Game Graveyard - Superman and Flash battle oblivion

[TemporalFlux]

Saw these pop up a few days ago; they contain footage and concept art from two games that Brash Entertainment was working on before they went belly up. One involves The Flash:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtwUQXuSXY

The other was a Superman game:

http://www.unseen64.net/2009/03/09/superman-factor-5-x360ps3-cancelled/

Maybe we'll see something more of them one day (after all, Ghostbusters was in this kind of development trouble too for awhile). I would especially love to see that Flash game.

 

[Reverend]

To be honest, I think those are two of the most difficult characters to build gameplay mechanics around, so it's probably not a bad thing they were scrapped.

With Flash the trouble is that if he can actually as fast as he's supposed to then it'd make him impossible to control, the only way around it is to use something like a bullet-time effect, which results in a game that's supposed to be about the fastest man alive, but where you spend half the game controlling things in slow motion.

With Supes, well it's been tried before and while I can't give an honest opinion having not played any of them, I gather the flying mechanic has yet to be cracked. On top of that you're playing a character that in theory could destroy a building by not looking where he's going so you're either going to be breaking the suspension of disbelief with invulnerable scenery or give the player too much godlike freedom that it becomes boring. On top of that you have to wonder what kind of bad guys to throw at supes that can be a credible threat while not just arming everyone with kryptonite bullets, kryptonite swords and kryptonite deodorant. Plus of course there the invisible wall problem when you try to fly outside the gaming area....On second thought I guess to steal a trick from 'Batman: Arkham Asylum' you could set the whole game inside the bottled city of Kandor that'd give you a nice limited game zone and a ready supply of Brainiac controlled kryptonians to beat up.

Personally, I'd REALLY like to see a GTA sandbox style game based on Judge Dredd. Dredd vs Death was a step in the right direction but I think the character and the world has much more potential than just an FPS where u get to arrest people.

 

[TemporalFlux]

With Supes, well it's been tried before and while I can't give an honest opinion having not played any of them, I gather the flying mechanic has yet to be cracked.

There is one nearly perfect Superman game out there - Superman: Shadow of Apokolips for PS2. The flying mechanics are perfect. The use of powers is perfect. You have a yellow sun bar that depletes with powers used, but it regenerates pretty quickly because you're in sunlight for the entire game. When you are hit with kryptonite, it simply drains your yellow power meter the more you are hit, but the meter again replenishes pretty quickly. Your health bar is also tied to the yellow meter; you regenerate health points if your yellow bar is full.

The programmers even did a great job with villains and the interaction with the environment; not to mention great use of super feats (and no cheap stuff like having jump through N64 loops). "Shadow" is the standard to live up to on a Superman game and the example that should be followed.

Of course, the game had a few minor bugs (which I personally never experienced), and the game is based on the original animated series power levels (which were approximate to Byrne's Man of Steel reboot). But I think that Byrne power level is the only real way to do a game on Superman; it makes him tough but yet not a god.

 

[Icemizer]

Ah the Byrne reboot. Fond memories of the best Superman reboot ever.

 

[SpeedRacer]

I thought that the flight controls in the Superman Returns game were pretty good...everything else just sucked.

 

[Brikar99]

With Flash the trouble is that if he can actually as fast as he's supposed to then it'd make him impossible to control, the only way around it is to use something like a bullet-time effect, which results in a game that's supposed to be about the fastest man alive, but where you spend half the game controlling things in slow motion.

I dunno, the youtube vid of the cancelled Flash game above looked pretty solid - sorta like playing 'Burnout' with a runner instead of a car, and mixing in some combat. I'm sure they could do all sorts of things where it would only slow down at certain points to deliver a super move or combo finish or something without really sacrificing a sense of speed. Especially if the combat system were sort of like the one from 'Batman: Arkham Asylum' where there's really just an 'attack button' and you sort of just aim yourself and press it to perform combos on multiple enemies. Throw in some cool scripted sequences and intelligent use of some 'quick-time events' and I think it'd work out pretty well.