Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Via evil incarnate
At Comic-Con today, we had our first opportunity since E3 to check out Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and based on this latest look, the title appears to have a good chance at becoming the best superhero game of 2006.
Given the appearance at Comic-Con, it only makes sense that we would get an announcement of a few new playable characters for the game at the show, and Activision has come through on that front, revealing that The Human Torch, Iceman and The Invisible Woman will be on the roster of controllable heroes for those who pick up the game later this year. There will be more than 20 playable characters in the game, though Activision isn't revealing the exact number at this point.
Activision has taken some heat in the past for porting current-gen games over for "next-gen" products, but for those worried of a similar fate for Ultimate Alliance, fear not. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of this game are unmistakably next-gen titles, and what we saw today was even nicer looking than what the company showed of the game at E3. New graphical refinements and shaders have been added, resulting in a game that looks pretty with two characters on the screen, and looks like an "awesome next-gen light show," according to associate producer Chris Palmisano, when the screen starts to fill up (and he's right).
Though the version of the game being shown at Comic-Con is running on Xbox 360, Ultimate Alliance is in development for just about every system imaginable -- from PlayStation 3 on down to Nintendo DS. The one version that has posed many questions since its announcement is the one heading to Nintendo's Wii, and we were able to round up a few details on that version as well.
Under development at Vicarious Visions (most versions of the game are being handled by Raven), the Wii game won't veer too far from the established action-RPG running-around-hitting-guys-and-leveling-up gameplay, but it will allow for a modified control scheme to match up with what players expect from Nintendo's system. "The basic game controls like the camera and the movement and stuff like that -- you can do that on the Wii with left side in most cases," says Palmisano. "Then there are standard combo moves, which you can also do with the Wii controller." But don't expect that to mean you'll have your arms flailing wildly. "I don't know how many games you're going to see where people are jumping around -- our game is an RPG so it's really hard to require that much physical energy to play a game for 30 hours," he says. That said, players can look for character-specific special moves that will hopefully do a good job of taking advantage of the Wii controller.
On the graphics side, Palmisano categorizes the Wii version as one step up from the current-gen versions and one step down from the PS3/360/PC versions. "Fundamentally, it's almost using the same [character] models as the current-gen. They're a little bit better. It's actually got real-time shadows in it, and the way the Wii processes graphics is a little bit better."
All version of Ultimate Alliance are scheduled to ship to stores in the fourth quarter of this year, with the Wii and PlayStation 3 versions confirmed as launch titles for those platforms.
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