Gameplay for Superman

wellgull and moonlightalice showed me the demo for Arkham Asylum a few weeks ago, and like most folks I was incredibly impressed with the game. It seemed perfectly tailored for Batman, in that every fight required good judgment as well as Bat-Gadgets and acrobatic ability. It made me think about ways a game could approach other superheroes. Superman, for example.

Supposedly no one has ever designed a successful Superman video game, and I can understand why. Most Superman fights are pretty straightforward affairs, in which Superman beats up villain until villain gets Kryptonite, and then villain beats up Superman. (Even the famed Superman-vs-Batman battle in The Dark Knight Returns worked this way.) The fact is, Superman's talents are wasted beating people up. Anyone can beat up crooks -- they beat up each other all the time -- but only Superman can, say, stop a flood from wrecking a city.

I bring up the flood example because the first great Superman story was probably "Superman and the Dam," Action Comics # 5. A dam was breaking and he rushed in to save people. Along the way he came upon a bridge that was about to collapse:

You could imagine a mini-game derived from this scene. A train is coming, quickly, and you have to hold the bridge up so that the tracks are perfectly straight.

Many of Superman's challenges, in fact, would be a lot like this, involving a very careful application of force at just the right time and position. Take the airline scene from Superman Returns:

The airliner was a fragile object. If Superman just held his hand out and caught the plane as it fell from the sky the vehicle would have collapsed like an accordion, killing everyone inside. He had to grab the plane at the right spot (he screwed up at first by taking the wing) and then slow its descent. In a game much of this could be explained in voiceover ("I've ... got ... to ... match ... its ... speed!") but it would take a lot of skill to get right.

Obviously I'm not a computer/console-game designer so I'm never going to put these thoughts into practice, but no harm in fantasizing I suppose.