Wednesday, July 31, 2013

2013 "Injustice: Gods Among Us - History of Martian Manhunter" video


Today, J'Onn J'Onzz was released as a downloadable character for the hit game Injustice: Gods Among Us. To celebrate/promote, the game's makers offered this new character biography. It's kind of not very good at all, but I appreciate all the folks who emailed me that this had dropped. It's full of scans from the Martian Manhunter: The Others Among Us, JLA: New World Order, Stormwatch: The Dark Side and Stormwatch: Enemies Of The Earth trade paperbacks that are readily available online without the warped dimensions and glare from the spine roll. Six seconds into the video, the narrator mispronounces the character's name as "John Johns," and much of the video consists of Justice League clips. The New 52 Stormwatch is referred to as a government team, and the Johns/Finch Justice League of America is confusingly abbreviated as the "JLA." They list Manhunter's powers as flight, super strength, x-ray vision, shapeshifting, "phasing," invisibility, and telepathy, which doesn't even cover the abilities he demonstrates in the “Injustice: Gods Among Us” Martian Manhunter DLC Trailer. I should probably mention that using the term "phase" to mean "turn intangible" is a pet peeve of mine, because the usage was popularized in X-Men comics, and because read a dictionary why don't you?



On the plus side, new game footage shows up about a minute in, including a visit to the Fortress of Solitide, where Starro is kept in an extraterrestrial menagerie. The Regime Superman gets pulverized in a finishing sequence, and the Alien Atlas offers a new line of smack talk to Ares, "I fail to see the point of this." I'm very cool with the Manhunter turning up in this game as a boss, but if I seem harshly critical of the video above, it's only because WatchMojo.com produced a vastly superior retrospective less than a year ago, which remains YouTube's most popular search result for the Sleuth from Outer Space.

Buy the character today for 400 MS Points/$4.99, and tell me how that worked out for you!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you seen his story "ending" in the Injustice-verse?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hr-LzmI0Og

Diabolu Frank said...

Sweeet! Looks like Sunday's post. Thanks again!

will_in_chicago said...

While I am happy to see Superman turned fascist pummeled and beat by J'Onn J'Onnzz, I have seen better summaries of the Martian Manhunter's history and abilities.