A quick one for comic book fans. Inspired perhaps by several of the Matrix and Star Wars games, which slot in between movies to flesh out the narrative throughline, Activision has announced that its next X-Men title will exist in a timeframe just before the upcoming X-Men: The Last Stand movie, thereby providing a back-story for the much-anticipated flick. And in an ever-growing trend, the film's screenwriter is being brought aboard to plot out the game - Zak Penn also provided the script for X2: X-Men United as well as Elektra and Behind Enemy Lines.
From the screens it looks like a standard, if rather more pretty than usual, third-person brawler. Activision, in its over-excited press release, puts it more like this:
"Players will immerse themselves in the signature powers of their favorite X-Men heroes - hack and slash with Wolverine's brute strength to decimate foes; as Nightcrawler, players will scale walls, spin and BAMF through environments to stay one step ahead of enemies; and experience incredible speed on Iceman's ice slide while shooting ice beams and creating hailstorms to freeze the opposition. For even more power, players can utilize fury and adrenaline modes to launch devastating attacks."
The game apparently features a combination of melee fighting, stealth-style action and time-based missions as well as global locations and favourite X-Men characters from the movie and comics. If they could bring in a God of War feel, it could be fantastic fun.
This whole back-story concept is making more and more sense in our burgeoning world of multimedia cross-platform branding. Videogame developers can get cracking on production without worrying about last minute changes to the movie, plus a game that forms a unique part of a 'franchise' timeline makes itself indispensable to completist fans. It's also a bit more interesting for the rest of us - and will hopefully prevent the directors of enormous blockbusters from inserting scenes purely for the videogame tie-in (pod racing, anyone?).
X-Men: The Official Movie Game (a working title, thank goodness) is out on every current platform in May 2006.
