Hard Project: Superman
Truth, Justice, and Soaring Around Looking Majestic.
Superheroes owe their entire existence to Superman. There are worst places to start off. Sure, we’ve spent the last several years inundated with writers who feel that you can’t relate to Superman or that it’s too difficult to give Superman compelling challenges, but if you can’t think of a good setup to tell stories about an alien who was raised by humans and then decided that he liked people so much he wanted to protect all of them forever? That says more about your lack of imagination than the character.
What’s weird, though, is that we’ve never gotten a good video game based off of the Man of Steel. Not a one.
There have been some tolerable versions of Supes in fighting games here and there, yes, although Injustice loses loads of points right from the word go for buying into the “but what if we made Superman evil” school of thought. But every single game version has been some flavor of disappointment, with Superman 64 essentially being used as a synonym for Worst Game Ever. Why in the hell is that? Why is it so difficult to make a good game based around the Last Son of Krypton?
Hard Project: Firefly
Find a ship, find a crew, make no money, fail, get an online petition going, make a movie, fail again, stare at the wall…
The announcement of Firefly Online way back in the day seemed like a marriage of the most obvious IP in the world to the most obvious game type. A series that’s all about heading out into the great unknown for various purposes married to a genre that loves to send you off and wandering. So when the game was released, it… well, we never got there, actually. It’s been started and stopped so many times that it resembles nothing so much as the engine room of the eponymous ship class.
Weirder still, the franchise has never had any sort of game made, not even the most basic adaptation. That’s odd, to say the least. Maybe not entirely odd given the fact that we’re talking about a franchise only in the strictest sense of the term, but you’d think the number of passionate fans would align to make at least some sort of game come out of this. And yet it’s never happened. The closest we’ve gotten are the many started and cancelled incarnations of an online game based in the universe. Why?
Hard Project: Mega Man
What’s so funny about robotic cats, dogs, and birds?
You are surprised. No, that is not correct; you are flabbergasted. “Mega Man is an IP for video games!” you scream. “Are you on the drugs?!”
No, gentle reader, I am not on the drugs. I am looking at the writing on the wall, and that writing is not good for the spunky little robot. The last game in the franchise was released in 2010, and that was after a two-year drought; before that, there was another lengthy period of time in which new games occasionally trickled out, but there was certainly no sense that the franchise was alive and healthy. If you disregard the intentional throwbacks of Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, the original series hasn’t had a new installment since 1998. (Disregarding the remake of the first game.) Mega Man’s games are more likely to be cancelled than launched.
Heck, for all this talk of it being a franchise, the parts that defined the initial franchise haven’t been seen outside of Mega Man and Mega Man X; as much as I love Mega Man Legends, it’s not really in the same food group as the original series. There’s a reason why Keiji Inafune left Capcom to start a totally new company for Mighty no. 9, a spiritual successor to the franchise. Because much as I love these games, at this point they definitely qualify as hard projects.
Hard Projects: Star Trek
It’s the reviews, sir, and they’re not happy!
There’s no way I could convince anyone reading this that I don’t love Star Trek Online. I wrote a whole piece about it. And it’s all true, Your Honor, I think it’s a great game that comes as close as any game has to capturing the spirit of the series. In fact, it might even seem unfair to list Star Trek here at all, seeing as we’ve been nearly buried under a variety of Star Trek games with varying critical reception. Some are seen as particularly good, some are seen as middling, but very few houses get the license and turn out something execrable.
Yet it’s always a tricky prospect. Star Trek Online languished in development hell for an extended period of time, killing the first studio working on it. Many of the games languish in that impermanent hell toward the bottom of the “acceptable” scale when they hit review time, many of them sliding below that. And nearly every single one faces criticism about its use of the license, with people hand-wringing and asking whether or not the game really fits in with the ethos of Star Trek as a whole.
So what makes this so hard to adapt?
Hard Project: Transformers
This might be as good as it gets. That isn’t entirely buoying.
One of the thing that fascinates me endlessly when it comes to video games is that there are certain IPs forever being tossed about and adapted into bad-to-mediocre games… despite the fact that the IP in question seems suited to games. Sometimes the games languish in development hell over and over, sometimes they get released and never find any sort of critical affection on account of being crap, sometimes they get adapted by several companies in several forms which are all bad.
So let’s talk about these sorts of project, starting with one near and dear to my heart: Transformers. I’d be lying if I said that this was an IP that’s never been made into a game, and it’s in fact been made into several. They’ve more or less all been fairly terrible; the games with the best reception are the ones that more or less just dropped everything else and turned the game into a more conventional console shooter with optional (and largely useless) transformations. War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron received generally acceptable reviews, but the other games have been panned, and Transformers Universe has gone from being an MMO to cashing in on the MOBA flavor of the month. So what makes Transformers so hard to bring in as a game?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 