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I have no thought whether or not the new Spider-Man movie is going to be any good, but all the hubbub about it lately has got me thinking of Spider-Man games of days gone by. There’s been some 40-odd games featuring Spider-Man released for various platforms over the last 25 years, and his radioactive spider powers haven’t saved the web-crawler from being badly frail by opportunistic game publishers out to turn a quick buck by using a proven franchise to sell copious copies of hastily-designed garbage. There are more unpleasant Spider-Man games than not. That said, some of them are pretty good … or at least interesting. Spider-Man has at least a few titles to his name that are worth a peek. I’ve selected eight here that, for one reason or another, merit a little attention.
Spider-Man
For : Atari 2600
Published by : Parker Brothers
The very first Spider-Man game ever licensed actually attempts to work within the constraints of the Atari 2600’s limitations in a creative scheme, focusing on Spider-Man’s chief power – his webs. It doesn’t quite succeed in making a fun game, but hey, they tried. Spider-Man scales a giant building, which is peppered with bombs and guarded by the Green Goblin, in an attempt to … well, I never did figure out what exactly. When you get to the top of the building there’s this staticky glowing TV screen thing that you can’t latch onto, you can latch onto the areas around it but when you do absolutely nothing happens. I reflect the designers may not have even bothered to program a conclusion to the levels. Anyway, the only thing Spider-Man can do in this one is shoot his web rope up, or diagonally upwards to the left or right. You have to time your shots so that you hit a solid wall, and Spider-Man will pull himself up to that point. Hit originate air or an start window, however, and Spidey goes into free fall (which can be recovered by launching a web and hitting another solid point while falling). Along the way up the building you must disappear from side to side periodically to avoid the bombs and the Green Goblin (who is fair kind of air surfing from side to side, I don’t know if he even realizes that Spidey is there), as well as navigate girders. There’s six buildings to choose from, with different colors and featuring progressively more bombs and Green Goblin clones surfing around.
The game isn’t considerable of a challenge – for much of the buildings you can just shoot straight up with few obstacles, the Goblin is slow and predictable, and the bombs have an extremely limited range when they explode. So what’s the high point of the game? Well, bringing Spidey up to the top then falling some 50 stories to a horrid death is pretty humorous.
Spider-Man
For : Gameboy Color
Published by : Activision
The Gameboy Color was a notorious dumping ground for poor quality games with high-profile licenses, but this particular Spider-Man game (developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision) has it’s points. I’m not ready to go so far as to call it a *good* game, but it’s a little more inspired than most licensed platformer junk. The first interesting point about it is that it is only semi-linear, in the style of the later Metroid and Castlevania games, and even has a rudimentary experience system to boot. The game gives you one overall objective at a time and even uses flashing signs to point you towards it, but nearly the entire world device is open to you from the beginning of the game. Spidey gains experience points from cranking on all the random thugs running around Fresh York’s streets, and as he gains levels he gains more attacks (such as a 3-punch combo and a swinging kick) as well as greater health and resistance to damage.
The play control is actually a lot smoother and more sensible than many of the later Spider-Man games, particularly with regards to the web swinging. You simply hit the jump button once again while in the air to shoot a web out and swing forward. It’s simple and a lot more rapidly and fun than the bizarre schemes cooked up in later games. The fighting is glorious stiff, but with use of the Impact Web attack (performed by rolling snappily from the jump button to the attack button) it becomes tolerable. Spidey also starts out with a lovely generous portion of health and there’s a lot of hearts scattered about and frequently dropped by enemies, so outside of the boss battles there aren’t too many sections that are unplayably difficult. Additionally, you can drag on all flat surfaces and will actually crawl around and over ledges instead of coming to a lifeless dumb stop.
The cutscenes and music have a sort of Ninja Gaiden vibe to them, very dark and peevish, making not a abominable job of it with the very limited powers of the Gameboy Color. Additionally, the high-energy music uses the Gameboy Color’s weak sound chip fairly well.
Not to say the game doesn’t have it’s problems – outside of the plot events/boss battles, there isn’t a whole lot to do in this one but beat up the same ol’ thugs on the streets of New York (and it takes forever to level off of them). The game gets a shrimp clunky at times, such as when there’s a lot of ledges at different levels and you need to switch from crawling to standing to deal with a foe who’s suddenly popped up. And then there’s the combat, which employs the good old “enemies don’t bounce back or pause when you hit them yet they pain you on contact” style that has maddened many an 8-bit gamer. Certainly not an outstanding title by any stretch of the imagination, but it does more things right than most Spider-Man games do.
Spider-Man & Venom : Maximum Carnage
For : Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Published by : LJN
Maximum Carnage is at it’s core a standard beat-em-up of the variety that was popular in the early 90’s, but it’s a very robust one with a lot of extras as compared to it’s peers of the time. The game tells the story of what I guess was the Carnage story arc in the Spider-Man comic series … I’m gonna be trustworthy to the game’s writers and presume that they expected players coming in to be familiar with the happenings of the comic’s plot, because the levels skip around quite a bit and often don’t explain fully how characters got to where they were or what they are doing there. Like, when you first get the option to play as Venom, he’s in San Francisco clobbering his design through punks … OK, but then all of the sudden he’s inexplicably a boss battle with the game’s main villains in New York. Despite sometimes making little sense, the game’s fable is presented in comic/cinematic cutscene style and those are actually done handsome well.
The game’s music was composed by the band Green Jelly (who are an interesting story unto themselves – check their Wikipedia entry for more information), a sort of joke-band-grown-out-of-control when one of their songs went from regular airplay on a Seattle radio position to being a #1 video on MTV for a few months in 1993. They rode the wave of that one-hit wonder to a deal doing the music for this game. While some of it is lost in translation to 16-bit format (the SNES’s sound chip was strong but still not enough to handle electric guitars), the music is actually pretty well done and enhances the grim mood of the comic cut-scenes.
The game’s engine makes use of the 6-button SNES pad to give you a wide array of moves. Aside from the standard punch combos, jump kicks and jump+punch special move that drains a bit of life, the protagonists can also swing on their webbing and deliver a kick, as well as climb up into the background and sit on the wall making faces at the hapless foes below. You can also dash by tapping forward twice to deliver a shoulder check, design a web shield to block attacks, throw webbing out like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat to hook foes in, and when two foes are positioned honest suitable on either side of you you can clunk them together with webbing for an instant kill. The game also keeps track of your accuracy, and after rattling off a string of consecutive hits you’re granted a Power Go to exhaust.
There’s a few sizeable drawbacks to the game that keep it from greatness, however. The character sprites are kind of lackluster and MS Paint-y lookin’. Though you’d contemplate it would be a given, there is no two player mode, as it has a very rigid story progression and forces you to play as one specific character at certain points. It is also punishingly difficult. There are a lot of secret rooms and 1-ups scattered about, but you’ll be forced to salvage every one of them to survive as the game kicks your ass over and over. You get only three lives and one continue to open out with, and have to find more along the way. While some secret rooms are easy to stumble into, like the one in the Climb level at the game’s outset, others are powerful more obtuse forcing you to do some random move in some very particular spot. Without Game Genie cheating or something along those lines, most players will have no hope of seeing the end of this game.
Spider-Man & Venom : Separation Anxiety
For : Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Published by : Acclaim
Maximum Carnage was pretty well received by the gaming public, so a year later Software Creations teamed up with Acclaim to revive the old engine and bring it out for another spin down Quick Sales Lane. They added two features that were much wanted in the first one – a two player mode and a password system that lets you continue after every level – but the game cannot really be considered an upgrade. It’s even more ridiculously difficult than the first one was – the punks are faster, more numerous, and do more damage. Spidey and Venom are also more prone to picking people up when they attack, but the pickup animations are very slow, so you get trashed by the other punks every time you do it. The punks themselves are all nearly straight sprite recycles from the first game, though a number of new enemies and bosses have been added.
The comic book style has been abandoned in this one, you get instead a meager text blurb between levels outlining the events of the story. Green Jelly was not brought back for another synth-rock soundtrack, instead it seems the designers decided to try to ape the techno style of Yuzo Koshiro’s popular Streets of Rage soundtracks (with limited effectiveness; most of this music sounds like it would be more appropriate for a bunch of bald men to be waving their arms over their heads and freak-dancing to in the Castro district of San Francisco rather than in a beat-em-up video game). It’s difficult and often rather tedious, but it is notable in that it’s one of the rare examples of being able to play as Spider-Man and Venom simultaneously and cooperatively.
The Amazing Spider-Man : Lethal Foes
For : Well-kept Nintendo Entertainment System
Published by : Epoch
Now here’s a real oddity; a Spider-Man game released only in Japan. And it’s a shame, because it’s easily the best of the 16-bit Spider-Man games. The gameplay is blooming simplistic, and Spidey takes a bit of getting old to in this one, but once you do it’s a gorgeous decent action platformer with really nice graphics and J. Jonah Jameson inexplicably flipping you off in between levels. Unfortunately, of course, it’s only available in Japanese – though this won’t halt you from playing through the game as it’s all straight ahead action and the main menus are in English, you won’t get to see heroes and villains spouting off their melodramatic comic book lines at each other. There’s a guy working on a translation patch (http://www.rpgclassics.com/subsites/twit/spidey/spidey.html), but it seems like there’s quite a bit of work left to be done yet.
Spider-Man
For : Arcade
Published by : Data East
Yet another beat-em-up (most Spider-Man games are), this one was rushed out amid the flood of 4-player arcade games looking to horn in on the success of 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Spider-Man was featured as the main character, but players could also choose from a roster of Marvel’s more obscure heroes – Dim Cat, Namor the Submariner (a buff Mr. Spock wearing bikini briefs and nothing else!) or Hawkeye. The game’s high points are the fact that you can select your player regardless of physical position at the machine, and the unintentional humor of the synthesized scat music on the character select cover and Venom’s warbly cranky venerable man snarl. Aside from those things, it’s a rather awful beat-em-up, at least compared to the better entries of the genre. There’s five levels, which are fairly colossal, but are padded out by these segments where the view “zooms out” and you control tiny characters as they navigate through large environs in a sort of quasi run-and-gun mode. The game tries to nonsensically cram every major Spider-Man villain in – you’ll begin a level being taunted by Green Goblin, only to hasten into Lizard for no apparent reason, then Electro, then Kingpin, finally Green Goblin shows up but he’s a mid boss, and the steady boss is Venom, or some such arrangement. A lot of the best bosses are wasted as throwaways in the tiny-sprites mode, like Doctor Octopus, whereas you get two epic showdowns with goofnuts like Scorpion. The graphics just have an off look to them, and it almost seems like this game was speedily rushed out the door (I don’t know why that thought surprises me). The characters are all pretty much the same, just have the usual stiff punch combo and jump kicks, though each has a different jump+punch special attack of which some are way better than others. Spider-Man shoots out like Ultimate Web that annihalates everything in front of him, whereas at the opposite end Hawkeye clubs a guy with his bow and then shoots … one arrow (which usually just goes over the head of the guy he honest clubbed for little damage). Unlike most beat-em-ups you have a numeric life meter at the bottom of the screen that slowly counts down in Gauntlet style, but the general ease of the enemies (a couple cheap-hitting bosses aside) combined with the generous portions of health and a lot of refreshers laying around makes this game a little less frantic than the usual quarter-sucker. In a kind of uncommon proceed for a 1991 game, it takes two quarters to start, but you can continue with only one.
Spider-Man
For : Nintendo 64, Playstation
Published by : Acclaim
This one is easily the most ambitious Spider-Man game released prior to the new generation, and despite it’s flaws probably the overall best. At it’s core is a fairly standard 3D platformer, but it has unique play mechanics and a proper variety of levels. The game opens with a sort of tutorial status of levels, wherein Spidey swings from building to building to reach a bank heist in progress and busts in on the robbers. You’ve got pretty much all the spider powers you can imagine here, and it’s all pretty convenient to control. You can’t come into this one expecting Spider Mario though; instead of large immersive worlds, you get small focused levels that each have a particular challenge. For example, in the first and third levels, there’s only unbiased enough buildings to salvage you from point A to point B and the rest of Unusual York consists of static bitmap and foggy void. Still, given the technology, it was impressive in it’s time. There’s some 36 levels in all and they continually mix things up – when you’re not swinging between buildings you duke it out with supervillains in a variety of settings, navigate sewer mazes, try to stay on top of a speeding subway, even solve a few basic switch-flipping puzzles. Some of the levels work well, and some really don’t, but because they’re all relatively short and very different the game experience on the whole is radiant good (and there’s a level select cheat code you can enter to skip the janky levels if desired).
Neversoft was clearly trying very hard to make a game that would both please hardcore fans of the franchise and stand up on it’s own as a good 3D action-platformer, and on the whole they did a pretty decent job. The only major troubles with the game is that the camera system obviously wasn’t perfectly worked out and often has a hard time keeping up with Spidey, particularly when you inaugurate crawling on walls and ceilings. Often it will switch views abruptly causing you to change direction unintentionally, and your direction change prompts yet *another* camera change, and so on until you are hopelessly lost, and the whole time you are looking at a wall between you and Spider-Man so you can’t even tell where you are anyway. This is restricted to only a few areas of the game, mostly just the parts where you crawl through air ducts and a few outside levels where you can skitter along walls and girders in open areas.
The backgrounds can be a bit bland, but the characters are rendered well enough. The music is punchy and has high energy for the most part, though in some areas it does fetch generic and repetitive. Aside from the fairly impressive amount of levels to play, there’s a number of unlockables. You can find the covers of famous comics, alternate suits for Spidey to wear in the game, character profiles and training modes.
It seems the designers wanted to create the definitive and all-encompassing Spider-Man game, and though technology held them encourage a bit and some of the level execute could have used some more work, I would say that it is indeed the best and most thorough of all Spider-Man games at present (though that’s certainly not a hard title to take given the quality of the competition).
The Amazing Spider-Man v.s. The Kingpin
For : Sega Genesis, Sega CD
Published by : Sega
This is most definetly not the best Spider-Man game, but it is one of the most engrossing. While the original Sega Genesis release sold fairly widely (probably due in large part to being one of the only titles available after launch), the later upgraded Sega CD version is an rude obscurity. The two versions have the same basic underlying gameplay and levels, but are quite different in a number of ways. The original Genesis version was a linear game that guided you from area to spot automatically, and the only means of restoring web fluid was to snap pictures of villains (ideally of super villains) and then sell them in between levels to the Daily Bugle. The Sega CD version cut the photo-taking out entirely, and made the game non-linear. You are now presented with a scheme of Modern York City at the outset, in which there are numerous locations to visit, though you still have the same overall goal of beating down the various bosses on your way to the final confrontation.
The plot in both cases is ridiculous even by comic book standards : The Kingpin comes on TV and makes outlandish claims about Spider-Man planted a bomb in the city which will go off in 24 hours, and unless he is captured and the dwelling is Gitmoed out of him everyone is gonna die horribly. Apparently just being a rich business guy and buying time on the air is authority enough for the police to issue an A.P.B. for Spider-Man’s arrest (at least in the Sega CD version, some faked video footage is shown of Spidey mugging an aged lady and webbing her cat as well as hauling a bomb around randomly on his relieve). The general public of Novel York seems to have a bit more sense than the police, as instead of panicking and clogging the bridges out of town they just go about their business as usual. Unfortunately for them, the Kingpin actually did plant a bomb (for God knows what reason) that actually will go off in 24 hours. Fortunately for you, that’s 24 hours of real time, so you have quite a stretch in which to complete the game – longer than many major RPGs!
While the Genesis version objective develops the plot with some stiff cinema of the Kingpin blabbing on TV, and the occasional shot of Spidey pacing around while talking to himself, the Sega CD version has a number of interesting cutscenes. These however look like … well, you ever see that much-joked-on Zelda game “The Wand of Gamelon” for the Phillips CD-I? If you haven’t, go Youtube up a video – it looks a lot like that. Short form, it’s not too impressive. It looks like something a 12 year old made in Flash.
The Sega CD version also has the dubious “enhancement” of a soundtrack by 80’s hair metal band Mr. Big. If you have forgotten Mr. Big, go into any grocery store and wait around until the song “To Be With You” comes up (“So come on baby! Come on over! Let me be the one to show ya!”). That’s them. Yeah, seriously, they did the soundtrack. They have one stereotypical 80’s movie style classic that blares on the method screen, “Swingtime”, which is not to be missed, but the rest of the soundtrack is objective instrumental butt-rock in a fairly typical style.
Anyway, comedy value aside, the Sega CD version’s non-linearity is the prime point of interest … but it actually turns out to be more like an NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles non-linearity than a Metroid or Castlevania non-linearity. There’s probably about three dozen areas in the game you can proceed to, but there’s only like a handful that actually acquire a boss battle or something that progresses the game’s story. The other levels are actually an interesting mix – there’s a bunch of moving subway levels around, a number of underground caves and sewers, a battle across rooftops in East Harlem and a brawl out in front of the New York Public Library among others – but there isn’t a lot to do in them except to replenish health and web fluid. The only real reason for exploration, other than the sake of exploration itself, is to find hidden comic books scattered all over the game which are then accessible from a gallery off the main menu. This of course actually is enough to hold you poking around for a bit however, just seeing what the game has to offer and finding comics for your collection … there’s also this bizarre pinball game you can stop in on for bonus points.
The Sega CD version did make some improvements over the play control of the Genesis version. Spidey automatically grabs walls and platforms that he’s near now, instead of having to tap the jump button again and hope for the best. He also does a much better job of climbing around angles in platforms, though it can quiet be finicky it’s not as impossible as it was in the Genesis game. The Genesis difficulty has been severely toned down – you have more health, can take more hits and there’s tons more healing items scattered about the level. The enemies are a bit better balanced and placed in this one too, unlike say the Rapid Fire Hobos in the first level of the Genesis version who were always on a ledge above you firing their endless clips wildly so that you couldn’ t jump up and hit them without getting tagged. The boss levels have been redesigned, and bosses can now appear randomly in one of four levels in their “territory” on the map. And some really stupid enemies have been removed, like that forklift driver mini boss in the first level of the Genesis game that there was like almost no way to hit without getting hurt yourself. Bosses are still tough fights, often a little too tough, but the difficulty is nothing like it was in the Genesis version.
The Sega CD version also has a couple new levels, though one barely qualifies as a “level” (it’s just one of the usual subway levels but you fight the Vulture at the end of it). There’s also Mysterio’s Funhouse, and at the game’s conclusion Typhoid Mary and Bullseye have been tossed in as sub-bosses before you take on the Kingpin.
The Genesis (and it’s related Master System/Game Gear ports) version is pretty considerable unredeemable, a precise clunker, but the Sega CD version may well be worth a look as a point of curiosity for those who can accumulate a means to lay hands on it.
