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Fight For Freedom As Captain America This Fourth of July

Liberty must be fought for every day, with every breath.  Once your colony declares its independence from your oppressors, you can’t just roll over and take a nap.  No, the price of freedom is constant vigilance, and since it’s Independence Day, let’s take a look at games where you can play as one of the greatest defenders of freedom in history: Captain America!

Old school gamers will preach endlessly about the good-old-days of the 80’s and early 90’s.  It was a golden age for video games, and America in general.  Men were men, and dames was dames, and multiplayer games were something you played in an arcade on a gigantic coin-op cabinet.  Among some of the great old multi-player beatem-ups were X-Men, Ninja Turtles, and Captain America & The Avengers.  This game was one of the few that had four built-in joysticks, and allowed you and three pals to all fight together as Cap, Iron Man, Hawkeye or Vision whule clustered around one tiny screen.  Although many of these classic coin-ops have been re-released as downloadable games for modern consoles and PC, this one has yet to resurface.



While Marvel VS Capcom 3 is familiar to many gamers today, Marvel and Capcom have been teaming up since the mid 90’s, and Captain America has been a part of their games since Marvel Superheroes and continues to be so, right up to the modern games.  While MvC 2 and 3 are available for present day consoles, the first few games in the series can only be played on older consoles like the Dreamcast, and there is still a loyal Dreamcast fanbase who prize these classic titles.  Cap is easily lost among the huge roster of playable characters in the Marvel VS series, but he’s still fun to have on your team.


Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was a terrific console action RPG that also hit the PC too.  It let you play as dozens of Marvel heroes, but in this game Captain America was definitely one of the best playable characters, and was featured extensively in the cutscenes used to tell the story.  He had a perfect voice actor too.  His shield would trash enemies in swarms, especially when combined with Spider-Man’s Spider Sense power.  Plus, Cap had some of the best buffs in the game.  The first game in the Ultimate Alliance series featured four different costumes for every hero, and you could dress Cap up as his various incarnations from the recent Ultimates series, right back to his classic World War II uniform (We’ll try to forget that US Agent ever existed).


Cap and the rest of the gang were back in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 with fewer outfits, but the graphics were much better and you could defend civil liberties by recreating Marvel’s “Civil War” storyline in which Cap has to fight off his fellow heroes in pursuit of freedom!


The upcoming Captain America: Super Soldier game is arriving in two weeks, missing today's Independence Day festivities, but many of the above titles can be grabbed right now.  So today, show off your patriotism by firing up that copy of the Marvel VS Capcom and spamming Captain America’s special attacks until freedom reigns the world over!  STARS & STRIPES!

 

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