambulance to the hospital by picking it up and flying it there) would restore the cities health.