The Four Color Media Monitor

Game Watcher says there's a new computer game coming out that emphasizes the most insufferably cliched genre of modern times, which dampens the impact of any comics setting put to use in the game:

Alawar and lonch.me are collaborating on Exiler, an adventure horror game set in a comic book world. In this game, you play as Adam Wayne, an exorcist detective, tasked with banishing demonic entities.

Well gee, that it builds on any comics inspirations would've been much more exciting if it weren't for how they fell back on the classic cliche of horror themes. What's so exciting about this, I'll never know. What would make something like this a lot more inspiring is if they made use of bright adventure themes, and comedy. Instead, they insult the intellect with yet more resorting to darkness, which we have too much of already in the real world at this point. This is not something a typical comics fan should look forward to, and video game players shouldn't finance it either.

On the other hand, IGN reports there's a new compilation from Capcom of their old series of Marvel vs. Capcom games, which even includes the 1993 Punisher game (co-starring Nick Fury):

A grand total of seven games are included in this collection, with release dates spanning 1993 - 2000. One notable (non-fighting game) inclusion is The Punisher, a beat-‘em-up game that kicked off the partnership between Marvel and Capcom.

These aren't just straight ports of the games – Capcom has added plenty of extra features and quality-of-life improvements. The biggest new piece is online play, so you don’t need to have friends over to go head to head or play The Punisher in co-op. You can play online in casual or ranked matches. There's a leaderboard for high score challenges and screen filters to make the games look more how they did on CRT displays.

Without a doubt, the new release of their Punisher adaptation makes for a most interesting moment in marketing, if we consider where Marvel's sadly gone with Frank Castle in the past decade, all because the leftists running the store there now view Gerry Conway's creation as "right-wing", including left-leaning Conway himself. Capcom certainly did the right thing in making sure to reissue this now over 3 decade old game for playing anew, and I hope all planned Marvel Epic Collections from that era will eventually be published.

And I'm glad this collection of games only goes as far as 2000, because what came years later was more an exercise in political correctness, recalling how poor the most recent entry was, with only 4 heroines on the list, and they relied upon the woke edition of Carol Danvers to boot. Of course, even Marvel Super Heroes vs. Capcom had the unfortunate problem of lacking any superheroines on the select menu, and only 2 women from Capcom's side were put to use. In other games where Marvel heroines were present, IIRC, it was mainly ladies from X-Men who were added to the menus, and no serious consideration of say, Avengers women, if at all. So in hindsight, I wish I could say I appreciate this new game collection more than I do. But as I recall, Marvel inexplicably wouldn't allow proper use of all its character roster at the time, and one of the games would only make use of War Machine instead of Iron Man, apparently because Marvel wouldn't approve the licensing requirements for Tony Stark's alter ego.

That said, this news makes me think I should try to highlight news about video games more than I actually have until now, if only because video games can be pretty close to comics and animation as an illustrated medium. As such, there can be advantages to highlighting news of video games more often.

Labels: history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, Punisher, technology, violence, women of marvel