HULK SMASH EVERYTHING!

While there are a handful of good to even excellent comic book games -- Spider-Man 2 and The Punisher, for instance -- there are fewer and fewer really bad ones. Encore's Daredevil, which never made it to market, and TDK's Aquaman, which just plain sucked, are more remnants of bad publishing and cheap development that anything else. And remember, Titus made perhaps the worst comic book game ever, Superman 64, a long, long time ago.

Flash forward to 2005 and it looks like theres nowhere to go but up in quality. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, a single-player action game, will hit retail stands in August 2005 on Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube.

Ultimate Destruction is the full-monty Hulk experience. The first title approached smash everything, but Ultimate Destruction will blow gamers away with "I can't believe I just did that" moments. The scale and sense of freedom of this game is much greater than any other comic book videogame to date. If you felt that locomotion in other games was great as you swing from place to place like a monkey in tights, you are in for a big surprise -- nothing can stop the Hulk! You can barrel down the street sending buses and traffic into oblivion, run up buildings leaving a swath of destruction in your wake and leap over buildings as you bound across the city linking super jumps together. The game engine was re-written to make sure that the player has the freedom to lose control -- where the world is your weapon and you can choose how, when and where to play. But this is not a sequel in any way. Ultimate Destruction has an original story penned by none other than the award-winning Paul Jenkins. The story and the game are true to the Marvel universe and to the Hulk's history. It is firmly rooted in the Hulk comic heritage but we did not stop there -- in a videogame first, the story from Ultimate Destruction is actually forming part of the Hulk continuity.

The PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game will boast progressive-scan and 720p support respectively, both of which offer greater visual definition than standard video out. Looks like Gamecube gets left out. The developer decided to forego a progressive-scan mode for the GameCube version after Nintendo last year removed the component video out port from newly manufactured GameCube consoles. Radical Entertainment still plans to support Dolby Pro logic II in-game with the GameCube version. It was said that the GCN version stacks up nicely with the others and that the development team has actually been able to pull off some effects easier on the console than on either PlayStation 2 or Xbox.

Look for much more on this game here & ign in the coming weeks.