It's the colossal battles and wall crawling escapades that are the prime fodder in a videogame, however, so why do these conversions consistently fail to deliver? In principle, comic book super heroes, who have already had their own personal distinctiveness established by another medium are the ideal candidates for just this kind of application.
To be fair to the programmers, it's an immensely difficult task. They are effectively re-writing the character's history and present actions, while all the tools and devices used by other creative mediums are effectively removed from their arsenal. While a script writer (comic or movie) has complete control over the visual development of the character and their story, a programmer has to let the player make those decisions for themselves. They must communicate a complete story and also the impact the story's events have on the life of an existing character, which is already replete with fanatic, detail-obsessed fans.
The movie and the comic can take us into the life of Peter Parker, Frank Castle or Norrin Radd, away from their costumes and powers, and bring the audience closer to them to feel their anguish and joys, fully appreciating them as rounded, believable people. Aside from the odd cut scene, however, a software developer would be committing commercial suicide by including a level in Spider-Man where we would play as Peter Parker battling his emotional turmoil over an inability to pay his rent:
"Use Parker's special ability to act all awkward and feeble in order to help Aunt May open a bank account and buy some new pants before the shops close! Get the free toaster from the belligerent bank clerk for an extra bonus!"
It might bring you closer to Peter's predicament during the movie, but in a videogame, it's just a waste of your wireless controller's batteries. Neither do we want to sit and be inactively entertained by watching the characters' origins in extended FMV sequences, so a game's developer must tell us the story, teach us about the history of the character's world, make us empathize with our protagonist and provide an enjoyable playing experience from the second the start screen disappears. No small wonder it's rarely achieved.
In order to love our super heroes, in all their guises, we've already decided they must allow us to feel as though we're helping our fellow man or woman - that's right, I'm a genuine "nineties man" (despite the fact it's 2006) - by hurting other, less likeable fellow men or, indeed, women. Strap on a few super powers or special abilities to our deep, moral epitome of human excellence, and you've got yourself a workable character from which many a great story and game can be fashioned. There is a snag, of course: One character does not a story make.
Heroes need villains, villains need victims and victims need predicaments. All these components must be equally three dimensional in order for us to become fully immersed in the wants and needs of the main character. If Spidey simply took himself a safe distance from the Green Goblin's hand propelled pumpkin bombs and webbed him to the wall until the police sauntered by, we wouldn't perceive the Wall Crawler to have achieved anything of particular worth, and his status would be reduced to just "hero," having done nothing especially "super." And the Green Goblin would be neither threat nor sympathetic entity if he simply got bored of being a multi-millionaire and decided to go on a pointless, egomaniacal rampage. His history and the events that lead him to the desperate measures, which pushed him over the edge of humanity and into the realm of the desperate criminal, must be believable, and it is this aspect a wise game developer would use to make us empathize with the characters.
