And also, we had Saturday morning cartoon shows with Wolverine and Batman playing starring roles. Toy Biz made itself into a major dealer in the action figure business with their huge X-Men line. Every trading card manufacturer in the country had some kind of superhero series going on. And yes, there were the games. Every week it seemed a new side-scrolling beat-em-up or platformer starring Spider-Man hit the market.
And yes, most of them were quickly forgotten. However, one game stands out in my mind; X-Men for the Sega Genesis was a well-made game with excellent graphics for the time. It had the look and feel of the comic, and allowed gamers to play as their favorite characters with a different game play experience to be had depending on who you were controlling. Plus it had two-player mode (now called multiplayer mode) and the game was designed so that the powers of each mutant character complimented each other, making for some really intense and surprisingly intricate gaming. Many a Saturday afternoon was spent with me, my friends, some Dr. Pepper and Chips Ahoy, and X-Men.
My how times have changed; now it’s me, my friends, a six pack of Corona and pizza, and Dance Dance Revolution.
Anyway, the video game industry is corporate, like it or not. It follows the money. But as that classic bit of gaming called X-Men proves, a development team can work wonders with a license. After all, the character designs and stories are already there. And since the license has its own settings, level design is already partially done. With a license, a developer can focus their energies purely on game play. After all, innovation in gaming has always been about new game play features, new ways to interact with a virtual environment, new ways to challenge your skills and technological advancements in audio/visual presentation, not Nobel-worth stories and Shakespearean character archetypes.
Just recently Electronic Arts proved that with their incredible Lord of the Rings: Return of the King game. The sequel to the also-licensed Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers surpassed its predecessor in every way. The presentation was jaw-dropping, it offered online and offline cooperative play, and like any classic video game, it was easy to learn but difficult (oh so very difficult) to master.
However, when more and more games are licensed then gaming loses its own identity. Sonic, Mario, Samus, Link, Duke Nukem, Solid Snake, Master Chief—these are gaming icons. Do you really want to see them replaced with Anakin Skywalker and The Incredible Hulk? Do you really want to see them replaced with Brett Favre, Mark McGuire, and Vince Carter for that matter?
But there is an even more bothersome phenomenon in video games, one that should bother gamers far more than developers not coming up with their own characters. It’s the old mentality of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” This is why we have so many first-person shooters; just when everyone was starting to forget about Doom, Goldeneye 007 hit the Nintendo 64. Likewise, when Goldeneye 007 started gathering dust, Halo wowed everybody (I personally don’t know why, but that’s a whole other article all-together). When a game is successful, other developers copy it, and when coupled with licensed-happy distributors this creates a problem.
Case in point; Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a hit and then just over a year later we have Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, a licensed game so similar to the aforementioned title that it might as well be the same thing with Star Wars skins mapped onto the characters. Does this make it a bad game? No. Would I have rather seen a totally original format with some innovative game play? Yes.
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