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Tomb Raider and the Ultimates
May 19, 2006

Tomb Raider: Legends

There, finished! Don’t have much to say about it, but opinions are always wanted, as ya know. Moving on, let’s talk about something awesome



GRAND THEFT AMERICA

This is one my favorite current storylines, but it’s not taking place in the normal Marvel universe, it takes place in the Ultimates alternates reality. For those who haven’t been around when I’ve explained it before, the Ultimates universe is like the Marvel universe, only…realer. The characters are more ‘in your face’, more ‘extreme’; the stories pretty much happen like they would happen in current day.

Now, let me set you up here.



In the Ultimates universe, the hero group that you know as the Avengers are called…well…the Ultimates. The differences are:

-Captain America is pretty much the same as usual, though much stronger and much more…I don’t know…meaner, than the normal Cap. He beat the crap out of Giant Man when after he beat up his wife. Cool scene.
-Black Widow is an ex-Russian spy who’s not quite as ‘ex’ as she’d like people to believe.
-Iron Man is pretty much the same as always. Gets drunk. Hits on every woman he sees. Jobs to the Hulk.
-Thor is one of the biggest changes; he’s something of a hippy here. He has long hair, he hates Bush, and he believes he’s the true son of Odin, despite everyone believing he’s a nut. He has the power of Thor, but…well, you’ll see. Whether he’s the real deal or not hasn’t been made clear.
-Giant Man is a wife-beater, much worse than he was in the normal universe. He not only got into a fist-fight with his wife (a fist-fight in which his wife did a good job of holding her own) but he used this helmet of his to control a bunch of ants and make them attack her when she shrunk to Wasp size.
-The Wasp is something of a floozy here; she was cheating on Giant Man with Captain America, went straight with Captain America after Giant Man was kicked off the team for spousal abuse, then started cheating on Captain America with Giant Man. Besides her poor ability to pick men, she’s also Asian in this incarnation.
-Hawkeye is a full-fledged government agent in this incarnation; he has…or had a family, and he doesn’t wear a costume.
-And the Hulk is, well…



Hulk is horny.

Okay, now, the current storyline is Grand Theft America. About a year or so ago, Dr. Banner had one of his Hulk escapades, and the Hulk tore a hole through New York City looking for Betty, who was, at the time, dating Freddie Prinze Jr. (which led to a rather awkward “Hulk horny! Hulk want Freddie Prinze Jr!” quote) 300 people were killed, but the fact that Dr. Banner was working for SHIELD or who the Hulk actually was never made it out to the public. Until recently.

Long story short, someone leaked the information, there was a trial for Dr. Banner, they knocked him out and put him on an empty battlecruiser, and dropped a nuclear bomb on him in an effort to kill him. Didn’t work, but eh.

Anyway, the same someone who leaked the information made up a story about Thor, and a convincing story at that: Thor wasn’t the son of Odin, he was a crazy hippy who stole an experimental belt and hammer from his government. The Ultimates turned on Thor and took him down.

Next Hawkeye’s family was brutally killed; a bunch of shadow troopers broke in, slaughtered his wife and kids, and took Hawkeye away for torture and testing. And guess who SHIELD saw on the security tapes and blamed for it?



Captain America gets ambushed, puts up a crazy fight, but is eventually dragged down and holed up in SHIELD headquarters.

Now, it should be made clear that, in this universe, the Ultimates are more like soldiers than superheroes. They go where the government goes to, they have a huge reserve of super-powered soldiers behind them, they their might around the world and whatnot. So, pretty much like it is today, with superpowers.

It looks like the world decides to push back.

They attack out of nowhere, striking hard on American soil. With the Ultimates heaviest hitters out of action, SHIELD is overrun by an army of superhumans; hell, the USA is overrun. The president flees. The army is smacked down. They even knock down the Statue of Liberty. And then, they announce themselves:



The Liberators. A team made up of united nations fighting against the US’s dominant ways. They effectively take over America in about…eh…two hours. Natasha, the Black Widow, was working for them, got the intel they needed, spilled the news about the Hulk, framed Captain America, and currently holds Tony Stark captive by sleeping with him and pinning him down to a bed with a gun in his face. Loki, the Norse God of Mischief, was the one who tricked them into taking out Thor. Hank Pym, the Giant Man, made robots for them.

Needless to say, I’m interested to see how things’ll turn out.

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Genj Genj - May 19, 2006 (12:43 PM)
Great Legends review. I'll be picking that one up on Xbox when it drops to $20 I suppose.
janus janus - May 19, 2006 (12:58 PM)
I enjoyed that review and agree with a lot of it. I'm still annoyed that I spent so much (£50!) on such an easy adventure, though. Doing all of the time trials didn't help much either, because it made me realise that the game can be completed in about two and a half hours.

And Hulk should make a rap video.
draqq_zyxx draqq_zyxx - May 19, 2006 (06:50 PM)
You said you wanted an opinion, so here are few typos I found in your Tomb Raider: Legend review:

- Run-on: "They rarely hit, when they do hit you it does crap damage"

- Parallelism error with verb phrase "discover...": "The bad guys dress in black, there’s a race to collect the pieces of Excalibur, discover the truth of Arthurian lore, and…it stops"

- Parallelism error with verb phrase "climbing...": "...can pole vault, climbing up walls, leap..."

- Better if it's "I look": "I’m looking around the environment trying to..."; In fact, the entire paragraph would be better in the present tense and not "I'm" + a gerund or "-ing" verb. It's my opinion, however.

galactus21 galactus21 - May 28, 2006 (11:32 PM)
I'm thinking of starting the Ultimate X-Men line, but noticed that there are a lot of issues, so which issue should I start with? What's a good issue to start with? I don't want to miss anything if at all possible, but I don't want to start from issue 1 since it'll be really expensive to get all the issues. Or maybe you can just summarize the entire line so far, so I can just start with the newest issue. Please help me out.

Thanks
lasthero lasthero - May 29, 2006 (05:59 AM)
Hm, that's a tough one. I'd start around "Return of the King", but I haven't kept up much with UXM. It's my least favorite on the Ultimates line.
galactus21 galactus21 - May 29, 2006 (11:31 AM)
Hmm...How's Ultimate F4?
lasthero lasthero - May 30, 2006 (07:01 AM)
Great, actually. Ultimate F4 is one of my favorite books. It's still fairly young, so you can get into it easy enough.
galactus21 galactus21 - May 30, 2006 (03:09 PM)
Just got UF4 2,3, and 5. Also picked up the new Uncanny X-Men and Ultimate X-Men 70. They didnt have Civil War, so I have to wait till next week. Other acessories that I got were 114 comic bags and boards, plus 2 long boxes. Tried to find all 7 X-Facots, but didn't have any luck. I might have to ebay that also.

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