Let's talk about Spider-Man games! (or Superhero Games in General)

King of Posters
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Yeah, I only played the demo of Superman Returns and wasn’t too keen on how it played or how they visually tried to straddle the line between the animated series art style and the movie’s.

I think we got pretty close with the late-PS2 open world games. Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Spider-Man 2 are very close to as good as those characters can get. Batman will be problematic because no one’s figured out how to make ‘be a detective’ interesting and a mainstream target will have to compromise any stealth systems (see: thread where we all complain about how boring Arkham is).

Iron Man should be a perfect blend of mech and flight games and the recent Sega game was aimed in the right direction but just not very good and very rushed.

It’s funny that super heroes are now much, much bigger IPs than they’ve ever been at exactly the same time that game budgets have grown too large to make licensed games worthwhile on consoles. Warner Bros might dip back in if they ever figure out their movies but Disney seems content to just kick their game licenses every once in a while to make sure it’s the highest dollars/investment ratio possible.

What are the good original superhero games? Prototype, as discussed, is almost one (but I seriously can’t enjoy the aesthetic of freedom and power in a world that gross; we can take ludonarrative dissonance out of storage and wrap it around Prototype). Gravity Rush hits the aesthetic! and I’d love it a lot without the tilt controls so maybe the new one will be great.

If we broaden past the ‘superhero’ aesthetic, we’re talking about ‘open-world beat-em-ups with powerful traversal’, broadly.

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I mean, every videogame is a superhero game. Licensed superheroes don’t have much above made-for-videogame characters unless their ability (like Spiderman’s) is especially interesting. It’s not difficult to make the player feel powerful, but it’s difficult to feel more powerful than any other game, to the point of truly justifying the character’s mythos.

Measured by the standard of “feels heroically powerful”, God of War.

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Saints Row 4

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Crackdown

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Boogerman

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i thought about this when saints row 4 came out. like, it’s a big deal that the boss gets superpowers, but they already had superhuman durability and almost instant healing, which just went by unacknowledged by everyone around them

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Because that’s pretty much a trait of every video game ever.

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I don’t think we dug enough on that if you’re going to evoke it again. Because Prototype was the weirdest property to come out of the ‘superhero boom’ It was a damn chopshop game like nothing else before or after it. When you swapped powers you swapped between character animations and properties of different games, Hulk, Wolverine (X2), Venom, and even his jump was pretty much Spider-Man’s Heck the map was pretty much their ‘New York’ map they re-giggered for each various game. But this one was licenced by DC? Too weird.

What’s worse is I wanted to go back and play through the game a couple of weeks ago, but the PC port is so broke I couldn’t. The sound is out of wack with the game and I can’t even get the right aspect ratio.

Of course the better version of playing with this idea is Infamous. IN famous really puts the whole supers thing on a pedestal like Rising Stars or the few TV shows in this vein. I think they found a good route for movment, if you’re on a power line you can truck across the city, but if you need to deal with something you have to scramble. It worked really well better than any o the spider games wish was good for distance but when you need to transition from movement to combat you either ‘hit y’ to divekick, which was so safe you could just do it endlessly, or try to drop in and duke it out, for points and glory.

Personally I think Infamous and Saints Row 4 are the ‘best’ Superhero games. But I’d but Web of Shadows up there too. But there’s a litney of other ones

The related Lego games, the DC scribblenaughts game, ALL the movie games, various X-men, Spider-man, Hulk, Cap, Superman, the Batman games, Ultimate Alliance (apparently don’t buy the ports),

But I think @Broco brings up an interesting point. Where’s the line here? I mean most videogames could be ‘superhero games’ But I think there’s a big line. Freedom of movement seems to be a big factor for being a superhero. But I just played the latest TMNT game, and I don’t think that would count, some would because of the history of the characters, but I think then you’d have to count Battle toads and by extension Double Dragon as superheros and I wouldn’t put them in there.

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Infamous particularly doesn’t scratch this itch for me. The focus on third-person shooting gameplay and the inarticulate attempts to balance fights against small groups keep the player disempowered enough that I never felt the maximalism I got out of late-PS2 era superhero games. I’m probably being picky! but this accumulation of small differences resulted in me never caring about these games as much since.

The traversal, too, is slower and ekes out a deliberate halfway point. They want every action to be considered but you’re then operating on a smaller scale, I think. Near the end of the PS4 Infamous they started to go all out (read: they threw up their hands at their notions of balance) but by then it had become aesthetically ugly enough (the Diablo 3 parody powers were real poor) and I was worn down enough that I just wanted out.

Crackdown is great! Co-op is a fine direction to take this in and the ability to gum blocks of traffic is lovely. They’re still committed to support shooter gameplay and it slows the pace down a lot, unfortunately. The announcer definitely pushes it as close as it gets to comic book when the color washes aren’t carrying the art’s weight.

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Iron Man on the GBA is a fun ass platformer and about as good as the strongest entries in the classic megaman series and that is a pretty Hot Take

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Yeah I think the standard SB answers for this question are Saints Row 4, Crackdown and Just Cause 3.

If what you like is getting really, really high in the air in 3D environments that feel huge: Jumping Flash.

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The best game about having superpowers is Syndocate B)

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In a moment of Gorblax-style curiosity, I looked up what franchise has more games with the same title, Alien Vs. Predator or Spider-Man.

Neither of them are as bad as I thought.

There’s 6 Alien vs. Predator and 3 Aliens Vs. Predator. I thought they were all singular.

There are 2 games titled ‘Spider-Man,’ 3 ‘The Amazing Spider-Man.’ Spider-Man is way better at having subtitles, I guess.

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-amazing -peter parker - sensation -spectacular - ultimate - unlimited - maximum -giant size - Team-Up - Superior -Web of

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The worst Spiderman game was Dr Doom’s Revenge.
It’s a single player fighting game. That by itself immediately makes it bad, but it is clunky as all heck.
It makes other single player fighting games look good.

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I think you might be misremembering Hulk:UD because you could most certainly not level the whole city in that game. You couldn’t destroy most of the buildings in the City level at all, but maybe a few in the Desert area? But i think overall, there wasn’t a lot of building destrcution going on. There was some great “making a skateboard out of a bus” though, so that works.

UD was a pretty awesomely fun game though, and really the first Prototype was a nice continuation of this. P2 was kinda dull though. P1 is sorta wonderful for having super powers, as long as you don’t mind that it makes you into a murder machine (which the game itself addresses a bit, though it definitely comes off as trying to have its murdercake and not feel any guilt about it).

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prototype gets points for murdercake though because you really aren’t playing as something with any moral compass at all

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oh yeah, that is what i was trying to get at. like it makes sense in the story, but the way it is presented kinda makes the story come off a bit like they built a murdergame, and then were like “oh man we gotta make it so people don’t feel bad for murdering everyone” at the end.

still really like the game, though.

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Oh. It’s been so long since I played it. I must be remembering how I wished it had played instead of how it actually did.

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Hey, you can catch incoming rockets and toss 'em back, though! That’s worth at least three hulk high-fives!