The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PlayStation 2
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
During the course of these posts there’s been more than one occasion when I’ve criticised a game for it’s treatment of police officers (people just doing their job) and animals (canicide is never guiltless fun), so imagine how it felt when, while playing 'The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction', I picked up a passing cow and lobbed it at a nearby copper...
Bloody amazing is how it felt!
I immediately rushed into the pasture to launch another bovine bazooka at a bothersome helicopter gunship!
My guilt for these hilariously inhumane actions was eased by three things:
First, cow’s are apparently the farmyard’s cockroaches; no matter how hard you throw them, or at what, or how many times… they casually pick themselves up and go about the daily business of cowing.
Second, there was some reference in one of the exposition sections of the game to all the police being crooked (topical) and in the pocket of the stories main baddie.
Third, and most important, it’s just too much damn fun.
As you might already know if you read my post on 'Spiderman' for the PS1 back on day 57, my knowledge of Marvel characters is pretty much non-existent beyond their big screen outings, and Hulk is no exception.
I vaguely remember the Lou Ferrigno series, I actually liked the Eric Bana movie, I thought the Ed Norton effort took itself way too seriously, and was a big fan of the way Mark Ruffallo lost control and turned into an enormous green rage monster in the MCU - right up until they nerfed him (along with Thor) into a comedy character for the finale.
My favourite Hulk, though, is now the one in 'Ultimate Destruction'.
This is a Hulk who snaps a car in half, turns it into huge gauntlets, uses them to destroy a tank, then throws the tank into a helicopter, and then picks up the burnt shell of the helicopter and throws it into another helicopter... while running up the side of a building… in jeans shorts.
I defy you not to love this game.
There’s a perennial thread I see all too often on the internet that annoys me, it’s that one where someone asks “Which old game needs a remake?”.
My stock, pompous old gamer, response is that we need more new games, not more rehashes of old ones - and I completely stand by that - but man do I want to see Hulk Ultimate Destruction built in the Red Faction Guerrilla engine. Can you imagine!
Despite how incredible it would be to have completely destructible buildings alongside the vehicles and objects already offered, one of the big reasons I wouldn’t get too snooty about a remake of this game is actually due to the loading times.
Individually they aren’t particularly long for a PS2 game, but there are a lot of them. Most jarring of all are those that occur when you start a side mission, it’s frustrating enough that after a couple I just stopped trying them. Which is a bit of a shame.
Fortunately, the main missions (at least those that I’ve seen in the first couple of hours) are varied enough for my usual requirement that open environments must have tons of distractions to take a back seat.
But, honestly, even if the missions were all identical it wouldn’t matter.
This is because of something I call the ‘Just Cause’ factor, which is itself an evolution of the old mantra: “If you’re bored, it’s because you’re being boring”.
There are so many ways to cause utter mayhem in Ultimate Destruction that it boggles your mind when, every few levels, a whole new array of moves and abilities are unlocked for you to ‘buy’ with special points you earn by stomping soldiers from a hundred metres in the air.
And it’s good that they do because, as the plot rolls on, so the difficulty curve ramps up.
The parts of the game where you run up buildings and throw policemen like human darts are linked together by an actually pretty decent story.
A little research tells me the writer worked on the comics and there’s certainly that level of passion showing in the world-building details of the game. It’s a nice bonus for those who like that sort of thing.
I’ve played very few of Radical’s other games. In fact a few short hours playing the brilliant 'Jackie Chan Stunt Master' on a PS1 emulator might have been the sum of my exposure to their work before today.
But, thanks to this game I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more of their stuff from now on - particularly ‘Prototype’ which, from what little I’ve picked up over the years, may continue the themes of ‘Ultimate Destruction’, albeit taken in a darker direction.
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