So it’s too damn bad that Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich tanked, because I’m playing it now (hooray for backlogs!) and it is really a chewy creamy slice of pure Kirby-esque campy goodness. Mentorrr always cracks me up. They’re so SERIOUS!
It’s also crappy at a gameplay level because I don’t know of any other superhero game that lets you really design your own hero from scratch the way Freedom Force did. The Freedom Force system is almost Champions-esque in its depth of character design possibilities, and dammit I MISS THAT. Try doing that in your stinkin’ Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
Anyway, just wondering what characters you all made (assuming you can remember, it’s not like this game didn’t come out in 2004 or anything). Here are mine:
DARKLAW: Kind of a Batman/Wolverine character, I gave him the Thug 1 voice. He’s reasonably tough, with claws, fast healing, sprint, and superjump. He is your standard unstoppable scrapper, I sic him on just about anybody because it’s fun to watch him get smacked all over the map, get up, and keep on wailing away.
RADEEMER: She’s a radiation sniper. Her main power is a 627-point (!) beam energy blast, with the Beam ability (which is definitely overpowered but isn’t powergaming part of the fun? Yes, yes it is), max accuracy, penetration, and zero endurance. Plus flight, of course. She just flies around at top speed (she’s fast, too) and zaps everyone all day long, she can take out your standard guard in one or two hits at the most, and when energized she’s great for bosses. You have to be careful about friendly fire with her, she’ll happily go right through a bunch of your guys, but they’ll survive, what else is Heroic Revival for?
I don’t have a whole lot in the way of backstory for these two – it’s too bad the custom character system doesn’t let you enter your own backstory. If I did, it would be something like, Darklaw was a bad guy who got in too deep with a weird gang that turned out to be a satanic cult, and found himself the unwilling star of a sacrificial ritual that went wrong after he managed to break free at a crucial moment. The ritual wound up investing him with demonic powers that he now uses for good, having seen how close he almost came to damnation.
Radeemer was a brilliant young physics student when her radiation energy transfer work was patented and sold to a military corporation that was secretly a terrorist front. She found out about it and was in the middle of deleting her files when the security forces attacked her lab trying to salvage what was left. In the fray, she irradiated herself with her own equipment, and acquired radiation powers of incredible focus and strength, as well as the ability to suspend herself on the Earth’s magnetic field. She couldn’t stop some of her work from being destroyed, and now she works to redeem herself.
Ah, it’s nice having read so many comic books, the cliches are at one’s fingertips :-) What about you all? Come on, spill the geekness, you know you want to. And for FUCK’S SAKE, game developers, MAKE MORE DESIGN-YOUR-OWN-HERO GAMES!!! Are there ANY on the horizon?