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

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.

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.