So… a huge movie came out last weekend – one which finally payed off four years of buildup with ridiculous plants, Easter eggs and almost infuriating scenes with Agent Coulson and Nick Fury (come on, they were cute at first… stay out of Iron Man 2’s second act, SHIELD!). Yes, we’re talking about MARVEL’S The Avengers. Well, the movie was AWESOME, no matter how you feel about Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Iron Man 2… really any movie that isn’t Iron Man Part 1. Cynicism aside, Joss Whedon gets nerd props through the end of time by crafting a devilishly good time. Now, sloppy blow jobs for the Buffy creator aside, who the hell dropped the ball by not having an Avengers game? HMM?
Sure there might be a game in development (and a sequel) now that Marvel’s The Avengers has made a dump truck-load of cash and we don’t care about Facebook games (Marvel’s Avengers Alliance to be exact). But where’s our movie tie-in? The Amazing Spider-Man’s getting one and no one even cares about that movie or game! Spider-Man’s obviously been in development a while (or not, we’ll see) but an Avengers game makes absolute perfect sense and was obviously in development at one point.
Before THQ was hemorrhaging money, they were obviously in development on a team-up FPS game. And it looks pretty cool. First person melee combat. Differentiated powers. Experience points. Finishers. Coulda been fun. And you fight Skrulls, not Chitauri or whatever those aliens were. And according to Marvel writer Brain Michael Bendis, the game was glorious, until the rights reverted back to Marvel.
What’s frustrating is that Disney could’ve pulled a Duke Nukem Forever/Gearbox and just finished the damn game… or maybe they’re hard at work doing that now. We remember the crushing blow when we heard there was a playable version of The Dark Knight game somewhere but it just didn’t progress in time. Well, considering the hundreds of movie tie-in games that are awful, maybe it’s a good thing we never saw a Dark Knight game (especially with Arkham Asylum/City in our hands).
Hell, it looks like Marvel and Ubisoft are hard at work on Avengers: Battle for Earth, since the domain was snatched up. Are we excited for that? Will an Avengers game in 2013 matter, with Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 set to hit? Our feeble minds are only capable of so much hype.
Until we get that Avengers game, looks like we’ll have to settle for this:
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2 Comments
For now, I settle for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 & 2.
Yeah, I tend to think movie tie-in games are a bad idea; games are now to the point where they take too long to make to just order one right when you go into pre-production on a movie, and the results are never good enough. I was glad they didn’t make a Dark Knight game and just went with Arkham instead.