Spider-Man

Spider-Man the video game is one of my favorite games when I was a child. Playing it non stop. I revised the game this year and it was as enjoyable as it was years ago. The only thing I have a little problem with while revisiting the game is that the game play feels short. It's a game for a fan of the Raimi trilogy or a Spider-Man fan in general.

It's an rollercoaster ride for my nervous system. Because this game is extremely hard to play. Controls are horrible on Xbox, you basically need to push the buttons with all of your force to turn the camera left and right. But my worst enemy was that you can't tilt the camera up or down. Only left and right works. As soon as I realized this, I knew I was in for some serious brain damage...

Honestly I probably haven't recovered fully but It was for sure an experience. The graphics of the game hold up to this day, but the reason for that is that this retro style nowadays seems stylistic. It doesn't feels like the developers attempted to make the best possible photo realistic game there could be, because for sure there were more realistic games to that time. The short animated sequence cut-scenes were amazingly good and fun to watch, great animation, always felt rewarding to watch them after completing the mission. I could watch a whole season of animated clips like that.

But what I love most about this game Is how much It adds to the Film even If it's not being canon. This game comes from a time where the next two movies weren't even in development, I feel like some of this was actually meant to interfere within the second film. Scorpion especially. Greatest villain in the whole game for me.

The mechanics of the whole control-system and the whole construction of the bot-system make it almost impossible to get through the missions in the first playthrough. And surprisingly, that Is a good thing. I was searching for an challenge game, and by today's whole Fair-for-Everyone-Gaming-Industry, I found this gem. Spider-Man reminded me of times where you hung on missions for days before you finally were able to complete them. Games were made to be challenging, nowadays they more likely tend to tell a story, which I also prefer, but the challenge is almost non-existing. A boss-fight like the Kraven or the Scorpion fight in a new Spider-Man game nowadays, Is impossible. And I played on the easiest difficulty...

Another reason why I love this game, the whole story Is hilarious and a whole bunch of non-sense. It is so laughable that It is fun again. That final scene where Osborn dies and Peter just decides to make out with MJ a few seconds after It happened... Absolute Cinema.

There's no open world city to explore, which is hard to get over for those who're more used to the follow up. It's got decent gameplay, good combat, graphics have aged surprisingly well, and overall is pretty decent. It's just hard to go back and play this when you've been spoiled by some of the later Spider-Man games, especially the PS4 iteration.

I have to say I enjoyed the game very much, and would have given it an 8 were it not for two very annoying flaws. The first is that the positions taken by the "camera" were often appalling. Sure you can manually move the view point around, but in the heat of the moment when surrounded by baddies, you simply don't have the time. I found some parts of the game extremely frustrating because of this. The second is that the loading times are excessive, and in my view occasionally unnecessary. Ok, you expect to have to wait for a new level to load, but when you die you have to wait for the current level to re-load.

I think both these flaws are a result of sloppy programming, or maybe the game just needed to spend more time in development instead of rushing a release to coincide with the film. It's a shame, because I very much enjoyed the variety in the gameplay, and the degree of control that, with practise, you can exercise over Spidey. Overall, then, I give it a 6.

Movie based games normally have a long history of being just avenged or awful.

Spider-Man 2002 has the thin line of being that. The game is based off the 2002 Spider-Man motion picture.

However the game just seems broken mostly. While the game does follow the story line of the film it is however like an different take of the film.

The story follows Peter Parker Voiced by Tobey Maguire who reprise his role from the film which is a interesting take plus Willem Dafoe also reprise his role as Norman Osborn/Green Goblin. Bruce Campbell provide the voice of the Tour Guide and his performance alone is what sold the game.

The game while following the story line of the movie also features villains like Shocker, Scorpion and Vulture to make the game feel original in terms of villains.

But the game doesn't have the feel of fun which is what the most important of any video game is for it be fun and playable.

The Graphics in the game do look great and you can get to see the whole city of New York as you swing into action. The Voice acting is very good and the music is very strong in the game.

The controls however are a mix bag I wish the game was like Spider- Man 2000 which is a very good video game.

So the results is the game is great to look at and listen to but not much for playing, only play it if you are a huge fan of Spider-Man but the game is just broken to me.

I give Spider-Man 2002 an 6 out of 10