Here are some of my thoughts on the actual gameplay of such a game as mentioned in the last post.  Check it out post-jump.

Gameplay for a game where the main character can’t die is ridiculously hard. It must get hard to balance the need for challenge without just making more things to sap at your health bar. I don’t want to go down the road of “hurting those close to you” as crops up so often in superman stories because, let’s face it, Superman is rubbish.

Besides, unless you can make the player care about digitised people that serve as their avatar it won’t actually do anything. I think the best way comes back to something I said before, about the evil science lab.

As has been said before, just because your character cannot be hurt does not mean he’s got any other powers. Being hit still hurts, it just doesn’t damage him. As such, I feel that the best way to deal with the challenge aspect is to make a game where failure results in your being locked up in the lab again.

Fights would be you struggling to get close enough to brain people, mobs of them trying to grab you and hold you down long enough to beat seven shades of consciousness out of you and bundle you in a van. Naturally they aren’t likely to try this sort of business in broad daylight, it would attract too much attention, so they would reserve this behaviour for dark alleys and their own facilities. Out in the day they’d send specialised operatives, fluent in various forms of incapacitation, innocuously dressed so as to blend in. They’d jump you in the street with the intent to KO you then and there, people will think it just a random piece of city crime rather than the shady kidnapping it really is.

Naturally if you get caught they lock you up, the further into the game you are the longer they hold you before your chance to escape appears (shown on the ingame clock rather than having you wait it all out yourself). The idea would be that getting locked up late in the game would have the world move on while you were locked away. Billboards would change, the scenery would futurise itself, all that business.

Oh, and while I remember, no health bar. I know there wouldn’t be a proper health bar as you couldn’t die in a traditional sense, but you would be able to be knocked out for them to transport you. As a result your consciousness would be illustrated by the state of the screen, getting more wobbly and dark the closer you come to blacking out. Then, they bundle you into the van and have to drive you, in real time, to the lab. This gives you time to shake some sense back into your pummelled brain and break out of the van and escape even before they lock you up.

That’s all I can think of for now, but feel free to ask some questions in the comments if I’ve missed something out you care about.