Baud Attitude

I would like to amend my previous glowing review of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, but only slightly.  It has 27 levels, and 25 of those are full of gleeful joy.

Sadly I am having some difficulty finding appropriate vocabulary to properly convey my sentiments towards the remaining levels, those being the missions “Strange Cargo” and “Endgame”.

“Endgame”, at least, has some rationale for the difficulty spike.  It’s the final level of the game, after all, and final boss fights aren’t supposed to be easy.  In all fairness, the difficulty of the fight wasn’t what made me wonder whether it was possible to accidentally break a “Type S” Xbox controller with pure hate.  Rather, it was the combination of an un-skippable intro cinematic and a slow-motion “you failed” sequence that likewise had to be allowed to play out to its conclusion before you could make another attempt, both of which were just that bit more annoying because most cinematics in the game ARE skippable.

“Strange Cargo”, by contrast, has a skippable intro sequence, which is good because I saw it a LOT.  It’s a mission of a type you see a lot of in the game – you have to infiltrate a heavily guarded military base, grab a doohickey, and escape with the doohickey without damaging it too much.

Yes, the game often asks you, as the Hulk, to carry delicate equipment over long distances.  Don’t examine this too closely.

The only issue with it, really, is that the person who designed the level decided that having an infinite supply of flying enemies with homing missiles chase you while you were carrying the doohickey in question was a GRAND idea, and that getting hit with a homing missile would knock Hulk off his feet and make him drop the doohickey, and that you could in fact get hit with a second missile before you had recovered from the first and perhaps a third before recovering from THAT and so on and so forth.

I cannot help but feel that getting juggled to death by homing missiles is a terribly undignified end for Hulk.

I failed this level a great many times, and it came frightfully close to making me move the game, mentally, to my “well, I’ve seen enough of that” category and physically into the box of “stuff for eBay”.

Still, overall a fantastic game and I suppose that a couple of levels that serve to drive the PLAYER into a state of uncontrollable rage are at least thematically appropriate.

A few years back, tired of giving up half our living space to media, we moved our DVDs and games into space-saving sleeves. Now that I’m selling some of them on, I’m having to reconstitute them into new keep cases. Fortunately, bulk DVD cases are pretty cheap, even when I’m going through this process with original Xbox games and need to buy lime green ones.

Anyway, the short version is that I had about 70 Xbox games, a number which surprised the heck out of me, and I winnowed it down to the point where I was keeping 25 of them, and then I started actually playing some of those to see if I really did want to keep them and wound up getting down to 20. It was some pretty harsh pruning, all in all.

Anyway, the game that most impressed me, and which actually cut the entire pruning process short as I got rather sucked into it, was the 2005 title: Incredible Hulk : Ultimate Destruction.

I picked this one up entirely because the online buzz back in the day was overwhelmingly positive, and I admit that I have put off playing it even despite this. I’ve never been a huge Marvel fan, and the Hulk in particular is one of those characters whose lasting popularity rather confuses me.

He was fun in the Avengers, I’ll give him that.

Anyway, while I’m not sure that he makes a terribly enthralling character on the printed page, he makes just about the perfect videogame character for when you’re in the mood to break stuff and hit things, which I find quite compelling on occasion.

There IS, for the record, a storyline. It can be ignored if you feel like it, because the point of the game is to run around environments picking up big rocks and hitting tanks with the big rocks, then picking up the remains of the tanks and throwing them at helicopters.

Some of the levels are in a city, which transforms the objective into running straight up the side of a skyscraper, grabbing the water tank off the roof, and throwing THAT at a helicopter, or breaking the sign outside a burger joint in half and then smashing tanks with a giant burger.

Also you can rip cars in half and use them as boxing gloves? I’m not sure where this concept came from but damn if it isn’t fun.

Finally, there are invulnerable cows. You see, letting the player kill harmless farm animals might be seen as cruelty, so you can pick up a cow and, oh, throw it into an assault helicopter and it will land next to the wreckage of the helicopter, get to its feet, and moo. It’s OK!

If you don’t have a massive smile on your face while playing this, it is my considered opinion that you are dead inside.

Technically this is also a stunning game for its generation. It’s one of only a few Xbox games that supported 720p, and the majority of the ones I’ve played have been top-down RPG sorts of things like the X-men Legacy games, which are attractive enough but don’t really seem to be pushing all that many polygons. This is a free-roaming game with a full 3D environment, a ton of destructible objects and a surprising degree of freedom on the Z-axis, and it really makes me curious to see what developers could have done with the system if it hadn’t gotten unceremoniously dumped in order to devote full attention to the 360.

Anyway. Fabulous game, pity about the untimely death of the system, I’m not sure if it’s supported on the 360 in BC mode but it makes a strong case for spending 10 bucks on an original Xbox at your nearest local thrift store to play it if it isn’t.

Embarrassingly enough, once I finally got around to playing Panzer Dragoon Orta, it turns out that it’s a pretty short game. The in-game clock put my final time at just under four hours, which probably includes a few false starts from back when I first got the game.

On the other hand, that was back when I was absolute rubbish at pretty much anything action-based, so I doubt I’d have been able to get past the final three-stage boss fight, would likely have gotten frustrated, and probably would have long since sold the thing off.

So, maybe waiting over a decade was a good thing after all.

It is a little odd going back to a game from the early 2000s when the dual-analog control scheme wasn’t quite as standardized. PDO’s controls aren’t as weird as the other Smilebit game I’ve played (GunValkyrie), but it still felt more than a little weird to be completely ignoring that second analog.

The simple controls work, though, because PDO is, like the earlier games in the series, a game with pretty straightforward mechanics. It’s honestly not much more than a very pretty shooting gallery that you fly through. There are branching paths in most of the levels, and PDO in particular adds some strategic elements with the multiple dragon forms and a greater emphasis on flanking in the massive boss fights that have always been the hallmark of the series, but you don’t legitimately have a whole lot of say in where you’re going or how fast you’re going to get there.

The payoff, though, isn’t really about the gameplay. It’s about getting to immerse yourself in a starkly-beautiful post-apocalyptic world and seeing just enough of its mysteries to leave you wanting more.

That may have gotten a little florid there but I trust you take my point.

Anyway, it was an excellent reason to blow the dust off the Xbox. 🙂