marvel: ultimate alliance 3: the black order

My VG Music Picks #84 – Night of the Ninja (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order)

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3‘s soundtrack is certainly a bit of a mixed bag. As I mentioned in my review last week, a lot of it consists of rather generic orchestral tracks that aren’t particularly catchy or memorable. It’s especially disappointing since there are a quite a few tracks that manage to avoid this; tracks that are full of energy and excitement and sound… videogamey, if that makes sense. Tracks that make running down hallways while taking down the swarms of enemies that come at you all the more exciting. For example, this piece from the game’s third chapter. Continue reading →

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order – Marvellous Masterpiece or Boring Button-Masher?

/ Michael Beckwith / 2 Comments

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One game that I used to play the crap out of during my childhood was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. A loose adaptation of the Civil War comic story-line, it was a top-down action-RPG/beat ’em up featuring a tonne of famous and not so famous heroes and villains from across the Marvel universe, enjoyable and addictive gameplay, cool character interactions, and some great replayability that had me coming back again and again, just so I could keep making all manner of different teams to play through the game as.

That game came out ten years ago and it very much seemed like a series that wasn’t going to get revived any time soon, especially with Disney now holding Marvel’s reigns. So I was pleasantly surprised to see a new, third title get announced out of nowhere. And if that wasn’t enough, Activision and Vicarious Visions were out and Nintendo and Team Ninja were in.

Suddenly, everybody was getting excited to see how this game would turn out. Aside from those big names, the roster looked great (the presence of the X-Men alone helped tremendously) and the presentation was delightfully stylish, but does the game have the substance to match it, or should this series have been left back in the late 2000s? Continue reading →

Ten Anticipated Games of 2019

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

2018 was a very mixed year in terms of videogames. It was a year of stellar highs and abysmal lows. On one hand, the PS4 exclusive Spider-Man game proved that not only were single-player titles still in demand but licensed games could also be incredible, Octopath Traveler was a perfect throwback to SNES-era RPGs and showed how beloved turn-based RPGs still are and only last month we got Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which very much lived up to its name considering it’s a game where Princess Peach can beat up Cloud Strife in the middle of Dracula’s Castle.

On the other hand, however, gross mismanagement led to the closure of TellTale Games, resulting in several highly anticipated titles getting cancelled and its employees suddenly jobless, the lootbox craze became so bad that some countries have made them illegal, which sets a worrying precedent for the possibility of games becoming regulated, and do I even need to bring up the utter fuster-cluck that was Fallout 76?

As always, I prefer to not dwell on the past but focus on the future. We all have high expectations for 2019 and while I’m sure there’s a myriad of bullshit headed our way, there’re gonna be some amazing things too. So let me share with you the ten games I’m most looking forward to this year. Continue reading →