By, Frank Hunter

We all spent most of our childhoods wishing we could fly, bust through walls, or shoot inexplicable laser blasts out of our eyes. If most of you are like me, these fantasies never came true. Some, like being able to fire strands of sticky white goo (though this still requires a Y chromosome and would be infinitely more precise if it fired from the wrist), magically did. These are still much less impressive in real life than in comic books. Naturally, we should always have been able to look to video games satisfy these insatiable urges, but for some reason the developers never managed to get the experience quite right.

Superhero games have always been subpar, and I for one cannot figure out why. All the elements for a superb title come gift-wrapped with almost any superhero franchise. Exciting powers, an excuse for gratuitous violence, and colorful characters are just the tip of the iceberg. But, no matter what the potential was, every title for some fifteen years of gaming was outshined by a tripped out Italian plumber, or a strange blue mammal with an unfortunate attitude. Whether you were solving tiresome, repetitive puzzles in platformer format (Spider Man & the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge), or harnessing the power of an alien god to fly through a series of loops (Superman 64), every title really left something to be desired.*

Recently, or should I say finally, we have begun to see a turnaround. The most recent Spider Man game, Web of Shadows, created a fairly interesting, if slightly repetitive sandbox title: one, at any rate, that was fun to play. Batman’s current incarnation, Arkham Asylum, presents a stealth action game that gives even Splinter Cell a run for its money. Cryptic Studios’ second foray into the MMO field with Champions Online does not give us anything truly revolutionary, but it makes some nice innovations and presents a fun distraction from an arena long monopolized by a certain Blizzard title that will remain nameless. In short, superhero games are getting gradually better.

Whether this is due to improving technology or just to developers with the balls get it right, I say kudos. Kudos to succeeding in a field that should have been successful at the get-go. Kudos to finally giving us comic book junkies what we actually want. Kudos to actually raising the bar. With new action titles like Star Wars: the Force Unleashed and Assassin’s Creed 2 pushing the envelope on what can be done with current-gen machines, a gamer can really look forward to the next appearance of a Superman or Spawn game with anticipation. We can finally take off our caped pajamas, and step into the tights of superheroes in the way we’ve always wanted. It doesn’t get us out of our parents’ basements, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.

*Spider Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage is the strange, notable exception.

(Frank Hunter is a contributing writer at www.AmpedGaming.com)

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