With the new Green Lantern movie coming out next Friday and Infamous 2 coming out last Tuesday (argh, I need more time!) it’s got me thinking about superheroes… specifically, superhero video games and, yes, how much they tend to be less than satisfactory (and the shop teacher’s handful of games that are actually worth recommending to others).
In thinking about why most superhero games aren’t good, the first thing that comes to mind is movie tie-ins and how those things tend to be shoveled out to make the arbitrary deadline of “when the movie comes out” and more emphasis is put on how “if you liked the movie, you’ll love the game!” than on making the game worth playing… as such, it’s fair to say (with one exception that we’ll get to) that video games tied to a superhero movie are just going to be bad. Ignoring those, though, why are they tend to be bad?
Well, for one thing, the characters in question tend to limit the type of gameplay you can expect. Let’s use the biggest example there is: Superman. Now, you may not know this, but the Superman videogames are almost universally condemned as being craptacular (with Superman 64 being considered one of the worst games, like, ever). The only Superman game that comes to mind as being “pretty good, I guess” is the Superman game that came out for the Atari in 1979. Since then, it’s all been downhill.
Why? Well, the easiest thing to note is that to include Superman’s powers of invulnerability is to turn the video game into something much less interesting to play. For example, if you’re doing a side-scrolling fighter (a la Final Fight), you’re going to have people asking not only “why did a guy with a chainsaw hurt Superman?” but “why isn’t Superman speeding, or using his breath, or his heat vision, or just *FLYING* over all of these people hitting him with chainsaws to get to the end of the level?”
If you were playing other Superheroes (non-flyers, anyway), you wouldn’t even think of these questions. Put Superman in there and you’re wondering why a guy with a gun can shoot him and kill him. And don’t say “Kryptonite”. That’s bullcrap. All umpteen hundred bad guys on the level won’t have unlimited kryptonite bullets and/or chainsaws.
Right there we see that the *IDEA* of Superman is enough to make a video game somewhat crappier than if, oh, Batman was the hero. A guy coming at Batman with a chainsaw? Yeah, you can see why you might want a couple more quarters.
How many heroes have this much in common with Superman? Well, off the top of my head (for various reasons), are Thor and Green Lantern. Thor, being a god, has many of the same problems with combat as Supes. “Wait, a big guy with a jackhammer can take out a deity?” Green Lantern, not only being a guy who has gone toe to toe with Superman, has the limitation of being able to do anything that a ring wielder can imagine… so when you’re playing a video game, you’re probably imagining something much more awesome than the stuff the video game is having you imagine. They’re using fist when you’d probably want something from an Ed Hardy t-shirt (hey, I wouldn’t wear one, but if I was hitting a burglar in the face, I’d rather hit him with a skull eating a rose-covered rattlesnake than a mere fist).
So even without getting into the fact that the videogames related to superheroes in recent years (decades) have been shovelware for the most part (which accounts for 90% of the games being disappointing on a gameplay level), the fact that the main protagonist has powers that not only is he not using but, for some reason (no, not kryptonite), does not seem to have *AT ALL* wrecks the “fun to play” part of the game for the player.
So which games *ARE* fun then? Which Superheroes are conducive to playing a game around *AND* have actually had a decent game or two about them? Spiderman and Batman. Why? Well… we’ll get into that tomorrow.
Parahuman storylines are hard to do in *comics*, let alone movies or videogames or television shows.
The thing that always cracks me up when I see bad parahuman storylines is how evident it is that the person in charge of delivering the experience obviously either never read comic books, or never got any sophistication out of the experience.
Anybody who ever read Superman for more than one writer’s run knows that it’s really hard to have dramatic tension when the guy in question is either invulnerable or dying. When the Heroes television show was in its first season, I remember watching it and saying, “This guy’s a superhero neophyte. He’s making a huge basic mistake, here. Four unstoppable characters? A teleporting time traveler, two power absorption dudes and a telepath? How can they interact at all?” Second season answer: one guy is banished to the past, one forgets who he is, one loses his power, and the last guy is going through the “I’m a telepath and I can’t handle the INPUT!!!” storyline.
I’ve never played many of the superhero genre videogames, all the games I’ve even tried out a bit have been really disappointing. If you were going to make an interesting one, a Batman one with lots of puzzles might work. You could do a Dr. Strange/Dr. Fate one with a completely different reality (think the new Mickey Mouse game). You could make the Silver Surfer interesting by making him a galactic agent and having him trying to stop a war or something…
Yeah, there are some seeds for a future essay in here…
The X-Men and Captain America sidescrolling 4-player arcade beat ’em ups were a lot of fun.
I was never into those comics, though, so I can’t say if they worked with the actual characters. Those type games reduce all characters to different skins on the same sprites, though, so I am guessing they don’t work.
But they were definitely fun.
I think I’m deliberately ignoring the stand-up games. Those had more than a few really cool ones (the fighting games weren’t bad fighting games, for example).
The four (or six) player games were games that I poured tokens into on many a Friday night. Ah, team-building.
But that’s a different experience than a single-player game on a console. (For example: Gauntlet was fun playing when you only had 4 quarters. If you have an emulator, however, you’ll quickly tire of it. I imagine the four (or six!) player games are the same way.
I don’t know about good characters, but without question the worst character to make a game about would be Dr Manhattan. Add Superman’s power set to the Green Lantern’s and then add teleportation and omniscience. Oh, and take away Superman’s one weakness.
It took a master storyteller to make him work as a character at all, but as a computer game protagonist? No chance.
Since I do not play games, I cannot comment very well, but to do a game with one of the true super powers (like Superman) it seems like you would have to do something other than his health as a restrainnig factor. If you make it more like a puzzle game where ther is a burning building and you need to figure out how to save all the people stuck inside before it crashes. Then a few times in the game he can face another true super power (like Darkside) and actually have health to worry about.
Still, the lower the power level of the superhero, the more the game can fit the standard molds (run to the right, etc.).
Still, GL would most likely be the most difficult since you should be able to do almost ANYTHING with the ring. How do you make a game than flexible?
Actually, Death and Return of Superman is considered one of the better ones. Yes, there’s the bit about guys with chainsaws (which was counterbalanced by Superman being able to throw them off buildings to their death) but it was praised for being fun and fairly true to the source material.
The problem with the Big Blue Brick is that you have a character who is essentially God (especially when JMS writes him). His main restricting factor is morals and that’s not something that will play well in a video game because most people playing the video game will not be hindered by such things.
Sure, they’ve tried. In a more recent Superman game, they gave Metropolis health and, if you let Metallo wreck too much shit, then you lost. In MK vs DC, they pointed out that Superman is vulnerable to magic. Both fell flat. The first one due to aggravating gameplay and constant voice comments. The second because it didn’t address the fact “Okay, Scorpion can hurt me if he lays a hand on me. Fine, guess I’ll just have to punch him at the speed of light.” (Then again, even in the comics, Superman’s relationship to magic is not well-defined. Maybe they’ll do so in the reboot.)
But it still comes down to Superman has virtually no weaknesses and more powers than he can remember. (Remember how Pre-crisis Superman could travel through time and all his various visions and breaths? Hell, I imagine the stuff under his fingernails could cure cancer.) That’s hard to work into a video game.