Chris Sims

Q: Which video game series would you love to pitch a comic series for? -- @rrob_IV A: I'm not going to lie to you, Rob: I have always wanted to make comics about video games. I think I've talked about this before, but the first memory I have of actually trying to make comics was laying on the floor of a hotel room at Myrtle Beach one summer vacation, drawing a version of the junkyard scene from Batman #425 that had Blanka and Dhalsim from Street Fighter in place of the standard thugs. It was actually a pretty big dream of mine, and a few years ago, I actually got the chance to pitch a comic based on one of my all-time favorite games. I even ended up writing a pretty big chunk of the script. So, since you asked, let's talk about the time that I almost wrote a comic based on Final Fight.

Back when it first started up, I wrote a review of Archie's Mega Man comic where I called it "the smartest superhero comic on the stands," mostly because of the way that it took on some pretty serious ideas without detracting from the accessible, all-ages adventure that made it such a fun read. That bit in the first arc where Mega Man starts to withdraw from his family, becoming cold and, well, robotic because of the psychological toll of destroying other robots like himself is still one of my favorite scenes in comics from the past few years. Forty issues later, I can still stand by that statement. Mega Man hasn't just continued building one of the most enjoyably action-packed stories around the bare-bones plot of "go right, shoot robots" that it got from the video games, it's also having conversations about ethics, forgiveness and what it means to love someone that nobody else in comics is coming close to. And it's great.

I think it's pretty safe to say that we're all eagerly anticipating the release of Arkham Knight this fall, but for some of us, October is way too long to wait for the thrill of Batman punching people right in the face. Sure, you could play through the first two games again, but why bother? There's an overlooked classic out there that will provide you with all the bat-punching you need: Batman: The Brave and the Bold for Nintendo DS.

2008's Fallout 3 isn't exactly an underrated classic. It was, in fact, a massive success with a huge fan following that garnered multiple Game of the Year awards, and it's still looked on as a high point of the current console generation that laid the blueprint for similar successes that came after. But here's the thing: Fallout 3 isn't just better than the games that came before it, it's still be