SDCC 2009: THQ Booth Preview
Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 07.30.2009
SDCC '09: The folks at THQ run us through some of their upcoming offerings including Darksiders, Dragonica, and Marvel Super Hero Squad.
THQ invited 411mania.com to take a look at some of their upcoming game releases, some of which we got a little bit of a look at with E3.
For the kids, families, and Marvel fans, there's Marvel Super Hero Squad due out in October. This is based on the Marvel/Hasbro toy line as well as the new upcoming animated series and will be released on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PS2, and PSP consoles. The game features the same voice cast as the show including Charlie Adler as Doctor Doom and the legendary Steve Blum as Wolverine. THQ showed us a demo of the Nintendo Wii gameplay. The game looks like a more youth-oriented version of Spider-man: Friend or Foe and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Also throw in a bit of the Lego Star Wars/Batman/Indiana Jones game. The game allows you to play over 20 Marvel characters each with their own specialized moves and attacks. There's also some arena style combat. The super heroes have to battle Doctor Doom as he tries to take over Super Hero City. This game looks really cute and fun, and its fun seeing Marvel characters get a little goofy in this format.
Darksiders which we got to play and preview got some more face time at the convention. The marketing manager talked about superstar comic book artist, Joe Madureira, being the creative director in the game where you literally play as War, the Horseman of the Apocalypse. War's been framed for triggering a false Apocalypse and must put the pieces together to clear his game. However, all the other Horsemen are nowhere to be found. Joe Mad came up with the concept and story scenario for the game and had approval over all the designs and script. We confirmed that War is the only playable of the script. THQ informed us the official release for the game is now in January 2010 on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The game still looks great with fantastic action and gigantic boss battles and fights. Think Zelda meets God of War for this one.
Finally to round out the THQ booth, we got a look at Dragonica Online, due out in the third quarter of this year for PC. The folks for the Dragonica game ran us through some of the gameplay which is essentially an online RPG with numerous different types of classic gameplay elements. There's side-scrolling action, some arena gameplay action, and of course customizable and RPG elements. All that and you can still team up with your friends online and go on quests. The game features sort of a classic RPG/anime type of sprite look which is really nice. The action and controls for the game they ran through us look very sharp.
