Ultimate Marvel Alliance

[mabudon]

He's basically a marvel batman, and he doesn't really have much of a distinguishing et of characteristics- loner, goes on missions, no eral powers, but he has boomerangs and can use martial arts so he could be okay...

He's likely no Wolvie tho

[vynsane]

He's basically a marvel batman, and he doesn't really have much of a distinguishing et of characteristics- loner, goes on missions, no eral powers, but he has boomerangs and can use martial arts so he could be okay...

that's true... on the outset. however, during the 70's there was a long-running story about how the man behind the costume had multiple personalities - and we're not just talking personas that he put on to go undercover or whatnot, but full-blown alternate personalities. he's a billionaire playboy, but he's also believed himself a cab driver, a hired military mercenary, and the manifestation of the egyptian moon god konshu. that's where it gets interesting.

[mabudon]

Oh I've enjoyed the books I've read with him in them, it's just a LOT different than much of the rest of the "Universe" and yeah I thought he kinda WAS that moon-god guy

[Ran]

I managed to get Spiderman and Iron Man killed on a mission so I tried Moon Knight. He is relativly weak because I haven't leveled him up yet. As soon as my dead characters recovered, I dropped him. My crew consists of Spiderman, Iron Man, Capt America, and Woverine...which I found out is the New Avengers which gives 5% bonus on something or other.

Just made it past Murder World and played a couple of the training missions. I failed horribly using Dr. Strange. Finished Elektra and Luke Cage. I don't know much about him, but in the game Cage is pretty bad ass. Tonight I plan on doing the training missions for The Thing and Vs. Mysterio.

Oddly enough, my current save file is named Strange (Normal).

[Ran]

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 Fusion is due out in the first quarter of next year. There is a quick video in the link. Doesn't show much, but it appears the Hulk will be in it.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Is it me, or do the graphics on the new game not look as good as the graphics on the old one?

[jjreason]

The frame rate in the first one blows - it's skippy as fuck on my machines (both PS2 and PS3 versions). I hope they've smoothed it out A LOT for the sequel.

[Ran]

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/home/951210.html

Code: Select all

The Marvel Universe is being torn apart. The Superhuman Registration Act becomes law and Super Heroes must register as weapons of mass destruction, becoming licensed government agents. As Civil War is stirred, Iron Man leads the Pro-Registration side while Captain America spearheads the stand on Anti-Registration. The enemies you battle and the missions you accomplish depend on which side you choose.

Due out 9/8/09. I never finished the first one.

[mabudon]

Okay, being somewhat low-budget these days I missed the initial release of this sucker. My good friend Johnny V got the game (PS 2 version) last week and played it for an hour or two, then told me he was going to have to think hard about whether he thought he "should unleash the turd on anyone else"

I was real surprised as some of what I'd seen online made it look about like the first one, only with that "fusion" thing.
He finally brought it out last night and I hacked my way through maybe 2/3 of Latveria

I sincerely hope that the next-gen console version doesn't do what the PS2 one does...

The graphics are decent, the cutscenes are servicable, the controls are also good enough (tho the "fusion" thing is weird, you hold down r1 and l1 and then select which team-mate you want to do the combo attack with- oftentimes it sort of "hangs" and your character stands there for a few seconds getting the shit knocked out of him/her while the attack sequence takes its sweet time happening- also the whole thing can get "cancelled" if the wrong character takes a hit while this is taking place) I am not sure if I'm just missing some important point regarding executing them or what but it can fuck things up a bit

I was having no trouble and was actually enjoying the game until IT happened. There is this huge chamber that you and your team must cross to advance to the next area. There are hordes of doombots to contend with, but generally they're simple to dispatch. Also in the room are 6 big-ass cannons mounted around the outside of the area on sort of platforms, too far away to destroy with your characters. At this point a cutscene informs you that there is a gun turret on a platform in the middle of the room and that you must go up there and take it over, using it to blast the cannons and protect the rest of your team from doombots (tho my team at this time was Hulk, Cap, and Human Torch with me controlling Wolvie, it would have been far better to take the Doombots on foot)

Sounds pretty easy at this point, right?? I mean, the attacking gun turrets take 1-2 hits (from a rapid-firing 2 barreled gun that you'll be using). So Wolvie runs up and once he gets to the right spot the game turns into a completely unrelated mini-game that I swear was created entirely by Snigtad Flornbi and Dell Rusk.
I didn't believe my friend when he was telling me about this bit- it is SO incongruous and jarring that I literally laughed in derision after only a few seconds had passed.

It's hard to describe how insanely awful this part of the game is. The graphics are suddenly from 10 years ago, which helps underscore the REAL problem- rather than design a standard stationary-mounted swivelling/tracking gun turret, someone decided that it would be more fun if the turret was solidly welded to the end of a stick (which would be around 50 feet long in "real life" scale). This puts the pivot point well beyond the bottom of the screen and renders the guns practically impossible to aim. I incorrectly assumed that the controls would be the traditional vertically reversed type and with just a quick push "up" on the stick I ended up riding the goofy contraption 90 degrees forwards so wolvie was staring uselessly at the floor. I really can't convey how ridiculous the whole thing is- I tried for a few minutes and by shit-luck managed to knock out all 6 turrets (swearing robustly the whole frustrating, dizzying, jerky time) and was rewarded woth the message that my team had succumbed to doombots since I "wasted too much time"

I did not make a second attempt last night and I pray to the Marvel gods that there will be no further displays of this "innovative gameplay mechanism" in the rest of it. It's totally not impossible, but I don't know how much of my life I feel like wasting on that level of inane bullshit. I mean, they DO playtest these fucking things right? Both me and my buddy were absolutely shocked at the instant and utter hateability that the sequence produced in us. It wasn't a matter of "well, a few things could be tweaked but it's okay, it's not a very important scene and it works fine for what it is". It was more of a "what the FUCK man, this has nothing to do with fucking anything, and anyone who tried to play even a few seconds of this should have cut it right the fuck out, no amount of fucking revision could possibly make this shit enjoyable- it's not 'flawed', it's pure doon, it doesn't even look like the fucking game it's FROM for fucks sake"

May be more to follow, depending

[mabudon]

OK, so it took some doing but I beat that idiotic part of the game. After getting past that, it returns to fairly playable. It also becomes more and more clear that the game was released well before it was finished, and that the team working on it had very little intercommunication.
On one board, your team had to battle through a "maze" of streets dispatching various baddies. Every once in a while there were these barricades that had to be cleared by grabbing a specific piece of junk and tapping some buttons, which was easy. I cleaned out the whole area then spent almost an hour going over it with a fine-toothed Spiderman trying to figure out how the hell to get to the next area before we decided that some manner of glitch must have allowed me to fuck up some key element, so we tried restarting from the "checkpoint", only to find that the checkpoint was set when I did whatever it was that buggered the game up. At that point we just reloaded and avoided doing whatever it was and blew through the whole thing in less than 10 minutes.

Another (fairly minor) gripe is the ridiculous preponderance of load screens. Oftentimes you'll sit through a minute or two of load screen then be plunked down somewhere, walk across a room or something and then get another load screen. I don't care much, load screens give you time to do this and that, but these are just far too common and seemingly pointless (at one point in the HQ, there's various computers for different things likes stats and bonus items etc- if you walk up to one and activate it, the screen pops up immediately, but when you push "back" to close the menu BAM 90 seconds of load screen)

I can't believe they'd bother to support a PS2 release and crap out such a fucking turkey, it's almost like this was designed to make holdouts like me HATE the PS2 or something. This game could have been developed 10 years ago easily. After playing the 2-year-old God of War II then having this abomination attached to one of my fave properties it's just hard to fathom why anyone even bothered

[Ran]

May as well turn this into an all-purpose Marvel game thread.

I don't really know anything about Deadpool, but he has his own video game.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

That first youtube link no worky for me.
I watched the second one. They lost me when they said Daniel Way wrote the story for the game. FAIL.
The gameplay looks fairly routine and boring.

[anarky]

They lost me at "Deadpool," because I didn't see anything about your character repeatedly sodomizing Deadpool with a rusty tire iron.

[Ran]

That first youtube link no worky for me.

Fixed it.

What surprises me is that there is swearing and lots of blood in a Marvel game.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Ugh. The dueling caption boxes sucked ass in the comic and look to suck MORE ass in the game.

Hella pass.