As I plan, mostly in my mind, the arduous task of making a game, 2 very different examples of gameplay, come to mind: Death and Return of Superman and X-Men 2: Clone Wars.
On the outset, besides starring famous comic book superheroes they are plenty different. DAROS is a story focused beatem up up in the vein of Final Fight meant to coincide with the "influential" Death of Superman Saga. X2CW is a plataformer and a sequel to another Xmen plataformer.
But I am not looking at genre differences: I'm looking at exploitation of potential gameplay.
You see both games where given a franchises with several characters to use. DAROS, perhaps uniquely for it's time, sold a long story where player choice was determined by stage. X2CW had the full range of the X-Men franchise.
X-Men plays the difference of it's characters up to the maximum. Psylocke has a melee one hit kill and a wallcling, whereas Cyclops is has an advantage using the kill beams that his eyes generate. The difference is more than merely functional in game, though. Each character manages to immerse you further into their shoes by playing up their powers, and it still blends organically to the rest of the gameplay. If it sounds like par for the X-Men course, remember, that using a single character template is easy, and can and has been done to the franchise. Aditionally, designing a stage and a game and an enemy type around a type of gameplay is easier than designing a game around a single type of playstyle.
This is never more uncommon than in the Beat Em up Genre, which is why DAROS is at a disadvantage. Even so, despite every character neatly fitting a singular gameplay type(And all having either Super or Man in the name), diferences in focus where possible, yet ignored. One of them could be a rushier character, and another could be more projectile focused. The only notable difference is range, which is unavoidably larger in the hammer wielding (and personal favorite in the whole saga/game)Steel. But Daros chooses a more story focused aproach, following different characters going across the story. True to the source material, the game has a handfull of boss fights against Doomsday as Superman before letting you play as the traitorous Cyborg, Overly cool Superboy, Armored everyman Steel and Kryptonian kill bot Erradicator before letting the resiscitated, black clad Superman close the story. But it's a cosmetic difference, which is fine enought, but fails to immerse in the gameplay.
X-Men 2, however, brings a simpler story of "stop the badguys", but the gameplay execution really brings it home. Not only does it let you choose your characters, but even adds a character as the story progresses. The game's story, though, sort of puts you in the shoes of Xavier, as all ingame story comes from Cerebro text messages. Characters do not really participate directly in the plot until the very end, where Cyclops is pissy that Magneto wanted to kill them all for the greater good, despite this pretty much being Magnetus modus operandi all the time. You assume Gambit sat there silently.
However, the true key to Xmen Clone Wars is the multiplayer. By combining the varied character types I mentioned earlier, it provides with plenty of chance to relive the experience in a fresher way. It is too bad the enemies are mostly 1 hit kills. DAROS has more of the satisfying oomph of landing multiple hits in the faces of opponents, where X2CW's melee combat is simplistic and it's enemies are simplistic as well, but ignores any possible multiplayer options. Now for it's genre, that's a miss.
If only it where more like X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse. Despite the unnececessary dragonpunch motions for the moves, XMA had a more robust combat and plenty of hardy enemies to try it on as well. Although it was sadly lacking in multiplayer.
These are the design matters which one must consider when making an oldschool superhero game. As I am. I have spent many hours peering into old Youtube Bossruns and Playthroughts, trying to find the right tone for the game I am making. Of course, being that my game will feature often highly changed versions of characters, perhaps I have an advantage than the characters can have whatever powers I want. I could try to fit them all in a mold, DAROS style...but I won't.
