The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

The Good
This game is a great stress relief and a lot of fun.

You feel like you can really smash just almost everything: cars, trucks, tanks, planes, choppers, people... You can grab a car and throw it to a soldier or the other way around: grab a soldier and smash him against a tank.

There are a plethora of special moves you can purchase by smashing things: every time you go on rampage, you'll earn smash points. Those points are later exchangeable for special moves, for example: creating a shield, ride it, throw it... or air combos, and devastating ultimate techniques that destroy everything around. It's one of those sandbox games where you have a very large map without loading times between areas, lots of enemies and a large quantity of secret items for you to be discovered. Once you finish the game you are given some more skins and models to play with: Abomination, Mr Fixit...

The history itself covers pretty much the Emil Blonsky / Abomination saga and sometimes I feel like "The Ultimate Hulk" movie was based on this game.

The Bad
The history leaves a lot of loose ends: Mercy, Ross, Samson, the Mission Directive... and centers itself only in Hulk and Emil Blonsky. It can be very, and I mean very, frustrating sometimes until you get to accomplish a mission, but, I like to see it as a challenge, not necessarily a bad thing.

The loading time when you start a mission... it just doesn't belong here.

The Bottom Line
This game lets you be creative being destructive.

The Good
People tend to think of pornography as being sexual. It is, as any Google search will let you know. However, there has been a growing trend in popular media of taking an object of desire and focusing so single mindedly upon it until it appears fetishistic. This is porn, nouveau porn for the masses.

Remember “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” as hosted by Robin Leach? Total money porn. If you weren’t brought up in the 1980’s, this was a TV show that showed you lavish and expensive places you would never be able to go to and enjoy on your meager salary, but still lusted for nonetheless. If you want a more recent example, check out “The Thomas Crown Affair”; this is money porn for the middle classes.

Star Trek? Technology porn. Sex and the City? Fashion, shoe, and lunch porn (those broads could not have a conversation unless a bunch of snooty waiters were hovering around them). America’s Wildest Police Chases? Car crash porn.

And with games, we now have Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Destruction porn. If you love destruction, if you love to watch buildings collapse, then you should grab that towel, put on those loose fitting pants and stop denying yourself. There’s a story in there somewhere (a really bad one), but one doesn’t watch porn for the story, do they? That’s like saying you play hentai games for the plot (SPOILER the schoolgirl gets rapedEND SPOILER). Anyways, that’s the good part about this game.

In this way, there’s a lot of porn in games, namely: violence porn (snuff is the idea of combining sex and violence, not here), snuff porn (yep, here), regular sex porn as well as the esoteric collecting porn (or, completion-ism or collection-ism; there’s a better word for it but I don’t know it). Some games waddle out of the moral puddle they’ve settled into, but not this game.

Porn is, of itself, not nor bad but just is. So if you title a game “Ultimate Destruction”, you better give up the goods the same way if you title something “Barely Legal College Co-Eds”. In this way the game doesn’t disappoint.. well, almost.

You can destroy almost everything. Almost. For example, I have listed these achievements that I always hoped to do in a video game and was hoping to do so with this one:

• I want to punch a guy so hard that he flies around the planet. For bonus points, after tracking him via radar I will wait for him to circumnavigate the Earth to reappear in the same spot so that I can punch him again, sending him back the other way in a cosmic game of gravitational tether-ball.

• I want to punch a guy so hard at the top of a tall building that not only does he fall through the roof of the building, but through every single floor, and through the parking garage, the bedrock, the Earth’s crust and mantle and then the molten core, straight through to the other side of the planet to China. You’d have to car-jack a jet and fly around the world where you would then continue your fight.

• I want to punch people so hard that I can write my name on the moon with the impact craters formed by their bodies, visible from Earth.

Can this game do that? NO! Ultimate Destruction, my ass!


The Bad
When you make a movie about a monk in a dress who can fly, or gay cowboys who can’t quit each other then everybody loves you. Sure, you say, those movies had wire-fu/period setting/anal sex, how can it be bad? However, if you were to make a movie about the Incredible Hulk and have the audacity to try to tell a story with a theme that is central to that character, restraint and the lack thereof, then nobody likes you anymore.

“It’s boring!”, “Too much psycho-babble”, “Jennifer what’s-her-face doesn’t show her tits”: all valid comments. But what Ang Lee did was to tell a story with these characters that only these characters could tell. (so, in this instance, no flying or anal sex)

The Incredible Hulk isn’t a character, he’s just a stereotype. In any given situation, the Hulk has one response: “HULK SMASH!!” It doesn’t matter if you are trying to give him an ultimatum, a birthday cake or a blowjob, the hulk has one predetermined response. What makes this one-dimensional character interesting to the rest of us shloubs is that we would all love to at least once grow green and rip out of our clothes (but not our purple pants) and tell off that nemesis of ours. We all wish we could be so angry and reckless.

On the other hand, Bruce Banner is a character: he’s the guy that has to deal with everything. He talks and thinks and actually does have something to say. Although he isn’t as exciting as the Hulk (of the two, only one would get invited to the Playboy Mansion), he’s the more interesting one. Think of the massive guilt this guy carries around with him knowing that on a whim he can release untold death and destruction. (Catholic?) Still, of the two characters Banner is the guy who can tell a story.

So in the videogame Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, it’s obvious any hope of a story is “SMASHED!”, and with it any semblance of an interesting game. I would be the very first one to pipe up that an action game doesn’t need a story (hello, Zombie Hunters!) but it seems to me if you import a set of pre-fabricated characters with a long back history to star in your licensed game you should at least tell a story inspired of them.

I think the truest definition of the Hulk is someone is overcomes by sheer anger and rage, not by tactics and strategy, and so in that sense is non-controllable. A true Hulk game would put you in the shoes of General Ross as he tries to control the rampaging hulk in Marvel City. Or another true Hulk game would be a sim-type game where you nurture your NPC Hulk by harassing him with tanks and jet planes to try to get him as angry and strong as possible; mission objectives would include persuading the Hulk from destroying the city and coaxing him to do battle with the Abomination. Think Command and Conquer meets Black and White meets tamagotchi. As the Hulk is completely uncontrollable, if you play your cards right you will be treated to a real-time rendered spectacular monster fight as you look on from the sidelines. sigh If only…….

As cool as this game is (the one that’s already made, not the one in my head), it’s all gimmicks. Sure, weaponization (a nerd-gasm of a word if there ever was one) is nifty, we all love turning cars into boxing gloves, but it isn’t the Hulk. We don’t like the Hulk because he’s smart, we like the Hulk because we’re scared of him. Like any schoolgirl crush, we like him because he’s dangerous. The coolest nod to this is during a mission briefing an objective is shown and then a repeating whisper is heard: “SMASH… Smash… smash…”. Very schizo, very cool.


The Bottom Line
I’ve discovered two things here. One, you won’t find truth or beauty at the bottom of a Kleenex box, and secondly, porn isn’t the answer: great porn is the answer!!