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A Web-Head Retrospective
In honor of the new movie, 1up has a piece on the site looking at the history of Spider-Man games. While the recent Neversoft and Treyarch titles have been sublime, the deep past of the wall-crawler franchise is more than a little dodgey: "It's a hard point to argue -- early games like Acclaim's Maximum Carnage and Separation Anxiety would just be forgettable Final Fight clones without the Spider-Man license, and most of the famed webslinger's other early games were fairly straightforward platformers with tacked-on Spidey abilities ... Early Spider-Man titles often tasked the webslinger with somewhat arbitrary tasks that seemed like tedious and mundane ways to string together an otherwise paper-thin plot. In Spider Man/X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, Spidey spent a lot of time running through mazes and searching for bombs, and The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin had him almost aimlessly hunting down his foes hoping to get keys to a bomb. These games failed to make use of one of the things that draws so many to Spider-Man's adventures in the first place: the story."
Frankly, I never even liked the new movies. The first was was so lame and cliched it actually made me physically ill to watch (my girlfriend at the time made me take her, basically). I felt most sorry for Willem Defoe, who has been in so many great films. I swear to God, he ACTUALLY says "I'LL GET YOU, SPIDERMAN!" and shakes his fist in the air at one point. Sad.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I still have the Parker Bros. Spider-Man Game for the 2600.
Players had to shoot "webs" up the side of a "building" and swing across windows to pick up bad guys hanging out of them. When you got to the top, a battle with one of the goblins on a radio tower (i.e. less web-anchor space). Then you got to do it again. Kind of like a Crazy Climber knock-off/mod.
Maximum Carnage caught my attention because it was the first major video game (to be fair to my lacking history, at least to western regions) to have it's soundtrack done by an established band, Green Jelly.
It wasn't CD quality, but at least, aside from a logo at startup, the advertising wasn't messing up things in-game.
Then again, I was younger and far more impressionable.
More Twoson than Cupertino
So Spiderman is the only big name franchise to produce crap games?
A lot of crap movie tie in games were pushed on us (on the NES) as kids. Spiderman/X-man was a minor incident compared to "Darkman" (god bless Sam Rami, he tried to make a great movie out of it) "Batman", "The Rocketeer", anything with "Robocop". Video game were considered promo-media, or tie in cash, not a genuine media format.
What we are today (as an entertainment format) is so different from what we were then, you cant really blame the old school code crunchers and game designers. They were trying to bring us a new media form, which they loved, any way they could.
The majority of games based on movies are always pants, not just spiderman games.
When a movie like this is released the movie is just a vehicle to carry the two hundred other spiderman related crap products (video game included).
The movie isnt even released here in Australia yet (May 4th) but walking into a Kmart its stocked full of Spiderman 3 goodies, movies aint just about movies anymore.
After the epic-ness of the spiderman movie series the games that follow just feel so tacky that I don't really have the urge to play them. I was engrossed with the comics and in part the TV series but the games just made me feel like I was looking at a game designer's spare time project. After the experience I had with the gamecube version I decided that I'd leave spiderman where he belonged, far away from my gaming rigs.
Maybe when gaming gets more cinematic I might consider playing a spiderman game but for now, I'd rather not be disappointed again.
The Refined Geek - Technology, Finance, Space and everything in between
I still have that Atari 2600 version. When I was a little kid my mom sent in some box tops (I think it was Alpha Bits, but I'm not sure) and a few bucks for the game. I remember her holding up the box to let me chose which one I wanted.
I was at a Game Stop a few years back, they had a sign up saying you could get a discount on the Spider Man 2 Playstation game when you brought in "The Original" Spider Man game. I was tempted to go home and get my Atari one and say "It can't get much more original than that". Unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of time for that sort of thing at that time.
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"While the recent Neversoft and Treyarch titles have been sublime"
Sublime? While they werent the god awful schlock you'd expect from a licensed title, calling them sublime is a bit much don't you think?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I really enjoyed the second Gamecube title. I thought it did a wonderful job of staying true to the source material while still adding in enough extra villains and game-related story to keep it interesting. The bits contrived for the game were as much fun to watch as play. I especially liked the stuff with Mysterio, it was hilarious. Not to mention the gameplay was seamless, and very intuitive. Plus if you got bored you could always roam around finding really high things to jump off of. I can only hope that the third title will be as good.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
There have been at least two decent spiederman games to my knowledge. One was a rather strange title for the Amiga, which starred a really tiny spiderman on playing field reminiscent of old games like jet set willy and its ilk. The other was the second spiderman game for the xbox generation, the one with the freeform movement around New York. The story weren't all that good, but it played like a dream.
Damn, this reminds me of the Commodore 64 version of the game: And not for the best.
While at the time it was quite a cool game (very hard at later levels though), it took one whole casette tape (both sides!) to load.
I still wake up in cold sweat thinking of those load-errors I sometimes received after waiting about 45 minutes.
There's not even one remark in the article about the shit Activision did with the difference between the PS2/PC versions of Spider-Man 2. The PS2 version was awesome, free web slinging through the city, while the PC version was like something a bunch of college seniors do for their final project.
Apparently someone hasn't played the clunky mess that is "Spiderman 3" yet...
Spiderman 2 and Ultimate Spiderman's play control was very smooth and responsive. Apparently they couldn't allow that, since the new controls are as stiff as Keanu Reeves.