{"id":870,"date":"2010-09-01T00:06:25","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T05:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/870"},"modified":"2016-11-25T23:53:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T07:53:18","slug":"freedom-force-bad-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/870","title":{"rendered":"Freedom Force: Bad Guys"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nearing the end of <em>Freedom Force<\/em>, I have a pretty clear idea now about the breadth and scope of it. It&#8217;s a bit unusual. Most superhero games, whether based on comics, based on movies based on comics, or just featuring original characters loosely inspired by comics, focus on a single hero (or at most a small group of related heroes), and on the situations and enemies natural to that hero. Superhero comics cover a range of scales from the mundane to the cosmic, but specific heroes tend to fall on a specific spot on that spectrum, some defending a single city against lawlessness, others safeguarding the entire planet against alien invasion, yet others dealing in the realm of gods and mythical figures. And so a game about a specific hero will tend to focus on what&#8217;s appropriate to that character, but, in so doing, lose a big part of the character of the comics. I&#8217;m talking about the weird juxtapositions resulting from crossovers and team books. <span class=\"footnote_referrer\"><a role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToReference_870_1('footnote_plugin_reference_870_1_1');\" onkeypress=\"footnote_moveToReference_870_1('footnote_plugin_reference_870_1_1');\" ><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_870_1_1\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\">1<\/sup><\/a><span id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_870_1_1\" class=\"footnote_tooltip\">The Scott Adams &#8220;Questprobe&#8221; adventures are a notable exception, being even more chock-full of weird juxtapositions and non-sequiturs than the comics themselves.<\/span><\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_870_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_870_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top right', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });<\/script> Spider-Man has been to other planets. The mighty Thor takes time off from Asgard politics to pick on street gangs, sometimes as part of a team that also includes Captain America. The weirdest thing about comic book universe continuities isn&#8217;t just that they simultaneously contain cyborgs and sorcerers, gods and ghosts and gunslingers and space aliens and talking gorillas. It&#8217;s that they all know each other.<\/p>\n<p><em>Freedom Force<\/em> is a simulated shared continuity. It tries to vary the scale and scope as much as it can within the constraints of its mechanics (ie, no space battles), but it&#8217;s necessarily an abbreviated form, with only one or two major villains per niche. At the most ordinary level, you&#8217;ve got Pinstripe, a mobster mutated by Energy X but otherwise simply functioning as a mobster. An escaped lunatic calling himself Deja Vu is the closest thing to a silver-age Batman villain, giggling and talking in rhyme and making the team solve riddles. Turning things up a notch, we have an army of city-crushing giant robots courtesy of Mister Mechanical, a snubbed and resentful architect who really has it in for the buildings rather than their inhabitants. Behind them all stands the space-opera villain, Lord Dominion, conqueror of a thousand worlds, whose main motivation here is amusement: he could easily crush the Earth, but he&#8217;d rather watch the earthlings do the job for him. But even Lord Dominion is a pawn for the Time Master, whose goal is the destruction of time itself. And somehow the god Pan is involved too, to bring in the mythical element &#8212; I expect that will make more sense after I&#8217;ve cleared a couple more levels, but there have already been mutterings that interplanar travel and time travel are really the same thing. This isn&#8217;t a complete list of the villains in the game, but it&#8217;s pretty close.<\/p>\n<p>The one sort of bad guy that the game is really missing is the <em>individual<\/em> bad guy, the one who doesn&#8217;t need henchmen to be a menace, like Bizarro or the Green Goblin. Everyone here has an army of some sort. Pinstripe has his goons, Deja Vu his evil duplicates, Pan his confusingly-named &#8220;Bacchites&#8221; (perhaps the god was recast during development?). Anyway, it&#8217;s true that some superheroes habitually fight large numbers of anonymous grunts &#8212; Batman and Captain America come to mind &#8212; but it&#8217;s not nearly as universal as you&#8217;d think from this game. But that&#8217;s not even a problem with this game in particular. Aside from one-on-one fighting games, most genres of game that reasonably accommodate superheroes have a basic structure that involves fighting a bunch of lesser enemies before you get to fight the boss, and sometimes it&#8217;s a real stretch to provide that. (I think of the various Spider-Man games in particular. <em>Most<\/em> Spider-Man villains do their villaining as solitary individuals.) At least <em>Freedom Force<\/em> gets to make up its villains from scratch, rather than shoehorn established characters into an inappropriate format.<\/p>\n<div class=\"speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container\"> <div class=\"footnote_container_prepare\"><p><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_label pointer\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_870_1();\">&#x202F;<\/span><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\" style=\"display: none;\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_870_1();\">[<a id=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_870_1\">+<\/a>]<\/span><\/p><\/div> <div id=\"footnote_references_container_870_1\" style=\"\"><table class=\"footnotes_table footnote-reference-container\"><caption class=\"accessibility\">References<\/caption> <tbody> \r\n\r\n<tr class=\"footnotes_plugin_reference_row\"> <th scope=\"row\" class=\"footnote_plugin_index_combi pointer\"  onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor_870_1('footnote_plugin_tooltip_870_1_1');\"><a id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_870_1_1\" class=\"footnote_backlink\"><span class=\"footnote_index_arrow\">&#8593;<\/span>1<\/a><\/th> <td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">The Scott Adams &#8220;Questprobe&#8221; adventures are a notable exception, being even more chock-full of weird juxtapositions and non-sequiturs than the comics themselves.<\/td><\/tr>\r\n\r\n <\/tbody> <\/table> <\/div><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> function footnote_expand_reference_container_870_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_870_1').show(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_870_1').text('\u2212'); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container_870_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_870_1').hide(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_870_1').text('+'); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_870_1() { if (jQuery('#footnote_references_container_870_1').is(':hidden')) { footnote_expand_reference_container_870_1(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container_870_1(); } } function footnote_moveToReference_870_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_870_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor_870_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_870_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } }<\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearing the end of Freedom Force, I have a pretty clear idea now about the breadth and scope of it. It&#8217;s a bit unusual. Most superhero games, whether based on comics, based on movies based on comics, or just featuring original characters loosely inspired by comics, focus on a single hero (or at most a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19],"tags":[181,401,140],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rpg","category-strategy","tag-comics","tag-freedom-force","tag-scott-adams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4631,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions\/4631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}