Men in Black II: Alien Escape - GameCube

Released for the PlayStation 2 in the summer of 2002, this latest movie license is now available on the GameCube - a trend that's becoming increasingly regular with the home console market. As you would expect, it's exactly the same game, albeit with the occasional minor technical or graphical discrepancy.

As the story goes, agents J and K discover a space prison hulk that crashed into the Earth's ocean decades ago. They soon learn that it carried the most dangerous alien gangs in the galaxy and that they are now hiding out on Earth, each one now a hardened criminal. Of course there's only one solution to the problem: hunt them down and bring them in, dead of alive.

Selecting between the quick-witted J and the confident veteran K, players choose their character, opting for the speed of the former or the experience and technologically superior weapons of the latter. Throughout the game, switching between characters is possible, thus allowing players to experiment with various weapons and character strengths.

A vast array of aliens are encountered along the way, appearing courtesy of the recent MIB2 movie as well as from the 1997 original (remember the little Worm Guys?). As with the films, some of the aliens are allies and informants but most are hostile and must be disposed of appropriately.

Which brings us on to the game's host of weapons and gadgets - a feature that plays a major part throughout. Among other things, players get to test the XD9 Lazy Weasel spread shooter, which zaps any alien life form in range into a pile of extraterrestrial goo. The standard sidearm of agents J and K, however, is the classic J2 Blaster, a gun that strips particles from its barrel and hyper-accelerates them to dissolve unfortunate aliens. A range of different technology can be found amongst the extensive arsenal, including spread weapons, homing weapons, area effect weapons, beam weapons and charge weapons.

With regard to the game itself, players blast their way across a total of five episodes, each having varying themes and settings, and each with their own sub-levels and story scenes. Some of the environments to be explored include a disreputable dockside, a decommissioned nuclear power plant, the streets of Manhattan, and the alien prison ship VVS Maxim Securitus.

With gadgets, aliens and attitude galore, Men in Black 2 will be a real treat for fans of the films. It also holds up fairly well as a simple, quick-blast shoot 'em up.
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