Hulk press X

The games industry has been sucking the tit of comics like a lactation fetishist for more years than Hollywood's been clambering for the other nipple. And very much like a lactation fetishist they produce some of the worst shit ever. Back in the days of the Mega Drive (that's Genesis to you over the pond) there was one or two blossoms fertilized by that pale green poo (X-Men and X-Men 2 being the only ones that really spring to mind) but for the most part they were pale imitations of existing titles with different sprites. The reason for this is if you're going to play at being a superhero you want all the perks that being a superhero brings to the forum. If I'm going to be Superman or the Hulk I want to be an unstoppable juggernaut capable of bringing down multiple shades of smackery, not get shot a few times by a man with a spud gun and loose a life before I can even reach the pathetic little dweeb because playing the afore mentioned juggernaut would massively un-balance the game. And thus was the problem with comic adaptations. These days there are people with technology that can bring a comic to life in your hands. The level of sophistication in today's gaming environment lends itself perfectly to balancing a super powerful character against the rest of the game by using leveling methods and various story telling techniques that simply weren't available back in the nineties. Compare the original Sega Hulk game. A side scrolling platformer were the Hulk takes more hits than a prostitute holding back on her pimp. This for the Hulk of comics wouldn't be a problem he would simply bitch slap his way through the throngs and crush everything in between him and his goal and then crush that to. But the Sega Hulk winces like afore mentioned prostitute and after three gentle taps from that afore mentioned dweeb, reverts to Bruce Banner and then you're playing a skinny little man wearing nothing more than a pair of purple trousers about to die because if the Hulk can't survive this game skinny lad better give it toes out of dodge. Now take Activision's Hulk Ultimate Destruction on the PS2. Imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto where instead of playing a snotty car thief from the eighties you are The Hulk and instead of police you have giant robots and the army. You still have the police to but unlike Sega Hulk, PS2 Hulk can casually walk up to them and smack them into the PS3. You pick up more moves and fighting abilities as you go, including the ability to ride helicopters and rip a police car in two for boxing gloves (ironically later mined for the Incredible Hulk movie thus proving that Hollywood sucks harder than the game industry). And by god you can take more poundings than the American Economy before falling into a coma rather than dieing outright. Most Marvel games these days are pretty good. Team comics like X-Men get the role-playing treatment while others like Spider-Man and the afore mentioned Hulk get a sandbox to play in. But there are still problems. While Marvel characters lend themselves to being digitized far easier these days, DC's crowd are frankly impossible. It's a bit like trying to make a sprite of God for Street Fighter the Divine Edition. You wind up with the truly horrible DC Vs Mortal Combat.

DC has yet to solve the problem of how to have a godlike being as a believable playable character. Because when Superman was on the Sega he wasn’t really what you would call ‘super’. He could leap almost half the screen height, he wasn’t quite as fast the controls reaction time and he was almost powerful enough to take a bin lid in the face. Though three or four bin lids and he’d be down faster the Frank Bruno in a Tyson fight. The problem being if you’re Superman you are kind of uneven in terms of game play. Rather like being the fat kid on the seesaw. Superman Returns on the PS2 had a clever but fundamentally flawed idea when it came to balancing out the character. Instead of having the Man of Steel be the Man of Putty they made the city into the lifebar. That is, the more the city took damage the closer Superman got to Game Over. Not you may think a bad idea but when it precludes the sandbox aspect of the game and prevents you from going gonzo crazy and tearing the place up fighting the latest monster/gorilla/robot menace just in case you knock over the falafel stand and hit Game Over it removes the sense of freedom and enforces a moral code a lot of us don’t want when we get home from a hard day at work and all we want to do is destroy shit.

So to make a good game from a comic you need to have a massive sandbox and a Marvel character/characters because they are often flawed in all the right ways and lend themselves to the type of learning curve required in game playing. Throw in a bunch of unlockables from the comics and more goodies than a piñata at Hugh Heffner’s birthday bash and it will indeed feel like you are at Heff’s pad but instead of silicon woman pootleing about in their scanties pouting a lot you’ll be with a collection of muscle bound men in very tight outfits smacking each other around.