Saturday 19 August 2023

RPG a Day 2023: The 10th Anniversary Edition--Day 21 Favorite Licensed RPG

I've already talked about it.  It is, was and probably always shall be Marvel Superheroes by TSR. I guess I  will link to my own earlier blog entries.

https://markthemadbaron.blogspot.com/2023/08/rpg-day-2023-10th-anniversary-edition_13.html

https://markthemadbaron.blogspot.com/2023/08/rpg-day-2023-10th-anniversary-edition.html

I'll use this space to rant about superhero nowadays...

So, at the time when the original and advanced versions of Marvel Superheroes came out, comics were still good. They were largely affordable and the focus was on entertainment and not some veiled (not so veiled) preachy message. For the most part, Marvel--the younger of the two major American comic companies--had not become the convoluted mess that DC was. Unfortunately, as it turns out these things seem to be unavoidable the longer the continuity goes forward. I dropped off the wagon during the 90's Spiderman clone  saga. I liked the Ben Reilly character. It was a good way to reboot Spidey without dropping the plot, but the writers flew too close to the sun by revealing that "Peter" was always the clone--which would have covered the entirety of my years as a collector,  and I started at an early age--while Ben was the original Spidey returned after decades in real-time. This went over about as well as one would expect especially with fans who were older than I was. The backlash was so bad that everything got sent by to status quo as quick as Marvel could make it so. Had they presented Ben as the clone and had Peter retire off in the sunset with Mary Jane, we could still be reading about Ben's adventures today...but that's not how it went down. For me it went downhill from there and apart from a brief stint--Superior Spider-man--I've never looked back. This unfortunately has bled into removing any desire to play superhero games. No matter how good a licenssed game may be--I've read not so good--I'm not going to play it if I have no interest in the license. 

BTW--I did follow Marvel and even DC during the movie years. Marvel of course had some good ones so I couldn't deny myself that as a longtime fan.  The Spiderman movies remain pretty good, but otherwise the superhero fatigue is real, and the cinematic universe has gone the way of its print universe only it fell apart more quickly. 




 

No comments:

Post a Comment