Summer of Superheroes: 2009's Three-Way Throwdown

Everything new is old again as the year's big hero games revisit battle lines drawn in 1989.
9/3/2009 9:35 AM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 2

If you haunted comic book stores 20 years ago, a basic publisher breakdown would have been common conversational currency. Marvel zombies gorged on mutant books and the superstar performance of Todd McFarlane's run on "Amazing Spider-Man." Rival DC was riding high with the massive success of Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," which paved the way for Tim Burton's first Batman film and new interest in the company's line. And in the independent scene, talented, interesting creators fought for space alongside books that recombined elements from Marvel and DC titles, unfettered by restrictions of the Comics Code Authority.

The super-stratified landscape couldn't last. And yet, 20 years later, three games revisit the classic three-way breakdown in the comics scene of old and offer a surprisingly similar set of rewards. Playing the superhero games from summer '09 -- Infamous, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Prototype -- I was struck by the ways in which they each represented one side of the triangle.

(What blows a hole in my entire argument here is that DC/WildStorm actually published a series leading into Prototype that should be winding up in a couple weeks. But bear with me; we'll see if this works anyway.)

The Infamous morality play

Infamous is classic Marvel storytelling. You can almost feel Stan Lee peering over your shoulder as you play. Plenty of features, like your electrical powers and the character of the city, fight for attention; but as far as I'm concerned, it's an expression of the old line: "With great power comes great responsibility." The origins of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four see "normal" humans gifted with superhuman abilities, and the repercussions that follow. Spider-Man in particular has to face the consequence of making the wrong choice between power and responsibility -- his murdered uncle.

Infamous is an updated Spider-Man origin story developed by and for a less hopeful time than the early-'60s days that produced Peter Parker. No one reading the first issues of Spider-Man got to make Peter's choices for him, but Infamous allows that. Yet here's the thing: The game's good/bad karma angle is really a storytelling tool. You're not meant to choose the bad side. Sure, you can, and there are gameplay allowances for doing so; but the narrative idea is clearly to make the same choice Peter Parker does.

To push that angle, the game abandons cynicism. The major characters in hero Cole's life are flawed but genuine. Cole's closest friendship turns sour and almost tragic; let that scenario get its hooks into you and it becomes very difficult to not play the game on the good path. It's the Marvel approach -- genuine characters seeing the down-to-Earth side of great danger -- ideally encapsulated. Instead of watching the well-established fate of Peter Parker enacted once more, you get to make those choices for real, and have the same narrative repercussions play out anew.

The bright darkness of Arkham Asylum

Comics imprinted with the DC logo had less soap-opera drama than Marvel's books. They were often more straightforward adventure /crime /sci-fi stories, but with a certain dedication to character and, by the late '80s and thanks to "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns," a darker bent that made them unique.

DC struggled with deciding how to tell comic-book stories. A few years after a series called "Crisis" attempted to streamline the DC universe, the publisher was publicly stalled at a crossroads. Classic heroes like Superman intersected more challenging books like "Hellblazer" and Neil Gaiman's new "Sandman." Batman, with his pop-art '60s history and newly minted dark side, was the perfect poster child for the imprint: a character at war with himself, published by a company split between two directions.

Arkham Asylum is two things: a distillation of the fractured Batman character and a resolution of the conflict between pop-art and pop-psychology storytelling impulses. Maybe you think Rocksteady had it easy developing the game after nearly two decades of comics and movies fought the same battle. But the game nails the late-'80s DC aura of a great character-based adventure story while also indulging the hero's more complicated psychological aspects. Few comics of the day managed that feat. Rocksteady's Batman is well drawn but weird, possibly dangerous. And iIt also brings together the friendlier elements of the character's history (the Penguin's accoutrements, the Riddler's hidden junk) with the darker elements (the recesses of Arkham, Batman's deeper fears), and lets neither one get the upper hand. A neat trick.

That said, I honestly can't decide if Arkham Asylum is a sign that the character's storytelling has come a long way, or if it really hasn't progressed at all.

Haunting the fringe: Prototype

After Arkham Asylum retriggered my appetite for superhero gaming, I went back to Prototype. I'd forgotten about the DC ads that litter the game's version of New York City, because mentally I'd cast the game in terms of books from Valiant and other indie publishers of the time: Malibu, Eclipse and Comico. While it's difficult to characterize the style and feel of Marvel and DC without over-generalizing (which I've probably done), it's a lot tougher to characterize the indie superhero scene without simplifying too much. But here goes.