After sampling both the new Marvel Ultimate Alliance(aka: X-Men Legends III) and JLH, I can give the pros on this. The Marvel game has a way larger cast, but not as locations. JLH has a shorter cast, but better locations and fighting areas. The Marvel game insists on constant(and I mean CONSTANT)upgrading your characters, while the JLH game isn't as taxing on it. JLH is more finite with its storyline, and not to many sidequests. Marvel's is a little more open though with its missions. The cast from JLU is most of your straight up Leaguers. Marvel's is more scattered though with regular game characters like Wolverine and Spider-Man, but you wonder why guys like Blade are there(no vampires to fight), or why flagship characters like Hulk where left out. The villains in DC were standard League nemesises like Darkseid and Braniac, but cryptic ones like The Key and Killer Frost were included when you wonder why Luthor and Joker are taking a powder in this. Marvel's villians were the big movers and shakers who affect stuff on an Earth-shattering or cosmic level, but hardly any that the non-comic book playing audience might recognize like Magneto or Doc Oc. JLH was fair, but should've had more playable characters. Marvel is better, but needs some more standard heroes and villains included.

A lot of standard characters end up having their rights tied up in other endeavors. There's another Hulk movie in the works, and there's a good chance there are game rights attached to it. Not entirely sure about the villains; there's a good chance a few of them just couldn't fit into the story or on the game disc.

The Hulk rights are, in fact, tied up elsewhere. It was a subject of much debate when the game was in development. Unfortunate, but not really much that could be done about it.

My biggest beef with both is the PSP. With JLH, you get an incomplete game if you don't get the PSP version. Not only are you missing two characters, you're also missing stages. The only thing that makes this somewhat tolerable is that the game at least costs the same reguardless of what system you buy it for. With MUA, that's not the case. You end up spending $20 extra for a version with less characters than the PSP version. I really hate these "incentive" requirements for the PSP.

I did like how everything seemed bigger and more impressing in JLH. When picking up a car, you really felt it was something large. Also, your energy recharged pretty fast so you could blow through your superpowers with abandon. Flying was handled better, particularly since you could fight in the air, instead of just having a dashing attck which puts you back on the ground. It would have been nice if they pushed it a little further, but with a few characters who couldn't fly, I see why they didn't.

MUA, however, just gives you craploads of stuff to do. JLH can be beaten in eight hours in one playthrough, doing everything. All told, playing through every difficulty level and maxing out your characters might take 40 hours, tops. MUA's campaign is longer and they have all sorts of stuff to do apart from the main campaign. I also like the new team management where you can create a team and upgrade team abilities as a whole. It would have been nice, however, if your characters weren't set to auto upgrade their abilities at the beginning. For people who like to manage their characters, it's a real pain to go through and turn it off twice for every character, and then unlockables end up getting 10-25 levels worth of point auto-assigned, anyway.

And while it may just be for me, a BIG plus for MUA is that it doesn't feature Kari Wahlgren. Zatanna was far more important in JLH than she really should have been.

She was always one of the less used characters in the active JLA roster. I suppose they needed another female character aside from WW and for some reason couldn't use Hawkgirl as one of the main characters. They did need a resident magic user though.

I don't see why they couldn't use hawkgirl, she's in the game, so there obviously isn't a licensing issue. I think it was just written with Zatanna instead. On the plus side, though, Kari Wahlgren was just using her normal voice for the role, so it wasn't so bad as most of her other roles.

There's also a JLH: The Flash game for Nintendo DS. About time he got a decent game. The only other one they ever did for him was a crappy Gameboy one based on the 90s TV series.

I don't know, from what I hear, the DS game isn't so hot, either.

isukun
I don't know, from what I hear, the DS game isn't so hot, either.

Generally, hand-held versions of console games are never anything to get excited about.

Unless they're for the PSP. In which, essentially, they're the same game.

Except they usually have MORE stuff in the PSP versions.

isukun
Except they usually have MORE stuff in the PSP versions.

You forgot to mention the 30 second load times, bad controls, and 4 hour battery life too.

And the lack of a second analog stick. Or even one analog stick. I hate the nub.

You forgot to mention the 30 second load times, bad controls, and 4 hour battery life too.

The controls aren't really any worse. The games don't exactly make the best use of analog, anyway. As for the loading times, they're pretty bad on the consoles, too, even the 360. Battery life has nothing to do with the game design, for someone willing to deal with the limitations of the PSP, I doubt any of those will factor into which version they buy as much as the fact that the PSP version offers more levels and characters.