Tag Archives: superman

Comic-based games: The Super Nintendo Years

As mentioned in the previous post, the SNES games are mostly the same as the ones for Genesis/Megadrive (except the X-Men games, which are different, the additional Japanese Spider-Man game (extra tip: the passwords for the different levels are the family names of Spider-Man’s foes)) and MOST IMPORTANTLY my favourite super-hero game for a while: WAR OF THE GEMS, if only for Thanos’s appearance.

Some of the covers are the same, so I didn’t go crazy looking for all the covers and just included whatever I came across:

More Glenn Fabry drawing super-heroes, which I dig and check the differences between the covers for Captain America in GEN/MD and SNES … Crazy, right?

Favourite SNES game, you ask? Strangely enough, this one:

ogre

Not sure if I am going to be doing more consoles, the covers for Playstation games start OK, then turn horribly wrong with computer generated art I don’t even feel like looking at. I might do Gameboy/Color/Advance, but there are so many that it might take a while … We’ll see!

Comic-based games: The Genesis/Megadrive Years

With the 16-bit consoles, we were able to finally recognize the characters on the screen and, even though most of them are mildly entertaining side-scrolling beat-em-alls, actually enjoy playing these games. As you can see on the box designs displayed below, comic artists started being used: that’s Glenn Fabry on Separation Anxiety, possibly Butch Guice on Captain America and that looks like Mike DeCarlo inking the Batman and Superman covers, over Jim Aparo? On the other hand, that led to abortions like that Punisher cover, but to be honest that’s what Punisher specials’ covers looked like.

Not only the product looked more attractive, games themselves were a quantum leap beyond what came before, and, again, the games are not even that good, but the possibility of manipulating these characters at home (there had been some good arcade games already, Captain America and Punisher being actually ports of arcade machines) instantly renewed our faith in humanity … There were good things coming, that much was undeniable!!!

I would normally include here the cover of my favourite Megadrive game, but they’re right above. The 2 games I played the most were the first X-Men (that music, playing as Wolverine) and Captain America and the Avengers (the list of enemies alone: Klaw, the Living Laser, Whirlwind, The Sentinels, Wizard, the Grim Reaper, the Mandarin, The Juggernaut, Ultron, and Crossbones), and even if I understand that they are not even close the best Megadrive games, they still bring good memories.

Next: the far superior SNES (even though they never had the awesomeness that’s X-Men, the SNES is the first system that featured Thanos in a game and superior versions of half of the games on this list)

Gallery: Moebius does America

Still a bit short of time, but here’s some art for your eyes to feast upon … This time it’s no one other than Moebius and I am not even going to bother and try to write him up. You don’t know who it is, click on the wiki link. The one thing I will say, though, is that it’s a pity that we cannot expect to be surprised by guys like him or Kirby anymore … Also, that has to be the best-looking Iron Man ever.