Superhero Games - which is the one true RPG?

I think its an overdone genre. Looking at many new games of this genre many do little for me.in my day we had Champions, V&V, SUperworld, Marvel, Super Squadron, DC
I played a marvel campaign for 20 years and find when I run now people understand easily and quickly and we didn't use marvel universe for very long. Id like to do a Zenith game and would use superworld because of cthulhu RPG. Superworld works ok but lots of painful champions like crunch added to BRP and point systems are painful.

We played Spectaculars which has the shared world creation step of the game which should ask how lethal superheroes are really early as this issue affected our game quickly as we were playing in a 60s setting and had a few 80s killer-type characters. It was quite fun but it railroads some character possibilities out of existence. Some of the ideas in a campaign set-up would be good for any session zero hero game. It has lots of stuff in the box to manage a campaign which is an interesting approach bordering on modern board games.

M&M has great lore, art and sourcebooks even if you don't use system it has plenty to steal from for any game like the highschool heroes and agent campaign books. M&M is full of fan content mashing up DC and Marvel.

As I worked in comics I can't touch some superhero games over the art. Its a genre more about art than others.

Heroclix I like to use for minis but the local gamer scene didn't care about comics or characters just collecting and playing this strange game they ignored comics lore on.

I prefer wildly unbalanced power it's on point for the genre and comic writers have the same issues as a GM needs to face to make everyone relevant - its a feature not an problem. Marvel you could have daredevil and thor team up ok. Its part of the conciet of comic genre that a guy with a bow can save a steam when a god cant. So you need a way of doing this in game.

I like marvel simplicity of one table and quick to grasp and easy to mod still makes it great but you can steal ideas from any hero game, especially the long-lasting ones. Silver AGe sentinels is pretty good too for lore. Its probably easier to make and sell a hero RPG than a comic. Everything for TSR marvel game is free online and new fan content has kept up with new sourcebooks. I ran as a battle royale game with 16 players at a con playing great 80s crossover battles. I might run a 1949 era version of my setting inspired by comic 49ers by Alan Moore as a one shot. A common complaint is it has no character gen system but actually it has like 4 and you can make up your own each campaign if you want.

Complexity is an important consideration and accounting spreadsheets without an app is pretty unpopular currently. Too much simplicity and I feel zero risk. (FATE I find utterly unthrilling for risk). Many narrative games allow louder more imaginative players to dominate reality more than the GM and some players are left out a bit. Point games often break down when a character wants to pick up that power ring of a bad guy and someone else can do more with cash than a person with powers in some games making powers almost pointless. Possibly crunchy games handle long campaigns better. Some simple games have little growth built in or when everyone gets some xp they look more similar and don't fail much.

I did play champions in a competitive club environment and Marvel was refreshing and got rid of lots of bad behaviour with min-maxing numbers and you could point out this was comic code standards in the 80s when players lost all their karma points for murder.

People are still pumping out this genre as games and nothing will stop it. I'm happy to give them a go. Bad or non-genre art is a turn-off. Making certain character types impossible has problems. In a setting where all heroes have the same origin like some 80s dark heroverse that's ok. Part of the point of super team books is they let you tell any genre stories with a mix of incongruent characters. If you limit the possibility I recommend you establish the setting ASAP to explain why. People have different visions of what is desirable to make a genre or what is the essence of comic adventure story tropes. I think some creators would like to make comics but can't (paying a realistic artist wage is beyond most people apparently).