Tony Stark is a certified genius, a billionaire, and a playboy. He was the son of Howard and Maria Stark, Howard being the founder of Stark Industries. A tragic car accident led to their deaths and Tony taking over the company at age 21. From there he continued to oversee the companies operations which would eventually bring him to Vietnam. While supervising a field test for an experimental weapon, Tony was injured by a booby trap. He was captured by a resident warlord who forced Tony to build him a weapon. Tony was placed in a cell to work alongside famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ho Yinsen. The two built a magnetic chest plate designed to keep the pieces of shrapnel from entering Tony’s heart and killing him. From there they continued to build a full suit of powered armor to use in an escape. Tragically, Yinsen was killed while distracting the captors long enough for Tony to don the suit.

Upon his return to America, Tony discovers that the shrapnel cannot be removed from his heart, thus he must wear the chest plate at all times. As such he devised a cover that Iron Man was his personal bodyguard. Tony Stark/Iron Man has always been seen as something of a patriot thus his early appearances saw him taking on Communist threats such as the Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man. Also being the head of Stark Industries, Tony has faced off against several unscrupulous business adversaries including Obadiah Stane and Justin Hammer. Tony has also had to deal with his own personal demons as well eventually overcoming his bout with alcoholism. But perhaps the hardest person Tony has ever fought was his best friend Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America. The two chose to support apposing sides of the Superhuman Registration Act with Iron Man being the face of the pro-registration side and Cap founding the anti-registration movement. This led to a series of engagements known as the Civil War. Following the war, registration was in full affect and Tony Stark/Iron Man became the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Tony Stark has no real powers to speak of. He is a genius of the highest order with an expertise in a wide array of subjects from engineering to quantum mechanics. Though he has applied this knowledge to building and expanding Stark Industries and creating astonishing advancements in a variety of fields both scientific and otherwise, Tony’s most visible achievement is his Iron Man armor. Tony has created several dozen versions of his armor over the years, each more capable than their predecessors. Nearly every suit of armor provides the same basic functions including enhanced strength and durability, flight, as well as providing a self-contained environment, communications, and offensive and defensive capabilities. Among the on board weapons are the trademark Repulsor Rays and Unibeam. Various armors have also featured weapons such as Pulse Bolts, a missile launcher and a retractable chain gun. An Extremis-injection allowed him to control his armor directly from his brain, store the inner layers of the Iron Man armor in the hollows of his bones and connect remotely to various external communications systems. However he has recently lost these abilities.

Iron Man was a playable character in the first Ultimate Alliance game as well as the second X-men Legends game. In Legends II he was a hidden character that can be unlocked by finding the homing beacon in each of the first four acts. Each beacon leads to a secret area where you’ll find a piece of Iron Man’s armor. A fifth beacon in the final act sends your team to another secret area where Tony Stark is being held captive. Free him and Iron Man is unlocked. In Ultimate Alliance things are far easier as Iron Man is unlocked from the start. Stark Tower is also the base of operations for the heroic taskforce in the first act. In both games, Iron Man is a flier and a ranged character above everything else.

When you have a suit of powered armor with as many weapons and gadgets as Iron Man has, there’re plenty of special attacks to develop. Both Legends II and Ultimate Alliance featured similar attacks, but there was a little confusion between the games and the comics. In Legends II, Iron Man’s Uni Beam was a beam attack that originates from his hands. In the comics, the Uni Beam stems from Iron Man’s chest while his Repulsors emanate from the palms of his gauntlets. In Ultimate Alliance, the Uni Beam was again a weapon built into the gauntlets, but this time they were a rapid fire projectile that had the ability to reflect off of various surfaces. Also in Ultimate Alliance, his hand blasts were known as the Plasma Disk. Iron Man’s versatility is what makes him such a fun character to use. Among his other attacks were Nano Assault (radial attack), Gamma Bolts (ricochet projectiles), and Rocket Uppercut (melee attack). Iron Man is all about outgunning his enemies and both games took that to heart so I can only hope Ultimate Alliance 2 carries that forward.

If there’s one other thing I want to see, it’s plenty of unlockable costumes, after all the man does have probably somewhere around 50 different suits of armor. So far there’s been a classic Red&Gold design from the 60’s and 70’s, the War Machine armor, and the Ultimate Iron Man armor. Since these have already made their way into a game, I’d like to see the Silver Centurion armor, the Modular armor, the Alblative armor, or even the Stealth armor. Tony also donned an incomplete version of the S.K.I.N. armor in issue 42 of Iron Man vol. 3 in 2001 when he battled the Shocker. I think this would be a cool armor to feature in the game as it is Tony wearing a flight suit with a helmet, chest piece, gauntlets, and boots.