I’m a Marvel guy who doesn’t play a whole lot of video games. But the **Marvel Ultimate Alliance **game looks kind of interesting. If I end up liking that game, are there any other good games featuring Marvel characters?
X-Men Legends is pretty good (and the sequel’s supposed to be even better).
The recent Spiderman and Hulk games that were 3rd person action games I thought were fun and well done. Smashing things as the Hulk was very satisfying…
I’ve been waiting for a good RPG style Marvel game to come out. By all reviews so far, Marvel Ultimate Alliance looks like a winner. I’ll have to check it out.
I can’t speak for the sequel, but I actually did not like X-Men Legends. The A.I. on your fellow mutants is pathetic. I realized this as Storm walked off of a cliff to her death. Also, the game spends way too much time loading. Pause to go to the character menu? That’s a loading screen. Pick a character? Loading screen. Back to the pause menu? Loading screen. Back to the game? Loading screen. It’s never a good sign when one of the unlockable rewards are brand new loading screens.
Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects is basically a fighting game. After the umpteenth time my opponent reached me all the way across the stage with a finishing move to win the match, I traded the game away.
I found Ultimate Spider Man to be annoying. Too much chirping from the teenaged web slinger. I almost wanted to lose simply to watch him die. The controls are okay, but they were better excecuted in Spider Man 2.
Spider Man 2, the game based on the movie, is probably the best Marvel video game I’ve played. The control system is perfect. You can either go through your missions or simply spend time swinging around New York City pounding on thugs and rescuing little old ladies.
The Punisher is also a pretty strong game. It took me a while to get into it since I was only familiar with the old school not quite as violent Punisher. Once I did, great game.
I have to disagree with Harborwolf, we never had a problem with the AI in Xmen Legends or XL2. Set your AI to defensive so that they’ll come to your aid when you’re getting pwned, and they mostly do their own thing without getting in too much trouble. I can’t say I was overly concerned by the loading either, and we got a lot of fun out of both of the games.
I will say, though, that I think they make better multiplayer than singleplayer games. The AI’s not terrible, but it’s nice to be able to properly coordinate things like power attacks with your other players.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is the shiznit and I’ve totally got a girl-gamer-boner on for it, but a word of warning - this thing appears to be optimised for the 360 or a higher-end PC. Hubby initially got it on the PS2, and the graphics were shit and it ran like a dog. First few screens into the game and it was chugging like someone had stepped on its throat. So we traded it at EB for the 360 version (paying $40 more in the process, but that’s another rant entirely) and it’s a beautiful sex-machine of a game now (and so shiny to boot. Everything’s shiny, even Wolverine).
They’ve improved on a few things from the Legends games - you don’t have to collect health and energy bottles and use them, you automatically pick up and use whatever you need, and if one person triggers their power attack it triggers the power attacks for every other character in the room, so you automatically get the combo bonus. They’ve also made it so your different outfits have different powers attached to them that you can spend money to power up, so the changing of your outfits becomes more of a tactical issue than a cosmetic one.
There’s a few things that I’m not so keen on in MUA. One is the Superhero “Team” thing you’ve got to do. At one point in the game, you’re told to choose your team. You can either choose a pre-set team (eg The Fantastic Four) or create your own. Your team levels up as you complete certain tasks, and you can get extra powers for them like extra XP, accelerated healing, extra team members etc. But you only start with four character slots in the team, and if you want to swap in a character that you don’t have in your team already (Example: We unlocked Blade, but already had our character ranks full at the time) then you take a hit to your team XP. That’s a wee bit annoying.
There’s also things like all characters are set to auto-spend points and auto-equip equipment, and you can’t un-spend a point that the Computer has already spent. The other thing is that when you’re playing multiplayer, the player that picks up a piece of equipment gets it permanently assigned to them. Unlike the Legends games where all equipment goes in a communal pool, that means if player 2 picks up something, and it turns out to be optimised for player 1, they can’t just use it. Player 2 has to drop it and player 1 has to go pick it up. That’s a bit of a pain in the arse.
Hubby’s main complaint with it is that he thinks Wolverine is overpowered. He’s just complaining because Logan pwns all of his pansy-ass characters 
I think if you’re going to start with a Marvel-flavoured RPG, you might be better off choosing one of the Legends games. They’re both really good in terms of storyline and character choices (both straight away and unlockable), and because they’re a little bit older they’re going to be a fair bit cheaper than MUA. If you like Legends, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of if you’d like MUA or not and it’s a bit easier to justify forking out for it in that case.
Spider-Man by Parker Bros. for the Atari 2600. Shooting webbing and swinging around the Daily Bugle was endless fun. 
The best by far is Spider-Man/Captain America: Dr. Doom’s Revenge.
Okay, not really, but it is historically interesting as a proto-fighting game and for the huge variety of villains included.
Probably not this one. 
Thanks for sharing that link… it plays sorta like this game.
I loved X-Men Legends, the sequel, and now Marvel Ultimate Alliance. And when I say I loved them, I mean “thank god I don’t own this game or I wouldn’t eat or sleep until I finished it.” I play them at a buddy’s house multiplayer-style.
In general I agree with everything Sierra Indigo said.
I’m not a fan of the auto-use health and energy potions. What it generally means is that you never have any potions, so unless you get a bunch of health potions mid-fight, boss battles often involve casualties. (Not that characters dying matters.) Despite that gripe, less micromanagement is always good.
As for the initial team limitation, ah, how quickly we forget. X-Men legends spent a ton of time with only one or two players; the start of the game, all the mansion crap, etc… This one, at least, lets you always have four players. And it doesn’t take long after the team thing starts up that you can expand your team, so it’s at least not a dealbreaker.
You can un-spend points the computer assigns. It’s just that there are certain thresholds that can’t be unspent. The first point of a power – plus the first point where a power changes – locks in and can’t be undone. Just be careful about re-assigning powers willy nilly. I do that, but occasionally end up wasting huge amounts of cash because I accidently buy an extra point.