Marvel Vs DC

Spectrum and Commodore. Nintendo and Sega. Sony and Microsoft. Mario and Sonic. The games industry has been the focal point for epic battles between iconic names since its inception.

One unofficial scrap has matched comic titans Marvel and DC against the other over the past two decades. Far from being in direct competition though, the firms have had their iconic rosters raided by games companies through the years, and have touched base through brawling on the same genre fields time and time again.

Here we take a look at some of those titles and weigh in on who's winning the great comic book gaming battle.

TEAMS

Both companies have long lists of superheroes (and villains, for that matter) banding together to combat a common threat, but the premier super-teams of both companies have yet to be given justice in the gaming medium. DC'S Justice League, compiled of heavy hitters such as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the Flash, has attempted to prove its success several times.

While Task Force wasn't horrible at the time, it's showing its age now.
Did you know the League was throwing in on the one-on-one fighting market just before Marvel's merry bunch flirted their eyes at Capcom?

Justice league: Task Force was released on the SNES and Megadrive in 1995, developed by none other than Blizzard. The powerhouse team wouldn't weigh in on a big budget title until ten years later with Warner Bros Justice League: Heroes. While it offered co-op gameplay, the game still wasn't the best representation of the characters.

Better, even though it was never labelled as such, was Mortal Kombat Vs DC, the latter's line-up pretty much drafting characters who had been Leaguers at some point in their career anyway.

Marvel's Avengers have equally been given a short thrift. Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye and Vision appearing under the unified name in only one title, that of the arcade side-scrolling beat'em up Captain America and the Avengers in 1991, which found its way onto console a year later.

The superheroes who began Marvel's march on the genre, the Fantastic Four, have faired even worse. Even though the foursome have had two games under their banner, both have been absolute stinkers. Based on the cinematic adventures in 2005 and 2007, they typified the approach of many developers stuck to under tight time constraints - tossing the characters into rudimentary button-mashing beat'em ups.

Weathering the years better than all has been Marvel's other big name team, the X-Men. While the games have been of varying quality, surprisingly the majority of them have been fairly decent.

The 1993 Megadrive title X-Men was an early surprise, a platformer which let you select between Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Cyclops and Gambit and utilise their special abilities to progress. It also added character support from other X-Men with the touch of the button - something Capcom would unwittingly emulate years later in the first Marvel Vs Capcom. The merry mutants teamed up with Spider-Man the same year in Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, and also had their own side-scrolling arcade beat'em up released in arcades (which has now made its way to XBLA).

The roster screen that made fanboys pee themselves in happiness.
It's arguable that it was the 1994 X-Men: Children of the Atom that ultimately paved the path to Capcom's Versus series, as the mutant gang scrapped against each other in a one-on-one fighter created by the Street Fighter developer (side note: this means Wolverine's character model in MvC3 is now seventeen years old).

X-Men Vs Street Fighter, which ushered in the tag-team system now used as standard by the Vs series, hit arcades two years later. The mutant team also went on to front the successful X-Men Legends, developed by Raven Software, which spawned a sequel and became the template for the universe-spanning Marvel: Ultimate Alliance years later.

WINNER: Thanks to some homo-superior action, It's a cocky 'SNIKT' for Marvel.

CROSSOVER EVENTS

Company-wide crossovers are big business for the two publishers, maximising sales by offering story lines that sprawl across multiple comic titles for months on end.

It seems obvious to roll a tie-in video-game to the event, yet for all the years behind us, we've only seen three events, one for DC, two for Marvel, directly green-lighting gaming renditions.

DC punched first with The Death and Return of Superman in 1994, letting you control the the various characters fighting over the right to carry the Superman name after the original's death at the hands of Doomsday. As would be expected of the era, the events were portrayed by way of a side-scrolling brawler, and even the big guy himself was stuck with an energy bar instead of his usual invulnerability - guess dying really takes it out of a guy.

The side-scroller was the genre of choice for superheroes in the early 90s.
The same year, and circling both the same genre and lower end of the score spectrum was Marvel's effort with Spider-Man and Venom: Maxmium Carnage.

The two foes joined forces to take down a super-powered serial-murderer on a rampage through New York. It was a poor event, and produced an average game. Worth noting was the specially-built blood-red cartridges that the game came on for both SNES and Megadrive.

Doing a better job of it was Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2. As to whether the game was changed during development or was built from the start to reflect the Civil War storyline that was swallowing up every Marvel title in existence at the time is unknown.

Either way, it definitely enriched the action-RPG, following the legalisation of the Superhero Registration Act and forced costumed heroes to either unmask and sign with the government or go underground as fugitives. Even if you cared nothing for the political metaphors of the story, it gave you the excuse to smack around some of Marvel's biggest heroes.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 has been the best crossover event thus far.
WINNER: Its a dynamic duo win for Marvel.

T FOR TEEN

Both companies have attempted to connect with their younger audiences over the years by producing animated versions of their characters.

But while Spider-Man and the X-Men have churned out some decent cartoons based on their early exploits, they haven't made the grade for gaming conversions. The latest kid-friendly attempt, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, had a nice concept letting you control some of the wall-crawler's biggest villains, but offered nothing special with its side-scrolling gameplay.

Nope, still can't excited for it. Friend OR Foe, we just don't care.
DC, on the other hand, capitalised on the 90s Batman animated series, which pulled in viewers young and old. While the Hollywood versions of the Dark Knight were rapidly plunging head-first into the nearest sewer, the high-quality cartoon series stuck close to foundations of the character and his world. It thus heavily influenced some of the better examples of his gaming adventures, from 94's SNES platformer Batman & Robin up to the game Boy duo of Justice League titles in the early 00s.

THQ also produced a fairly robust Teen Titans video game in 2006, starring Robin and a team of pint-sized heroes, which was also based on an animated series. And only one company of the two has had a Lego title based on one of its properties: Lego Batman being another worthy addition to the Lego franchise portfolio.

Far, far, far better than Batman & Robin the movie.
WINNER: Holy return volley Batman! DC's punched the lights out of Marvel in this school-yard scrap!

GOING SOLO

Despite two universes that are chock full of characters, both comic publishers rather unsurprisingly have only had their top tier talent raided for adaptable video games, and even then its only been due to movie tie-ins that we've seen some (such as the Fantastic Four) get their own top game billing.

On game numbers alone, Spider-Man takes top spot for Marvel by a huge, HUGE margin, with Hulk, Iron Man and Wolverine barely making a dent in the web-spinner's towering collection of titles. Quality-wise Spidey's had a patchy career, with developers having a tough time matching his moves and web-slinging ability with a decent game to use them effectively in.

Spidey was voiced by Neil Patrick Harris in Shattered Dimensions.
Aside from last year's decent Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, which pushed a more linear level structure on ol'web-head (which was also the first time Peter Parker's trade-mark speedball humour was utilised properly) he's been shunted into the sandbox playground for years now. Its a genre that has failed to flesh out the gameplay much further than chase sequences and button-bashing scraps.

Yet it's a particular brand of gameplay that has suited Marvel's own jolly green giant. Radical Entertainment's Hulk: Ultimate Destruction revelled in the radioactive might of the monster, letting you smash and pummel the environment, as well as use super-powered charges to cover vast distances, and proved to be a huge amount of fun to those that played it.

Button-bashing at its finest in Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
Superman and Batman have been waving the flag for DC all these years, the firm's other heroes relegated mainly to group efforts (we'll get to the exceptions to the rule in a second). Man of Steel he may be, but as for games, Superman's have been mostly Kryponite to gamers.

Superman 64, with its poor draw distance masquerading as 'Kryponite Mists' (but no mention whether the Mists were the reason for gameplay being as fun as poking a dead dog with a spoon) was worse of the bunch.

He hasn't fared much better in his other titles either. Developers have hit the same snag as the comic writers in this respect - how do you make an invulnerable man who can travel faster than a speeding bullet interesting but still retain the core of the character?

Yes, Superman 64 was this bad.
DC's Dark Knight has had the same problem as Spider-Man. The industry mostly forgets that he's a master detective with a range of gadgets to save him from every scenario, and instead focuses on how hard he can punch someone in the face.

Then a little studio called Rocksteady came along, and changed everything. Mark our words - the next generation of superhero titles will be markedly different because of Arkham Asylum. Its had the same effect on the genre as BioShock did on story-driven adventure games, and Gears of War had on third-person shooters.

It alone would be enough to swing the category in DC's favour, but it's nearly crippled by that exception to the rule. EA's 2004 Catwoman title might have drowned DC's hopes like a bag of kittens in a river. Thankfully the competition has its own skeletons in the closet too.

Arkham Asylum proved how to do a licence justice.
Nothing hits harder than a developer getting it so badly wrong twice in a row: Secret Level's Iron Man was pretty poor, but the fact that it did an even worse job with its sequel two years later is special for all the wrong reasons, and the developer closed straight after its release. Consider that a repulsor ray to Marvel's chances here.

WINNER: Greatest superhero game in the history of videogames versus the tin man that smells of ten-week old tuna. Yea, who do you think wins?

THE FUTURE

The state of affairs comic book tie-in titles have got themselves into in recent times seems to have set the tone for the future.

While we're hoping beyond hope that both Captain America and Thor's game debuts, which coincide with their movie appearances, washes the dirty taste of Iron Man out of our mouths, tight development times once again may leave us disappointed.

Hope for Marvel could still come from Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions developer Beenox, who's sterling work on the title has seen it handed lead development duties on the franchise going forward. But we hope it isn't pushed to create it's own version of Arkham Asylum based on sales figures alone.

Can Cap sling off the weight of expectation this summer?
As for DC, Green Lantern, DC's top-selling comic property about a space cop, is about to take a mammoth step up into the Hollywood mainstream. However, we can't help think his tie-in video-game will suffer the same fate as Marvel's two heroes.

Even if it does suck, it'll be but a small misformed pebble washing up on the paradise isle that is Batman: Arkham City. Ignoring the lunacy of letting the Caped Crusader's biggest foes run their own district of Gotham, Rocksteady's sequel is one of the highlights of this year, be you a comic fan or not.

There's no doubt Arkham City is going to rock.
WINNER: Bat's continuing presence casts a long shadow over marvel's colourful brawlers. DC's looking bright and is the best bet for the future.

THE RESULT

DC walks away with the win, with a 3-2 score over Marvel. But it can't claim complete dominance, as both companies have an incredibly patchy history when it comes to the interactive versions of their top tier characters, and with the wider picture being considered, they stand more or less on equal footing.

While we'd love to see some publisher take a risk on either a relatively unknown superhero from within either firm's ranks, or try something different with a well-loved character, we doubt it'll ever happen. The beat'em up and sandbox genres are jammed with spandex, and we can't see that changing any time soon.

The big question is, if licences and copyrights were sorted out, whether anyone would ever take a stab at pitting the heroes of both publishers against each other. A Vs title from Capcom would be the stuff of legend. But until that point, we're going to have to make do with this nugget from gaming's glory years.