Sean Orange and Zac Shipley ponder the future of Marvel entertainment after being blown away by the new Hulk!
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Metal Gear Solid 4 was released earlier this week, so this week’s $20 Game of the week and Lost Classics will spotlight 2 entries from the series. So once you get done with 4, seek them out if you haven’t played through them already! Despite the similarity in names, this is not the Playstation smash hit, but it’s the American release of what is known in Japan as Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel. Ghost Babel exists outside of series canon, and contains a new plot, new characters, and new enemies.
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This week, Metal Gear Solid 4 hits the Playstation 3. As Metal Gear Solid 3 was a tale set in the past, this makes MGS 4 the long awaited follow up to the events of MGS 2, which was released almost 7 years prior! As such, series newcomers will want to check out the franchises past entries. While Metal Gear Solid 2 may have gotten a bad rap for a few key issues, (most notably the complex plot and the fact that you play as someone other than Solid Snake for a majority of the game) Metal Gear Solid 2 is still every bit a classic as any other game in the series. While the original version is still available, players will want to grab this special edition which contains several hours of new content and marks the first and only time that Metal Gear Solid has appeared on a Microsoft console.

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This is not to be confused with the fan favorite PC and Dreamcast game Soldier of Fortune. Soldiers of Fortune is the name given to the USA Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis release of the Amiga cult hit The Chaos Engine, which was developed and published by UK developers The Bitmap Brothers. It was also ported to the RISC OS, the Amiga CD32, and the Atari ST. Soldiers of Fortune is a 2-player top-down shooter in the vein of Ikari Warriors with a few elements borrowed from Gauntlet, and some alternate history science fiction thrown in for good measure.
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We have a new Hulk movie coming out this summer, and Sega is supplying us the prerequisite tie-in game to go along with it. Here is hope that it’s good, but with the flop of the recent Iron Man game, Marvel fans may have to prepare for the worst. However, there is a bit of hope for it, as preliminary screens indicate that the game resembles this 2005 classic from Radical and Sierra. That can be considered somewhat of a good thing too, as Ultimate Destruction was the first really good Hulk game. It helped bring players into the role of the Hulk the same way that Activision’s Spider-man 2 video game did. It (along with Scarface:The World Is Yours which came a year later) also proved that Radical entertainment was adept of creating good open-world experiences that weren’t rip offs of Grand Theft Auto.

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Zac Shipley and Sean Orange took in the latest Harrison Ford epic and wonder aloud if it was all worth it, and if we deserve another.

In the world of 3-d fighting, there are two kings: Namco (Tekken and Soul Calibur) and Sega’s AM2 (Virtua Fighter). Tecmo’s Team Ninja and its Dead Or Alive franchise is closely behind the two, and is quickly gaining steam. Although Dead Or Alive has been criticized for it’s more simplistic play mechanics and heavy focus on the female form, it has earned praise for it’s envelope-pushing graphics, gorgeous backdrops, awesome looking player models, and robust online system. While DOA may not be a huge innovator in the fighting world, Team Ninja’s fighting franchise becomes deeper and more enjoyable with each iteration, and the series’s first appearance on the Xbox 360 is no different.

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At the time of its release, this Data East-developed game was second only to Konami’s X-men game in terms of multiplayer beat-em-up action, and even today it maintains its charm. Taking control of either Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, or Hawkeye, you battle your way through various supervillians in order to make it to the Red Skull’s moon base. You’ll meet Whirlwind, the Wizard, Ultron, Crossbones, and several other familiar Avengers villains. You’ll even run into Juggernaut and the Sentinels from the x-men comics. Quicksilver, Namor, the Wasp, and Wonder Man make cameo appearences. There are even some shooter segments to mix up the action. The game’s English translation took some hits (“Why should it goes well?”) when it came over here, but the game is still enjoyable, especially when you bring along friends. There is an absolute zero chance of this being re-released in any way (primarily due to the fact that Data East no longer exists and Activision holds the licensing rights to most major Marvel properties), so you’re going to have to do some searching to find the cartridge or cabinet. If you do manage to run across the game, check it out, and it will tide you over until Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 hits sometime down the road.