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Opinion: It’s Time To Bring Back Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

By Eric Chrisman

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I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy and man, it was fantastic. But how long until the next one? 3 Years? That seems really far away. And though the whole Marvel Universe is connected, any thought of say, seeing the Guardians & The Avengers together in some epic movie is years away and possibly will never happen because it’s just too complex.

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What’s the answer then? Why a video game of course. And I’m not talking about shoehorning every Marvel character into Disney Infinity. I’m talking about bringing back easily the best Marvel game series to date, Ultimate Alliance.

Now admittedly, Ultimate Alliance 2 felt a tad on the stale end, but that’s because between X-Men Legends, which started the series and Ultimate Aliiance 2, which was the last game in the series (and especially if you want to throw in Justice League Heroes, which was basically the same game with a roster of DC heroes), we had gotten 4 extremely similar games in the course of 5 years. Ultimate Alliance 2 came out in 2009. We’ve had a plethora of movies and a TV show (with more of both on the way) since that time. Odds are we might never see Luke Cage team up with Ant Man or Rocket Raccoon on the big or small screen, but a video game tying all the universes together makes that a snap.

I don’t even think it would take that much of an overhaul to the existing gameplay. The previous games in the series had a very Diablo-esque feel to them that with a little updating would work very well today. Maybe speed it up a bit and have upgrade costumes and gear you can buy for the heroes. It could even be an on-going thing, starting with the current stable of Marvel Movie characters and as more movies get introduced, release expansion packs alongside them. It could be a great example of games as a service where you simply have the initial game and it just releases expansion packs over the next 8 years or whatever til the next generation of consoles comes along.

Ultimate Alliance 2 came out in 2009. We’ve had a plethora of movies and a TV show (with more of both on the way) since that time. Odds are we might never see Luke Cage team up with Ant Man or Rocket Raccoon on the big or small screen, but a video game tying all the universes together makes that a snap.

It would also be a pretty easy way to get around those annoying rights issues. Sure, Fox has movie X-Men & Fantastic 4 & Sony has movie Spider-Man, but that pretty much only pertains to the movies. If you’ve seen shows like Ultimate Spider-Man, which is a animated series produced by Marvel, but under the Disney name, characters like Wolverine, Deadpool and Mr. Fantastic show up all the time. So obviously a video game would for now be an easy to have Spider-Man team up with the Avengers or any other number of cool combinations without worrying about these obnoxious film rights issues. It would also be a fantastic way to flesh out minor characters.

Bottom line, we NEED a huge Marvel Universe crossover game, and I think gameplay style found in the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games is the best platform to do that on. Hopefully somebody will just smell the opportunity and money fans like me would just throw at their feet for such a game and get somebody on that. I for one really want to see Peggy Carter and Howard the Duck fighting H.Y.D.R.A. together.

The views expressed in this article explicitly belong to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, nor should be attributed to, GameSided as an organization.

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