After seeing The Avengers on May 4th I was hankering for more. Specifically I wanted to play as earth’s mightiest in a video game setting and sadly Marvel didn’t see fit to release a game based on the movie.

The recent choices avaliable to me were Thor, Captain America and Iron Man 2, all based on their respective movies. Thor and Iron Man 2 were out of the question, as they recieved terrible reviews and Cap proved hard to track down. This left me with the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games.

MUA2 was all about Civil War, with heroesfighting each other. That idea ran against what I wanted to play after seeing Avengers so I went back to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1.

This game, released in 2006, was about heroes banding together and fighting a ton of different villains from across the Marvel universe. Plus, it featured the Avengers prominently and travels from a SHIELD hellicarrier to Asgard to the Skrull planet. Upon starting the game you thrust into the action on a burning hellicarrier and take control of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Thor and Captain America.

Once you’ve gotten past the first section, you come across a glowing SHIELD access point. At this point you can really make Marvel Ultimate Alliance into The Avengers game.

The option to change your team comes up. This is where we can replace Spider-Man with Iron Man.

This still leaves us with Old Canucklehead over there on the right as the outlier. Now sadly, unless you purchased the DLC years ago before it was discontinued, you can’t play with the Hulk as your fourth member.

Instead Ultimate Alliance has a number of hidden characters, one of which is a shockingly prescient fit. Now normally to unlock all of these characters you’d have to meet certain conditions within the game. Thankfully, MUA is one of those rare games that’s old enough to have cheat codes. The unlock all characters cheat on the Xbox 360 version is  Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Left, Left, Start from the character select screen. You have to enter it quickly and it’s a little bit finicky, but it’ll do the trick. The character we want to get access to is Nick Fury.

Now we have our team, but they don’t really look close to the movie at all. This is where another cheat comes in: the unlock all costumes cheat. On 360 it’s Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Up, Down, Start again from the character select screen. Now we can change Thor into a costume that’s closer to his movie counterpart by going into the details section for him and scrolling over to costumes. His original comic duds are the closest we’re going to get.

Now onto Fury. The Ultimate version of Nick Fury was introduced in 2002 and Ultimate Alliance came out in 2006, so it made sense to include that version of Fury as an unlockable costume. His first costume doesn’t look all that great though.

Thankfully his second costume looks much more badass and is closer to Samuel Jackson’s look in the movie.

Now we have our Avengers team as close as we can get it to the movie.

Time to go kick some ass!

I don’t think there’s anyone who, upon hearing the rules of rock-paper-scissors, didn’t immediately question why paper beats rock. I propose the game of rock-paper-scissors be changed to ember-vine-wave. It just makes sense.

The fist is ember, because it is a ball of heat. The two fingers are vines coming out of Bulbasaur’s back. The flat hand is a wave of water.