Games for Lunch: Iron Man

(Page 2 of 4)

0:13 Yinsin activates my radar and I can see the smuggled weapons I'm trying to take out. "I didn't build these weapons for the bad guys. I built them for... well, you know." THE GOOD GUYS! THE U.S. IS THE GOOD GUYS! DAMN YOU AND YOUR MORAL RELATIVISM, STARK!

0:15 There's some really annoying stuttering and slowdown whenever a group of enemies appears out of nowhere. Bad sign.

0:16 I forgot to mention I have missiles now, mainly because they're pretty anticlimactic. They lock on automatically and fire straight at the target, causing some rather pathetic-looking explosions and smoke. Bleh.

0:17 "Our friend Raza," as Stark puts it, rolls in in a super-tank. "Raza, I'm sorry, but our friendship must come to an end." Oh, Robert Downey, Jr., is there any corny line you can't make better?

0:19 Raza plays it smart, launching missiles from long range so I can't punch his tank. Luckily, I also have missiles that I can launch back at him. I lose all my energy again, but it doesn't freaking matter because I just get up again right away. They should have called this game "INVINCIBLE Iron Man."

0:20 Cut scene time. Stark goes back to save Yinsin, but Yinsin is forced to set off the stockpile of explosive to hold off his captors. I've got to say, his death came off as a lot more meaningful in the movie. Stark hangs his head for a second, then jumps off with rocket boots. Why couldn't I do that in the game?

0:22 Back at Stark's lab. "You want to ruin the company?" says the bald guy whose name I also can't remember. "Is that a rhetorical question? All I know is we're not selling weapons anymore," says the suddenly incredibly moral Stark. "Maybe it's time for a new kind of company." This is actually a decent 30-second summary of the second quarter of the movie.

0:24 Flight test time in the new, black, Mark II suit. "All right, let's see what this suit can do." The controls are actually pretty good. The analog trigger is used to hover while the shoulder button is used to fly forward at a good clip. I crash into the water because the Y-axis controls aren't inverted (easily fixed), but I automatically fly right back out. Man, this is one forgiving game.

0:25 "Wow... this suit is damn good." I have to agree with Tony, here. Flying is just pure fun. The city looks dead, though. There are no people or vehicles moving around and it's the middle of the day! WTF?

0:26 My assistant, Pepper, complains over the radio as I fly that people might lose their jobs if we no longer make weapons. Cry me a river, hippie.

0:28 So I'm supposed to grab a missile and throw it at a drone with the B button. I utterly fail to do this because I can't see where the missiles are coming in. But the drone explodes anyway. Wha?

0:30 The Unibeam attack reminds me of Dragon Ball Z. I just hover in place for a few seconds, charging up the beam, then fire it off. Kame...hame...ha!

0:31 Flight training is done, but Pepper calls frantically: there are men with guns at the door. Apparently some defense contractors are mad that we're not selling them weapons anymore, so they decided to send tanks and helicopters to invade our private business. This story is going off the rails rather quickly.