Marvel Ultimate Alliance Is Broken For Some Players On PC

Last week at Comic-Con International: San Diego 2016, Marvel Games announced that Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 would be making their way to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Steam in the very near future. On Tuesday, we got exciting re-release trailers for both games as they were made available for PC. Unfortunately, that’s where the excitement may end.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 on PC are both experiencing technical issue that makes them practically unplayable for some. Perhaps the biggest issue is an inaccurately mapping controller buttons. Since there is no way to manually remap the input for the game, that error makes it impossible to get past the opening title screen. However, this isn’t happening for all players. Steam user SageX85 explains the issue (via Kotaku):

Since the first release, the way the xinput api was implemented was broken. Only the WIRED 360 controller worked as it should. Third party controllers like the logitech ones and the wireless 360 controller with adapter suffered wrong button mapping.

Apparently the game read something else beside the api, something like the name of the device or the hardware id. If it is not correctly recognized as an XInput controller, it falls back to DirectInput, and here is where the problem shows. For the DirectInput, the layout the developers used is different than the common DirectInput layout of Xinput controllers.

In addition to the controller issues, the few players who have been able to make it past the title screen report an issue with the sound where a persistent, annoying crackling noise is heard over the music. On top of all of that, the eight downloadable characters that were previously exclusive to the Xbox 360 version of Marvel Ultimate Alliance – Cyclops, Hawkeye, Hulk, Nightcrawler, Doctor Doom, Magneto, Sabretooth, and Venom – are not available, making this less than the ultimate edition of Marvel Ultimate Alliance that we hoped it would be. And really, at $40 each (or $60 as a bundle), these versions of the games should be pretty definitive.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 are available now on Steam. Purchase at your own risk.