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The first issue of The Incredible Hulk was published in May 1962, written by movie cameo addict Stan Lee and featuring spectacular art by the great Jack Kirby. The cover depicts a familiar-looking but grey behemoth looming over a skinny, scared guy in a lab coat. "Is he man or monster or... is he both?" asks the blurb, clearly in rather an existential tizzy. In the five decades since, the Hulk has survived various character evolutions and a series of hard reboots. But if we know anything about Marvel's brawl-y green giant, it's that the monster and the man co-exist, or at least time-share. An aggravated Hulk will kick the tar out of baddies all day long, but once his famous anger dissipates the big guy visibly deflates like a parade balloon with a slow puncture, returning to his other, slightly less imposing form: puny Bruce Banner.The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction took this absolute cornerstone of the character and cheerfully binned it. Poor Bruce has no juice: in Radical Entertainment's 2005 game you are all Hulk, all the time. The classic Jekyll-and-Hyde squall of internal conflict is completely stripped away or, more accurately, repurposed as externalised conflict, the sort of conflict that video games do very well. Anger is an energy, and at its best, Ultimate Destruction lights up the screen with sensationalised, ring-a-ding pyrotechnics, like a pinball table plugged directly into the National Grid. It doesn't fetishise violence, but it certainly aestheticises it, spotlights it, rhapsodises it. It's a sandbox game in the truest sense, in that it presents you with an elaborate clump of sandcastles disguised to look like skyscrapers and puts you in control of the world's largest, greenest, tantrum-iest toddler, ready and eager to stamp all over them. Once you've earned enough Smash Points to start digging properly into Hulk's surprisingly large repertoire of unlockable abilities, Ultimate Destruction becomes a freestyler's heaven, like parkour for Godzilla.
Even for a game released a decade ago, Ultimate Destruction's open world can seem basic rather than bustling. The Badlands is a Death Valley-style desert of sandy canyons and towering mesas, a generally featureless map broken up by hardscrabble towns, isolated military bunkers and the occasional longhorn steer, moo-ing as you roar past. In the anonymous city, the processing emphasis is on how concrete, glass and tarmac will crumble, crack and explode as Hulk lurches around rather than recreating an absorbing clockwork simulacrum of modern urban living. There are a pockets of foot traffic, but presumably most of the civilians are using the city's extensive public transport network: it's very common to skid round a corner and be faced with an entire street bogged down with a traffic jam composed entirely of buses. At this point it's incredibly difficult to resist the temptation to slam down on the sprint button to see what happens when Hulk charts a path through them.
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