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."

Comments

Spiderman has sucked plenty of times before

[elrous0]

In all fairness, Spiderman has been dodgy in MANY formats. Anyone remember the 70's TV series? How about Spidey Super Stories?

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.

Re:Spiderman has sucked plenty of times before

[Purity Of Essence]

I swear to God, he ACTUALLY says "I'LL GET YOU, SPIDERMAN!" and shakes his fist in the air at one point. Sad.

Yeah, you'd never see such hackneyed dialogue in a comic book.

Re:Spiderman has sucked plenty of times before

[ReverendLoki]

he ACTUALLY says "I'LL GET YOU, SPIDERMAN!" and shakes his fist in the air at one point. Sad.

C'mon. To be fair, he's only pulling a direct quote from no less than 47 Spider-Man comics...

Re:Spiderman has sucked plenty of times before

[Tofystedeth]

heh, reminds me of a recent PA concerning staying true to source material.

Maximum Carnage

[Applekid]

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.

Atari 2600 version:

[pecosdave]

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.

Sublime?

[CheechWizz]

"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?