With Professor Layton teaming up with Phoenix Wright, Hideo Kojima teaming up with Guillermo Del Torro for Silent Hill, crossovers in the videogame world are happening more and more - and people are loving it. In an ideal world, there are so many games we'd love to combine. Since we don't have an infinite amount of time, we picked a few of our favorite games that will probably never happen. Spiderman hasn't really had too many truly great games, I'll grant you. The closest we've come to a decent Spiderman game is probably Lego Marvel Super Heroes and he wasn't even the main character. Sure, you didn't really get to stop any major crimes and the game was primarily meant for kids, but it got a number of things about Spiderman right that the other games didn't. For one, his movement felt great. Nothing felt better in that game than swinging around the city from place to place and exploring to help old ladies find their cats. It felt how Spiderman should feel, attached to an unlocatable object in the sky and swinging around like an urban Tarzan.
For another thing, the general tone to Spiderman that just felt great. He was funny, a crime fighter, and a kid who had all the completely normal problems a human spider teenager. Grand Theft Auto has always been on top in the world of crime sandboxes for a number of reasons (except San Andreas. Let's never speak of San Andreas). The story is usually pretty solid, the feel of it is great, and just the sheer ridiculousness of all the things you can do just makes us giddy. However, if Grand Theft Auto suffered from anything, it's taking itself a bit too seriously at times. Somehow, even in the weirdly hilarious / uncomfortable comedy they pull off, it all still feels very stiff. Another problem some have with the game is that the bad guys are sometimes too, well, bad. There are times when you've had to do something so rotten in the game that you really just want to do something good. You can't even go fishing in the game without sometime happening. How it would work: Taking the best from each game, you'd play as Spiderman in a crime riddled GTA-esq world where you'd have to stop crime.
The benefit of combining Spiderman with GTA as opposed to any other sandbox game (ie; Infamous) is that you would have such a wide range of crimes or criminals. Each criminal would be interesting and have a solid personality and each crime would be ridiculous and grand without all being about the main supervillain like Doc Oc. The city is large enough and has lenty of buildings that swooping through from street to street wouldn't feel empty. Online could even work if you had a team of Spidermen and criminal tearing up the city simultaneously. Gitaroo Man is a lesser known music game in the same vein as PaRappa the Rapper but made by the same guy who made Elite Beat Agents. You play as a U-1, a bullied kid who learns how to play guitar from his talking dog, Puma, and somewhere along the way learns that he is the last hero from Planet Gitaroo (roll with it). Needing to get back all the pieces of the Gitaroo, U-1 and Puma travel around the universe to fight off enemies in comedic music battles.
The game has a bunch of great original scores and a bunch of very odd characters to boast. The humor is pretty odd and somehow worked with the weird esthetic of the whole thing seeing as you find yourself fighting with skeletons made of computer parts that play an odd but great combination of Latin music mixed with quasi Old-Western tones. Guitar Hero was a great game that plagued the entirety of my college career that had a great soundtrack to boot. The game was pretty easy to pick up, albeit frustrating in the beginning and it gave me a better feeling of satisfaction than just drumming my fingers along to whatever song I was listening to. However since none of the songs were original and I was forced to leave the confines of my room and venture into the real world, I would hear them everywhere. I went into the game being a fan of "The Police" and left never wanting to hear "Message in a Bottle" ever again. I'd go so far as to say that if I were stranded on an island and had an actual bottle, I wouldn't put a message in it just because I'd think of that song.
One of the biggest problems I had with Guitar Hero was that it was just a game about playing a fake guitar to real songs. There wasn't any dumb story to carry it along, no characters to get attached to, nothing original. My biggest problem with Gitaroo Man was that it was a game about the guitar, but nothing in it made it feel like I was actually playing a guitar. Fix both problems with each other, and you have the formula for a fun experience. Give me the weird characters, the silly story, and the original songs of Gitaroo Man and the mechanics and feeling of actually doing something from Guitar Hero and I will play it all day long. I'd still be aware that I wasn't really playing a guitar but at least the silliness of the Gitaroo Man esthetics would suit it in a way. Metroid is a prime example of a series that has so much potential but hasn't really tapped into it with the exception of a game or two. The series has a lot going for it despite what "Metroid: The Other M" would have you believe.
The overall world of Metroid has a great style to it and the enemies are classic. Samus herself is great. The design from her suit is alien enough to make her feel grounded in her universe. So why have recent Metroid games been missing their mark? It could be argued that Nintendo doesn't do dark and gritty games super well. They haven't made a dark exclusive game of late since Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube and that wasn't even developed by Nintendo. The games that take place in space and are well known from Nintendo are Super Mario Galaxy and Star Fox which are still gentle games and somehow, "gentle" doesn't really suit a game like Metroid. ("what happened to me and my franchise...") The world of Mass Effect is pretty spectacular even if it is over shadowed by its notoriously awful ending. The overall map gave one with a sense that they had a vast universe to explore and planets to discover and problems to solve. Choosing whether to be good and bad made this universe seem even bigger, no longer having just actual space to explore, but also interactions.