As much as I love fighting games and their storylines, just about all of them run into one major problem: if the series goes on long enough, the writers will run out of ideas and just pull off the same story over and over again with slight variation. King of Fighters reached this point after their ’97 incarnation. Mortal Kombat got there in its third game, though they were original enough in their ideas that it didn’t get too stagnant until several games later. Street Fighter went on for a while without this, up until Street Fighter 4. Soul Calibur is probably the worst offender, as despite five games, they’ve yet to come up with a story other than “guys fight each other in search of sword that just won’t die.”

Tekken, which is by the same company as Soul Calibur, is also a pretty bad offender. On one hand, the later the game, the more personality we get out of the characters. On the other hand, almost all the characters are window dressing to the never-ending infighting between the Mishima family members, who are all a bunch of assholes.

See, you have Heihachi Mishima, who is an asshole. He’s opposed by his son Kazuya Mishima, who we discover at the end of the first game to also be an asshole. Then in the third game, we get Kazuya’s son Jin Kazama, who seems like an all right guy for a while, only to succumb to being an asshole by the end of Tekken 5. Tekken 5 also introduces Heihachi’s powerful father Jinpachi Mishima, who is a pretty sweet guy, only he’s possessed by a power that’s forcing him to be an asshole.

Insert your Spaceballs joke right here.

Let’s go back to the simpler days, when the rivalry was no more than Kazuya vs. Heihachi. Tekken 3 was just being released, leading to the most popular era for the Tekken franchise. To tie in with this, the comic company Knightstone put together an attempt to retell the story of the first few games with Tekken Saga.

What’s with Kazuya? It’s like he’s spooked by Law’s ability to completely ignore getting hit in the skull with lightning. Or maybe he’s weirded out by Paul Phoenix’s hair.

Tekken Saga #1 came out in October, 1997. John Kim was the writer with Walter McDaniel an art. It begins years before Tekken 1, where Heihachi holds a meeting with his top underlings at the Mishima Zaibatsu (which in the comic is spelled “Zabitsu”). Conveniently, all three of his businessman flunkies turn out to be fathers of Tekken series mainstays: E. David Gordo, Bernard Chang and James King.

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Matt Jett is a guy I know who I talk about games with. He expressed an interest in writing about games a little here on 4l!, so I figured I’d give him a weekly on Tuesdays.

It’s not much of a secret that licensed tie-in games usually suck. The vast majority of them aren’t given much of a chance to succeed, their budgets low and their development cycles rushed so they’re released at the same time as a film or new television show. Games based on comic books tend to suffer the same fate, coasting on their licenses instead of quality to generate sales.

So, what about the other kind of comic book games? Ones that aren’t based on any existing superheroes, that invent whole new settings? Some might argue that to be a “comic book game,” a game necessarily has to be based on a comic book, but I disagree. To me, any game that adopts a comic book feel in its design choices is a comic book game, no matter who the game stars. Many of these games have been forgotten by the current gaming audience, or aren’t known as comic book games at all. In the interest of correcting this grievous oversight, here are two that I really like, games that have enough crossover appeal to make both comic readers and gamers happy.

Freedom Force & Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich: The PC-only Freedom Force games are the most blatantly “comic-book-style” games I’ve ever played. The series puts you in charge of a fictional superhero team and has you fight supervillains in a very straightforward manner, using a clicking interface similar to Baldur’s Gate or Diablo to make controlling a team of characters intuitive. The things that make Freedom Force stand out are its presentation and its attention to detail. The art style, while still using 3d models, looks like it’s straight out of a comic book. Loading screens are even fashioned to look like comic book covers from the Silver Age, with the game’s fictional superheroes replacing the likes of Superman and Batman. Characters’ dialogue is put in speech bubbles, and sound effects are put on the screen just like they are in an issue of Greg Pak’s Hercules or the old Batman TV show. The games are available as a bundle through Steam for $7.50.

Infamous: Infamous is the best example I can give of a comic book game that hasn’t, to my knowledge, been recognized for being one. The cutscenes are crafted to look like pages from comic books, with caption boxes and different “panels” of action on the screen. The protagonist, Cole, is clearly patterned after a superhero, his electricity powers eventually granting him the ability to float around, almost flying like the prototypical superman, and his character arc follows a clearly defined pattern that goes back to Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider. Beyond its comic book pedigree, Infamous is just fun. The controls are solid, the story is interesting, and the open-world gameplay allows you to play for hours or for 20 minutes and still feel like you’ve made significant progress through the game’s content. It’s a solid recommendation for anyone with a PlayStation 3 (all ten of you).

I’m not saying licensed comic-book games are universally terrible. I played Marvel: Ultimate Alliance until my thumbs cramped up, after all. There are just so many other games to consider when looking for a superhero fix, so why not go outside the safe zone of Wolverine and Batman? Try one of the games I recommended, or if I missed a great one, tell me and I’ll try it out.

I’m a huge fan of Metal Gear Solid. It’s probably my favorite series, though I’ve undoubtedly put more time into Madden NFL than MGS by virtue of having played Madden for 14 years now to MGS’s ten. I got to help out on the guide for Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, which was a really cool thing to do.

MGS4: Guns of the Patriots is out and it is quite honestly game of the decade for me. I beat it over the course of a weekend. Not because I’d planned to, mind you– I just got wrapped up in the story and enthralled and suddenly it’s Sunday and I have to be to bed in two hours and I’m just now finishing the hour long ending and oh man I want to start over and do it all again but I can’t I have work really I can’t okay maybe just a little before bed.

If I had to make a comics comparison, MGS4 is to the Metal Gear series what All-Star Superman is to Superman comics, only even more comprehensive and even better.

Hideo Kojima is a director who doesn’t skimp on the details. This shows in the attention paid to the story and what you can do in the game itself. One of the things that interests me the most about MGS4, other than the functioning in-game iPod which you can apparently rip your own music to, is The Beauty & The Beast Unit.

One of the overarching themes of the MGS series is that war makes monsters of men. No matter how honorable, good, evil, or whatever you are, war is going to ruin you. It’s the nature of the beast. The Beauty & The Beast Unit are the embodiment of this idea. They are four women who, while they were still young, encountered war and suffered under its boot. The girls ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder and were turned into war machines by an unknown party.

They became The Beauty and The Beast Unit, SNAKEHOUND, and were given special code names: Screaming Mantis, Laughing Octopus, Crying Wolf, and Raging Raven. Each prefix is a reference to a certain unit from Metal Gear Solid 3, while the animal tags are taken from FOXHOUND and the unit from MGS1. The Beauty represents what they once were– attractive young women. The Beast represents their outer appearance– monstrous war machines.

“They are humans that have been transformed by battle. They are the ultimate casualties of war.” According to Kojima, he chose to base these characters on beauty from the real world. “The world created these ugly beasts, but underneath they are gorgeous women. These ladies — this beauty — is real.”

Hideo Kojima, 1up.com

Where it gets even more interesting is their origins. Kojima wanted them to represent the real world. Lyndall Jarvis is from Cape Town, South Africa, and Laughing Octopus is ethnically Scandinavian. Yumi Kikuchi is from New York, and plays Raging Raven, a woman from Indonesia. Scarlett Chorvat’s from Slovakia, but Screaming Mantis was born in South America. Mieko Rye, Crying Wolf, is from Brooklyn, but reps Africa in-game.

It isn’t a 1:1 correlation, but it’s a step in the right direction. Their nationalities aren’t a huge part of the game. They’re pretty much literally one line in an audio conversation per boss. It isn’t a big deal, but it is at the same time. It’s a great move. War affects everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and having the Beauty and Beast Unit be multicultural is a sharp way to represent that.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been about storytelling. Its themes of war and its effects on life reflect throughout the entire series. The B&Bs are an obvious parallel, with their innocence being twisted and malformed into violence. There are plenty of other examples, as well, but this is one that leaped out at me.

It’s smart world building. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more often in comics. Let the little details do the work for you. You don’t have to have characters hop up on a soapbox and blah blah blah about their motivations or what they mean. Let the reader infer some things. MGS4 is amazingly unsubtle about basically everything on a certain level, but sometimes it slips in these little touches that make you pause.

In case you were wondering, the girls are all delightfully creepy bosses.

Shots below are ripped from Kotaku and various places on the internet.

Also, just for fun– Kojima and Frank Miller.

Now imagine Kojima making a Hard Boiled or Rusty the Boy Robot game.

Yes.