u/YaboiGh0styy

“You're fighting against the inevitable, Hulk. I'm simply the final product of natural selection. The strong survive. I'm the strongest. I survived.When you go against me, you go against the laws of nature. Admit it! You'll die at my hands momentarily anyway. Let your last words be honest ones! Remove the blinders from your eyes and see the truth! I AM THE FUTURE!”

- Maestro

Hulk has had a few evil versions of himself. Of course there’s the other characters like Red Hulk (though he’s mostly an anti-villain) but different and evil versions of Hulk has been done a few times to mixed reception. There’s Ultimate Hulk 1610 who is… yeah he’s a violent animal driven by instinct that’s most known for cannibalism. I don’t mind the concept but don’t think it was done right.

Ultimate Hulk from earth 6160 who is part of The Maker’s secret council who runs a cult that manipulates politics and events while crushing anyone in his way. Pretty interesting but there needs to be more.

Then there’s Old Man Logan. My favourite Wolverine story has a Hulk that went insane and had an inbred family with his cousin. Yeah this one isn’t good.

But the original evil Hulk way back in 1992. That’s where it’s at.

What happens when the heroes can’t save you? What happens when the world is bought to its knees with an extinction level event wiping out most of humanity? Well only the strongest survive. Bruce Banner though was lucky, he was kept in stasis by AIM and tortured as they try to figure out what makes him immune to radiation. But this is Hulk so of course he broke out. This hulk in particular is a more intelligent Green Scar having Bruce Banner’s mind because Bruce Banner is entirely in control as Maestro and he loves it.

While most would expect Hulk to want to save everyone, he didn’t care. He even directly told Rick that he wouldn’t mind if Hercules killed all those he ruled over because humanity saw him as a monster no matter what he did, and now he sees them at their worst. Pathetic, bitter, afraid, clinging to anyone with power if it means they’ll be safe. But despite claiming that, Hulk ultimately still tries to save them, fighting against Hercules even if he fails. Though years later he does succeed, and once he does the people of Dystopia reject him, angered, he tries to make them submit through force and is betrayed by the one person who always saw the good in him, no matter how far he went, Rick was always there to remind him who he was. Only then, does Hulk finally break. All the trauma Bruce has endured throughout his life, from humans hating him but begging for his help, his friends keeping him at arms length and being ready to fight him if he lost control, and finally one of his closest friends trying to kill him all lead to this moment.

Maestro breaks and becomes worse. Rules Dystopia as a Cruel, vicious, cunning, and powerful dictator destroying settlements without a second thought and killing all who oppose him. What happens when Bruce Banner breaks? He becomes a worse monster than the one he feared, taking complete control of his life and using it to make the rest of the world kneel before him. He’s the inevitable future of the Hulk.

Everyone knows Night of the Living Dead. It’s a timeless classic that is responsible for zombies as we know them today. Stories of the dead coming back have existed for centuries but those stories were often spirits possessing corpses or necromancers bringing back the dead and not full on mindless zombie hordes coming back and driven by instinct to eat the living.

But no one really talks about the remake despite it kicking ass. Night of the Living Dead 90s is great with a solid cast of actual actors instead of just a handful of them being actors staying faithful to the original story while also making changes to keep things fresh. The one thing I dislike about the remake is that Harry Cooper is just a straight up villain and not just a scared father who’s letting his fear guide him and ultimately makes decisions that seem cruel but believable. Here, he’s more of an asshole that actively screws over others and refuses to help.

One noticeable detail about Night of the Living Dead is that all deaths are tragically avoidable and dumb but in a believable sense that people affected by tunnel vision wouldn’t notice at first. Johnny gets killed by the very things he was scathing his sister about, Tom and Judy wanted to keep each other safe but Tom wanted to protect his girlfriend but in their plan to fill up the truck and leave the truck gets set on fire and Judy’s jacket gets stuck leading to them both blowing up, Harry’s refusal to cooperate with anyone else outside of his family ends up getting himself shot by Ben while his wife, Helen is killed by their recently zombies daughter, Karen who she wanted to protect above all else with all 3 becoming zombified by the end of the movie, Barbra was indeed killed by the horde of zombies like her brother foreshadowed, her zombified brother even being the one to drag her into the horde, and Ben isn’t killed by zombies but by the militia when he was the one trying to get everyone to cooperate and save everyone.

1990 Night of the Living Dead keeps this dark irony but changes a few details. The most noticeable change (well besides colour) is Barbara. She’s a much more active character, taking time to observe the situation and think more rationally. Calling out Ben and Harry for arguing over petty reasons. Even being the one to point out the dead move slowly and clumsily which they could use to walk past them and towards help and Ben shoots down that idea insisting that they stick together by staying in the house or getting in the truck.

Once everything goes from bad to worse and Ben and Cooper shoot each other, Barbara decides to run away, seeing that she can outrun the dead. But once she’s away from the house does she realise she was safer out in the open. The zombies are more or less affected by tunnel vision and don’t notice her. It’s only the ones that are still moving towards the house that try to get her which leads me to believe that the zombies the whole time are near blind. Not once do they begin moving from sight alone, with the exception of Sarah who is the only zombie that leads me to believe that have some sight but just really poor sight. From start to finish the dead were reacting to the noise the survivors made by constantly arguing, screaming in panic, gunfire, and barricading the house. The first scene even shows that the man who was probably bitten and slowly turning didn’t move towards Barbra and Johnny’s direction until Johnny started to get loud with his teasing. The zombies that attack Ben and Barbra in the house only appear once Ben tries yelling at Barbra to snap her out of her shock she’s been in. Adding more evidence to this, every shot of the house seems to emphasise the noise made as the zombies begin to become a horde.

The entire cast would have been fine if they listened to the loud and angry Harry. Go to the cellar and just shut up. But because they didn’t know about them being blind, going to the basement was a dumb idea if the zombies somehow knew where they were but they wouldn’t have. At worst they would they would have been stuck in the basement with a zombified Sarah but they could have fought her off or shot her only drawing the attention of a handful of zombies and even then they wouldn’t come into the house because it was only the content noise that drew the large horde. To make things even worse, Ben bleeds out in the basement, the one place he refused to hunker down in but if he went down their and looked around he would have found the keys for the pump, the keys Tom didn’t have and had to resort to shooting the pump to unlock it, spraying fuel on the lit torch and blowing up the truck with him and his girlfriend. The key was quite literally under their noses the whole time. Ben can’t help but laugh at how fucked the situation became with this mistake playing a big role in it.

Hell, when Barbra leaves the house she eventually comes across the militia shooting the hordes. They are given much more screen time in the remake and as such it’s much more clear that these guys are a barely organised, trigger happy, and reckless group of rednecks but they have guns. Having a bunch of guns and ammo does help but the reason they managed to survive is because they kept moving and didn’t waste time arguing with each other while there was a horde surrounding them.

Everyone’s refusal to cooperate and letting petty arguments get in the way ultimately led to their avoidable deaths. Barbra was the only one to pay attention, make decisions based on the behaviour she observed and as such she is the only one to survive. Even shooting Cooper when she discovers he’s still alive seeing that he actively fucked over the rest of the survivors at the end. Night is a great look in how people can make dumb decisions in horror movies.

People are scared, try to keep as much control as they can, stubbornly refuse to cooperate, and are deeply affected by tunnel vision. It’s a frustrating watch not because the decisions are dumb but they are believably dumb and I think 1990 further emphasises this point by allowing for Barbra to survive seeing as she was the only one to see reason.

Starting off I want to say, I fucking love Deus Ex. I’ve only played Adam Jensen’s games but the series has me hooked harder than any other cyberpunk series has.

But a huge part of the story that has bothered me in the Adam Jensen games is that they never fully explain why the majority of humans are against augmentations from the start. Now in Mankind Divided it’s understandable due to the events in Human Revolution but in Human Revolution there’s nothing properly explained.

You have the purists who claim that augmentation is polluting the human body and forcing evolution when it isn’t mankind’s place to do so. But those guys are terrorists not so subtly meant to be the game’s version of Nazis if the armband insignia wasn’t obvious enough.

There’s some dialogue and a side quest that does show that jobs are pushing for employees to get augmented and this can be seen in the final level where augmented blue collar workers have augmented arms with tools in place of where their hands are. Even a PMC using augmentations to control the memories is of their soldiers however this is military augmentations that aren’t public knowledge.

There’s not enough arguments against augmentations that their are full on riots in the streets on the second visit to Detroit based on the claim without proper proof that the company heavily pushing the limits for augmentations to make them available to more people who desperately need them. Most people don’t have access to the augmentations Adam Jensen has, his augmentations are specifically experimental military grade, most people with augmentations just have mechanical replacements without things like Icarus landing or gun arms.

If anything augmented individuals should be rioting due to how expensive augmentations are, jobs pushing for employees to get augmentations, and augmented people requiring neuropozyne to survive and neuropozyne is monopolised and expensive and without neuropozyne they will lose control of augmentations and cause damage to people around them. William Taggart’s wife died because a man was going through serve Aug rejection and was killed in the crossfire prompting Taggart to stay Humanity Front and push back against augmentations.

Now they do make a better point for why augmentations should be regulated in secondary media like books spinoffs and mobile games that will never be finished (Hi Deus Ex: The Fall) but not in the game where this is the main plot. They even make a point that until Sarif Industries was attacked by terrorists that Humanity Front was losing popularity… the augmentation company getting attacked and its research stolen by augmented terrorists caused the Humanity Front to gain popularity… what? It’s even worse when another attack on the company happens 6 months later by natural humans on employees that are solely natural humans, they even killed one. There’s an augmented human among them but that was covered up by the illuminati.

Mankind Divided manages to give a good argument for anti-augmentation in a single side mission. You find a man who has essentially made a cult using hypnosis and social enhancer augmentations with pheromones. He has people so controlled to the point you can’t call him out or draw your weapon in the area until you disable the emitters that enhance his augs. This one side quest showed that the shit a normal dude had access to gave him scary amounts of control over most people. In a single side mission they made a better argument than all of Human Revolution.

I love Deus Ex, but you really have to go digging in order to see valid arguments for anti-augmentation groups and very little of them is in Human Revolution which revolves around the idea of augmentation or remaining natural.

I love Human Revolution, I’m halfway through my second playthrough going non-lethal but I just want to talk about the disappointing ending. All the player has gone through, their decisions on how to approach the situation, who they let live, who they killed and it all comes down to what button you press.

To quickly recap who, what, when, where, and why for those he don’t remember or haven’t played, Adam Jensen gets to the Panchaea facility where Hugh Darrow has sabotaged the illuminati’s plan to broadcast a signal that would allow them to control the augmented population. Hugh Darrow, being the one who made augmentation possible for most people, sees on how the illuminati plans on using augmentation people rely on to live comfortably to control those people didn’t have positive opinions of this idea and began to see augmentations and all research into it as a threat to humanity itself. In a way he viewed himself as a god, that only he can say when humanity flys too close to the sun and when they should stop. Specifically comparing himself to Daedalus who created Icarus’ wings but was helpless to prevent Icarus from flying too close to the sun and falling into the ocean. So he sabotaged the signal turning all augmented individuals into murderous, uncontrollable, rampage in order to cause a global fear of augmentations which he hopes will get it outlawed and permanently banned when they see just how dangerous they truely are.

Now when approaching the broadcast system the player is given the option to replace the broadcast with one of three other broadcasts or the fourth option to just destroy everything.

Darrow’s Ending: Reveal the truth of the illuminati’s existence and their plan. Hugh Darrow believes that broadcasting this message will cause humanity to abandon all research into augmentations ensuring they cannot be used against humanity.

Sarif’s Ending: cover up the truth and blame anti-Aug extremists in order for technology and researching into augmentations to further progress.

Taggart’s Ending: Blame Neuropozyne poisoning for augmented rampages, completely covering up the Illuminati’s involvement and further strengthens their position of power.

Fuck everyone, I trust humanity to save itself ending: Destroy Panchaea and the broadcast, placing the blame on no one and giving no answers, leaving it to humanity to discover what happened and what to do.

These choices seem interesting right? Their consequences would be something you’d like to see… yeah have fun with what you get, asshole. You have a cutscene featuring a compilation of stock videos and images with maybe a handful of art from the game itself as well as a monologue from Adam Jensen which changes depending on if the player was lethal, non-lethal or a mix of both which is interesting to listen to but that’s it. You don’t see the consequences Adam Jensen doesn’t even tell you the consequences, all you have to go off is what you’re told the ending will likely do by Hugh, Sarif, or Taggart and just hope humanity will do the best for themselves if they find out what happened in the destroy Panchaea ending.

So we have 4 ending where we don’t see the consequences or anything it just goes immediately to the cutscene. The only ending where something happens is destroying Panchaea where the screen turns blacks and you hear the alarms go off as Panchaea sinks. So every ending is very anticlimactic and very obviously rushed because as stated there’s no one frantically calling as their plans get ruined or even a transition into the cutscene it just immediately cuts from gameplay to the ending cutscene.

But beyond all of that what really makes the ending suck? It’s a false choice. It’s revealed that the messaged that was broadcasted didn’t reach anyone due to the illuminati’s influence over global media, they suppressed it pretty quickly and Panchaea sinks anyway. So there’s no indication of what message Adam Jensen went with besides that. It probably wasn’t Taggart’s message because that would help the illuminati’s goals making it nonsensical for them to suppress it and also fuck Taggart. Glad you can just kill him at the end of the game and it affects nothing.

So you have one of four endings which were all made invalid immediately and there’s no indication of which one was picked. But no matter what, the fourth option of destroying Panchaea happens whether or not Adam chooses to do it. This is very close to the original ending of the first Deus Ex where, they didn’t pick one of the endings to make the canon ending but rather just picked all of them.

Is Deus Ex a series that’s cursed to have unsatisfying endings? I haven’t read the comic or the novels nor have I heard anything about invisible war besides that it was very disappointing but the two games I’ve played had unsatisfying endings, the first game famously has an unsatisfying ending, and we’re not even going to get an end to Adam Jensen’s story because Eidos decided to take the series to the back of the office and magdump the poor fucker. Shit ain’t fair man.

I love playing as Hulk, he’s difficult but really fun to play especially if you have a damn good team behind you. Though he has a few issues some of which they tried to address but ended up just screwing over all tanks as a whole or gamma shield which is the most useless shield in the game.

But no, my big issue with him is that he does not feel like the strongest avenger. Show when you ult into Monster Hulk you feel powerful but even then the regular attacks don’t feel incredibly powerful and not opponents away making it difficult to kill most through regular attacks unless you do the Hulk juggle (RIP) and the most powerful move when he’s in the state is his thunderclap.

But now what I mean is that Hulk needs a powerful move or state that he can do regularly especially when other vanguards who are characters known for their incredible strength get to have those powerful states.

Thing gets his Stone Haymaker which not only gives him additional damage with each strike but also gives him bonus health.

Thor has his Awakened state which can drop individual characters relatively quickly but the Hulk doesn’t have anything like that.

Dr Strange’s Projectiles are pretty damn good and damaging and the Maelstorm of Madness AOE really makes the player feel like the sorcerer supreme even after he has been the target of so many nerves to the point that they haven’t even updated his ability showcases in game to properly show off how he is currently.

Emma Frost has her Diamond form giving her reduced damage as well as dealing heavy melee damage.

Hulk, despite being a character known for his raw power and strength due to his gamma radiation being directly correlated to the one below all. Hulk is so powerful to the point that, I’m not kidding when I say this, Green Scar Hulk impressed Umar, Dormmamu’s sister and ruler of the dimension to the point that they slept together for 12 hours straight and it affected the entire infinite Multiverse to the point that silver surfer was like “Ok what the hell is going on bro?” I shit you not, this is real.

Sure, Rogue doesn’t have a state like that either (or at least without team up) and she’s known for her strength being able to box up people like juggernaut and honked due to permanently having the strength, speed, and flight of Captain Marvel and Wonder Man doing her case Rogue is a character just feels weak. I think she could use a buff and especially sucks that there are so many characters that she just gets nothing from. But unlike Rogue, Hulk is so unbelievably powerful that the avengers have to have contingency plans just for him in fact the reason the avengers first assembled was because none of them could take down the Hulk.

The entire World War Hulk story is Hulk throwing down with every hero on earth in search of the illuminati after they betrayed him. Hell in one of his fights with Thor who at that point had defeated one of the most powerful versions of Galactus with the audience have seen Thor could not kill him and the fight got so intense iron man had to intervene and accidentally created a gamma nuke that did nothing but ended up creating a Hulked out Thor who was still incapable of fully defeating Hulk. Just to rephrase that, Hulk was so powerful that even after Tony accidentally buffed his opponent, Hulk was still in the same league.

Hulk should have a rage meter that allows him to deal more damage when it’s full, or a secondary attack that’s maybe just a big punch or an AOE smash that grounds the area. Despite his typical Hulk smash being a double fisted slam to the ground for some reason he does not have that ability in this game. Hulk as a character could use a few bumps because as I see it his shield is one of the worst in the game. The hit box on his leap grab is far more strict than the hip boxes on other grabs his projectiles are incredibly small and overall his probably the tank that gets screwed over the hardest by CC.

Hulk is Hulk, and Hulk is the strongest there is. So I beg you guys make him feel like that.