Review – Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects [Playstation 2]

Release Date: 2005   |   Developer: Nihilistic Software   |   Publisher: EA Games   |   Also On: Xbox, Gamecube, PSP, Nintendo DS

Gather ye round, little ones and listen to this old man’s tale. Once upon a time there was a fantastic wonderland known as 90’s Gaming. It was a time of great change, innovation and colourful arcade games that made everybody go deaf and blind such were the booming audio and bright visuals. Today, we live in a second gaming wonderland with access to all of the old goodies plus huge, immersive experiences that previous generations of gamers could only fantasise about. But in between these two ages there was a dark age. It was a time when everything had to be moody, brown and uber-violent to pander to the teenage boys locked in bedrooms with closed curtains and crusted, very soiled socks hidden beneath beds. Games had to be brutal and gangsta and feature women with enormous breasts and blank, “sexy” expressions. Because reasons.

And games that had no reason to get serious were affected too. If – like me – you were a massive fan of the magnificence that was Marvel Vs Capcom 2 then you could have been forgiven for feeling the hype when EA announced Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. After all, it was a 3D Marvel fighting game backed by the might of EA. It was going to be huge! Holy shit! And it was huge…a huge fucking disappointment that has been lost to the mists of time. Nobody talks about it and very few remember it. here’s why…

Devoid of imagination

For some reason, I had always assumed that Marvel Nemesis was a 3D fighting game but no, I’m an idiot. It’s a 3D action game where you move about arenas/stages defeating enemies in a beat ‘em up fashion. The game’s story mode opens with The Thing walking along a bridge when aliens suddenly attack New York City. Your job in this first stage of the game is to defeat all the enemies on the bridge, punch through some blockades and that’s it. The next stage demands that you defeat all enemies on the streets. The third stage is back to the bridge again with the task of (guess what?) defeating all enemies. Okay, there’s a time limit this time but it isn’t anything taxing. Then it’s back to the streets again to…you get the idea. These opening stages with The Thing really show you what Marvel Nemesis is about. All of the stages in the game are essentially identical. Some have time limits or other conditions including handicapped health but the underlying requirement is always to beat all enemies or destroy a certain number of objects. The level descriptions sometimes almost attempt to disguise this mundane exercise but others can’t be bothered and simply state “Spiderman must defeat all enemies!” or “Daredevil must defeat all enemies!”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this set-up because – as you may be eager to point out – even the classics such as Final Fight have the same paper-thin game structure. The PS2 has its own collection of competent 3D beat ’em ups such as Urban Reign and Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance so the formula could still work back in the mid-00’s. It has to be interesting to play though and aesthetically appealing on some level. Marvel Nemesis could only dream of being these things.

Spiderman vs some bloke that nobody cares about. With added brown for that gritty effect.

There’s very little challenge for example with most of these ‘missions’ finished in a matter of minutes. Honestly, I felt like I was looking at loading and saving screens more than I was playing the game. Some of the missions are just plain embarrassing too such as the one where Wolverine must “navigate the traps in the Avengers mansion and defeat all enemies”. This translates to bypassing one set of security lasers then clearing a single room of enemies. Big mansion, huh? The character bios in the manual make mention of the ‘New Avengers’ so why the hell is the Avengers mansion even here? Anybody who reads Marvel comics knows that the mansion was destroyed before the New Avengers were formed. Obviously I’m nitpicking on a dangerously nerdy level here but that’s what happens when you play Marvel Nemesis; you get so bloody bored that your brain exits stage left and goes for a wander.

The graphics do a supreme job of reflecting your mood when playing this game. Everything is dark, muddy and desperately dull in a game world that barely manages to look much better than a PS1 title. The music is similarly complementary in that beautifully forgettable ‘stock music’ fashion. The soundtrack isn’t criminal but you won’t remember it thirty seconds after shutting the game off. I’ll let you decide whether that’s a positive thing or a big fat neg.

You’d expect the controls to be rotten as well wouldn’t you? Well you’re wrong! Shockingly, the controls are actually functional here; one analogue stick controls movement while the other offers generous manipulation of a reasonably compliant camera. You have buttons for attacking, blocking, grabbing/throwing and jumping so there’s very little to get wrong. Holding R1 while attacking allows for some more powerful moves (such as Storm’s lightning or Daredevil’s club) while doing the same with L1 allows for bigger jumps or some characters i.e. Human Torch and Spiderman to fly or swing.

Complimenting the controls is like trying to apply a tiny plaster to a massive, gaping wound that is gushing blood from a main artery however.

Marvel Nemesis shouts about having fully destructible environments but this really boils down to having arenas littered with projectiles such as cars, furniture and oil drums. As suspiciously numerous and carelessly abandoned as these drums are, they swiftly become your best friend in the whole wide world because most tight spots and boss battles can be negotiated by simply spamming drums and throwing them for big explosions – a tactic that remains effective no matter how far you get into the game. Stand in the wrong place when an enemy is throwing a drum though and you can instantly lose over half of your energy in one massive blast when getting caught in a chain reaction of exploding drums and cars. Well, you gotta take the rough with the smooth. Swings and roundabouts and all that.

Surely this cannot be visually appealing to anybody?

I said that the game is really easy but there are ways for your ass to be handed to you in no time at all, the aforementioned random explosions for example. Like all poor 3D beat ‘em ups though, you can also get caught between multiple enemies and trapped in a loop of hits that will leave your character with hardly any health. Boss fights too swing from pathetically easy to being extremely cheap. The boss battle against Storm for example saw me getting hit by a bolt of lightning before I had the chance to move then stuck in a cycle of follow-up hits, leaving me with no energy and open to a finishing move in seconds. After many copy/paste starts to the battle, I finally won by jumping around and…throwing oil drums…sigh. The only way to overcome some of these battles is to fight fire with fire and be cheap by abusing oil drums or ranged attacks. Other times I have witnessed boss battles end instantly thanks to the opponent graciously walking themselves off the edge of the stage and to a ring-out defeat.

With the gameplay confirmed as tedius, poorly designed and possessed of stupid difficulty spikes and a severe lack of fun, what about the playable characters? You need to remember that Marvel Nemesis was released in the mid-2000’s so the roster is a good reflection of the pre-MCU era of Marvel cinema and who was popular as a result. There’s Spiderman (complete with Tobey Maguire era costume), Daredevil, Elektra, Iron Man, Wolverine, Storm and Magneto to name a handful. There really isn’t much more to say but I can’t avoid discussing Elektra.

For some reason, Elektra is the only character to have been given a visual revamp by EA and her new outfit looks like a bra/thong set from a racy lingerie catalogue with the red trousers from the crappy Jennifer Garner Elektra film thrown in for good measure. Oh and a spiked gothic choker. She looks nothing like Elektra should other than being garbed in red and her model is just plain fugly. All of her attacks seem to be accompanied by sexual moans and groans and even sans super-powers Elektra can still rip parking meters out of the ground and smack enemies about with them. Who needs the Thing?

Worse still however are the ‘Imperfects’, the foes of the game. The Imperfects are humans modified with extraterrestrial technology by the game’s alien villain so that they can do battle with Marvel’s finest and capture them for their powers (it’s a really crap storyline) but EA’s villains receive no injection of originality and appear to ape the powers of existing Marvel characters. Can you guess what sort of superpowers the likes of Solara, Fault Zone and Johnny Ohm (good grief!) have at their disposal? Asking these characters to stand next to Marvel characters is like you or me going back in time to when Arnold Shwarzenegger was still on the body building circuit and being asked to compete on-stage next to him. It would be a competitive massacre and the same applies here in Marvel Nemesis. I think I can say that Stan Lee didn’t lose sleep over being beaten to creating Johnny Ohm.

Conclusions

In hindsight, this game had all the ingredients of a disaster but we were naïve and could not have known that Marvel Vs Capcom 2 would remain the definitive use of the Marvel license until Capcom came riding in to save us in 2011 with MvC3. Likewise, it’s only now that we can look back on EA’s mid-2000’s output and realise just how many shoddy movie tie-ins, licensed trollop and relentless yearly updates their logo ended up being slapped on. If I had paid £40 for Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects then I would have been absolutely devastated. Thankfully, I chose other games back in 2005. Aside from functional controls and the almost perverse desire to go back in time and experience shit games, I can’t come up with any other legitimate reasons to recommend Rise of the Imperfects. If anything, it shows just how far Marvel has come and you can’t imagine that precious money-printing license being permitted to associate with garbage like this game in the same way that films like the 2003 Hulk or Jennifer Garner Elektra would never happen in 2019.

Summary

The controls work at least

Repetitive, non-imaginative gameplay

Miserable visuals and forgettable music

Original characters are unispired and uninteresting

Random cheap deaths and chaotic gameplay

 

 

Need For Speed Underground 2 [Playstation 2]

I have a strange relationship with EA’s Need for Speed Underground games. Despite always being a big car person (or ‘petrolhead’), I looked down on these games when they were current because they tapped into a street racing subculture which appeared far more glamorous in Japan or the US while here in the UK, it was associated with ‘ricers’ or ‘chavs’ building ugly, thunderous monstrosities out of Citroen Saxos or Peugeot 206’s. I was busier playing my intellectual JRPG’s and skillful fighting games while the masses were buying NFSU in droves.

There was also a stigmata associated with EA during the PS2 era if you ran in certain gaming circles. It was the impression that they only slapped their name on yearly cash-cow updates, average licensed fare and software that they could sell via cynical marketing which tapped into what teenage boys of the mid 00’s wanted. So football, loud cars and tits then.

It probably didn’t help that I eventually played the original Underground and wasn’t that impressed. However, I have been heavily re-involved with cars and the ‘scene’ over the last 6-7 years and in an ironic twist of fate, I now actually MISS the days of The Fast & The Furious movies, street racing culture and magazines like Max Power with topless models draped over ridiculous cars. Most of this has evaporated and with the constant droning message about road users needing to be responsible as well as the ‘lads mags’ being killed off (because sexism…whatever), the world feels like a more sterilised and straight place.

So I was ready to give NFSU2 a chance after snagging a cheap copy in a bundle of PS2 games. It is after all, one of the better-regarded games in the series with a bit of a following.

Urban cityscape and a nitrous-fuelled motion blur: welcome back to the mid 00’s.

The first thing that hit me was how good the game still looked. ‘Jaggies’ and outdated textures are pretty minimal and the car models are fantastic. As a petrolhead, I can safely say that all of the cars in this game are modelled highly accurately with a nice level of detail down to the correct badges and original exterior equipment. This was a nice surprise because I admit I was expecting worse from an annual EA update, perhaps a mistaken presumption that the game would have been blasted out by the developers in time for its intended release with a lack of polish. But no, the visuals and those cars look a lot better than many other racers of the generation and hold up incredibly well today.

EA added in a free-roam structure to NFSU2 as well and this really elevated it above the first game. Simply speeding about the city to different race events is enjoyable and even though the ‘free’ aspect is obviously limited by being stuck inside a car, it’s much more preferable to selecting races from a menu. Most circuit and sprint events use sections of the city too so getting familiarised with the many corners and shortcuts while in free-roam mode definitely helps when it comes to the races.

Race events are varied with circuit and sprint events joined by drift challenges (score more points than opponents), drag races and the new ‘Street X’ event which consists of small, tight courses that take place in car parks or (for some reason) building sites. These are more about acceleration, handling and taking the best racing lines. Finally there are the Underground Racing League events. These are the biggies that take place on proper race tracks and progress the game’s career mode. You are able to use a dyno and test track(s) to custom tune your car for each event, settings that are auto-loaded upon entering each style of event which does at least offer a bit more depth.

You have to start somewhere with cars like Vauxhall’s Corsa.

Progressing the career mode also means meeting the requirements of various sponsors that sign up to your cause. These demands are pretty straightforward and involve winning a set amount of events as well as sponsor races which pay out a lot more cash. You also need to get your car featured on a set number of tuning magazine and DVD covers and this is achieved by raising the star rating of your ride’s visual appearance until the call comes in for you to hightail it to the photographer’s location.

The only crappy thing about this aspect in my personal opinion is that it forces you to go all in and fit every conceivable modification possible such as neon underlighting, carbon body panels and hydraulics. So if you’re like me and prefer minimalism or a stock appearance then it ain’t going to cut it with the sponsors. It also means paying for components then having to continually replace them with ‘better’ versions down the line as parts are gradually unlocked, an artificial method of extending the game’s life but completely expected. I kept a separate Nissan 240SX that received the visual mods purely for this side of things then spent the rest of my cash on performance upgrades for my other cars that I could then ‘tastefully’ modify on the outside.

Still, the magazine and DVD covers made me smile and took me back to that period in time that I talked about earlier. They might look ‘laddish’ and chauvinistic by 2018’s easily offended standards but I like ’em.

If you remember these types of magazines with a fondness then you will definitely appreciate NFSU2 and the culture it represents.

It’s a shame that the game’s AI didn’t make me smile as much. If you want to take the proper racing lines and overtake opponents cleanly as you would have to in real life then forget it. Towards the beginning of the game this is entirely possible but later on as things take a turn for the challenging, you’d best forget it. Rivals launch themselves up the inside of your car kamikaze-style in the corners and pile into the back of you for braking zones as if this is a Destruction Derby sequel, not Need For Speed. Worse still, they have no qualms about punting you off the track or even utilising the police-approved PIT maneuver to spin you out. Cheating bastards!

I tried to race fairly because I hate winning in racing games by abusing a lack of damage modelling to bash my way to the front but unfortunately, you have to lower your standards with this game and fight fire with fire sometimes, especially since the game’s AI has another crafty weapon up its sleeve: the dreaded rubber band effect. Opponents seem a lot less inconvenienced by collisions with civilian traffic (whereas a single smash can ruin YOUR entire race) and can somehow take tight corners at impossible speeds, sometimes while using nitrous. You can leave them several seconds behind by getting out in front and driving perfectly but the game allows them to catch right back up to you on the last lap as if they have been handed a secret performance boost. This sort of thing makes sense in a game like Mario Kart but in a proper racing game involving real cars that have real performance figures and capabilities…well, it just sucks.

It also blew my mind to witness heavy muscle cars like the Mustang and Pontiac GTO leaving me for dust on twisty, technical circuits that should never favour such vehicles. Losing drag races to Vauxhall Corsas and Ford Focuses somehow capable of reaching near-200mph speeds was another mind-boggling development.

The game can also strategically place a taxi or van around a blind bend and this is unbelievably frustrating after investing seven-or-so minutes into a race, successfully keeping those shady opponents at bay for three long laps only to lose it all and have to start again because there was a unavoidable crash around the final corner. I’ve even experienced a white van speeding over an intersection right into my path as if God himself decided that I wasn’t allowed to win the race. Whether this was EA’s subtle commentary on the infamous “White Van Man”, I can’t say but I swore quite a bit!

Overall Thoughts

There is a lot to like about Need For Speed Underground 2 and thankfully, the good bits just about outweigh the rotten AI-related elements. There was of course the added bonus of getting a far more polished game than I was expecting but it definitely helps if you consider the racing to be more of an arcade game than a serious sim. For me personally though, I really enjoyed being transported back to that era of street racing and the JDM craziness inspired by what was happening in Japan and the Fast & Furious movies. NFSU2 perfectly captures that subculture – just don’t expect gentlemanly conduct from the game’s AI.