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Picture this: it’s the early 2000s, the first Fantastic Four film is about to hit theaters, and someone at a video game developer says, “You know what would be the perfect way to capitalize on this intellectual property? A side-scrolling action game on the Game Boy Advance where Reed Richards appears to have been replaced by his less scientifically-inclined brother in law (close enough, give me this one) and the Thing is made entirely of texture-mapping nightmares.” Congratulations, you’ve just invented Fantastic Four Flame On! It’s a game that managed to take four of Marvel’s most iconic heroes and somehow make them feel more constipated than a chemistry lecture taught underwater.

Joining us this week is the absolutely phenomenal Scott Niswander from NerdSync (the man who can explain the entire Marvel mythos while simultaneously making you question why the Human Torch doesn’t just solve every problem by setting it on fire) and It’s (Probably) Not Aliens (where not even Sue Storm’s force fields could save Ancient Aliens from the debunking). Together we’ll navigate a game so baffling in its design choices that you’ll start wondering if the developers were actually aliens trying to understand human entertainment and coming up just slightly short of the mark.

Will our heroes discover that the Game Boy Advance’s technical limitations somehow made this game better than it had any right to be? Can Scott explain why this game exists in a way that doesn’t make all of our brains feel like Alicia Masters trying to sculpt in the dark? And most importantly, does “Flame On” actually let you catch things on fire in any meaningful way, or is it just an elaborate metaphor for combusting under pressure? Strap yourself in for an episode more chaotic than trying to explain Fox’s Fantastic Four continuity to anyone born after 2010.Continue Reading

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Flame on, podcast listeners! This week we’re stretching our way back to 2005 to tackle the Fantastic Four game that somehow managed to land on more consoles than Reed Richards has had scientific breakthroughs. Based on the first Fox movie that made us all question whether Hollywood truly understood what “fantastic” meant, this multi-platform adventure promised to let us clobber our way through levels faster than Ben Grimm goes through doorframes.

Joining us for this cosmic-powered gaming expedition is Anthony Sytko from Capes on the Couch, who’s here to help us determine whether this game was the ultimate power or just another case of “it’s clobberin’ time” gone wrong. We’ll be exploring how this tie-in game managed to squeeze onto everything from GameCube to Game Boy Advance, and whether any version actually captured the magic of Marvel’s first family – or if they all just left us feeling more invisible than Sue Storm on a bad day.

So grab your unstable molecules costume and prepare for a gaming experience that’s sure to be more unpredictable than Johnny Storm’s dating life. It’s time to see if this Fantastic Four adaptation was truly marvelous or just another victim of the superhero movie game curse!Continue Reading

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The world of comics and games, as evidenced by the existence of this podcast, have a decent amount of crossover. But a game where you introduce a whole new team to an already established universe? And have a tie in comic? That’s got to be pretty rare, right?

Listen in as Robert Secundus from Comics XF comes on the show to help take a look at Marvel Nemesis Rise of the Imperfects.Continue Reading

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You know what’s crazy? That we somehow got to the PS1 without a home console Fantastic Four game. You’ve got one of the most iconic groups in the Marvel Universe, a group that pretty much defines what it means to be Marvel, and it takes this long to get a game made? It’s pretty bad if you ask me.Come listen in as Alistair from Get Soft with Dr. Snuggles comes by the show to talk Fantastic Four and this game that clearly suffers from a thing known as “being an early 3D game.” But does that make it bad? Continue Reading