Yes, I did manage to get an advanced preview of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 before the street release date. One of the perks of being media. We started Sunday at around 1pm (desperately trying to play and keep an eye on the football games…) and played until we beat the game at around 2am. Like the previous game, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a seriously fun game. The characters moved like you expect them to from reading the comics and the powers of each one is dead on. Activision/Vicarious Visions manage to give us all our favorite Marvel characters, while ensuring that none are too incredibly powerful over another (except Hulk and Jean Grey/Phoenix. Holy crap!). The Fusion powers were a great addition and fun to pull just to clear a room or concentrate on a boss. There are 276 different power combos, but many are duplicated by simply using different characters and their powers (ex. Thor, Storm and Jean all do the same combo with Gambit…). The environments in the game were also more destructible than the last, allowing you to pick up more mundane objects (i.e. furniture…) or even debris and use it as a weapon. The number of characters seems adequate, but do leave some for characters that I felt where left out in future DLC (Cyclops, Emma Frost, Hawkeye, Cable, Black Panther, Punisher, Nova, Rogue, Magneto, etc…). As the game begins, you play as Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine and Spider-Man storming a Dr. Doom-less Latveria with Nick Fury as the Secret War storyline is used to start the game. You then have to choose to additional characters when Nick Fury pulls Cap and Iron Man to be decoys while your team fights its way inside the castle from another angle. Characters choices at that point are Luke Cage, Daredevil, Gambit, Storm, Ice Man, Mr. Fantastic, Thing, Human Torch, Invisible Woman and Ms. Marvel. Deadpool is the next character to be unlocked just as the Civil War storyline gets started. Once Civil War gets started, you are somewhat limited be your character choices based on if you decide to go Pro-Reg (Iron Man, newly unlocked Songbird and Mr. Fantastic are exclusive Pro-Reg…) or Anti-Reg (Cap, Luke Cage and newly unlocked Iron Fist are exclusive Anti-Reg…). The Thing decides to be on the sidelines for the beginning of Civil War, but will become available again during the prisoner convoy mission. There are three characters that you unlock during the course of game-play by collecting items: Jean Grey/Phoenix – M’Kraan Crystals, Thor – Asgardian Runes and Hulk – Gamma Samples. While the game-play and basic cut-scene graphics are much better than the previous game, the cinematic cut-scenes are nowhere near the quality of MUA1. The story also seemed much less epic that the previous game. As I said during ComicCenter, it felt like a story that was killed in favor of Secret Invasion during Marvel editorial meetings. I was OK until the story went from Civil War (where Anti-Reg forces storm Prison 42 in the Negative Zone…) to some weird nano-tech/Phalanx storyline where you wind up fighting heroes and villains under nano-tech control. My one wish for the sequel to MUA2 is that the story be as good as the one Paul Dini wrote for Batman: Arkham Asylum and not scraps left on the editorial floor. All-in-all, I give it a solid 9 out of 10 just based on the fun I had playing the game and the replay value of it. What’s your rating?