Oh boy, Spidey fans – Spider-Man

Back in 1986, talking about the Ritman/Drummond/Stevens Batman, I noted the versatility of the character and the amazing span of time between #1 games starring him, from 1986 right through to 2015. Now his Marvel rival Spider-Man swings into this story, and while he has a bit of catching up to do to match Batman, there’s every possibility he might. And looking at their first big games successes, Spider-Man of 2000 and Batman of 1986 have some key things in common.

Crucially, both games are named after the character alone, and both games have only the vaguest of links to any other individual version of them. They use the character established from comics, taken as an archetype with no back story required. Spider-Man shares a lot of voice actors with ‘90s cartoon Spider-Man series, including an early video game appearance for prolific voice actor Jennifer Hale, but it isn’t a video game based on those cartoons. And just like Batman was so much better than Batman the Movie (or indeed like Rogue Squadron was so much better than The Phantom Menace), avoiding being roped to a specific existing narrative leaves Spider-Man free to do whatever a video game can.

A film based on Spider-Man taking on all the best known series villains in sequence, made up of endless action sequences tacked together with wisecracks and cameos from other comics characters would be exhausting and wouldn’t have worked (well, not yet, anyway). For a video game, though, it’s a fine way to make use of every trick possible to patch over limitations and keep things constantly entertaining. When your cutscenes mostly show up character model limitations, using narrative sparingly makes sense, and how is it going to compare to swinging between buildings anyway? Better to get you straight into the action and have Stan Lee enthusiastically narrate through any gaps.

The central action in Spider-Man is that you spot a building ahead, jump up, press R2 and swing over to it on a line of web, eventually sticking to the side of it to climb up. The freedom to traverse huge distances is great, and worth almost every sacrifice required to achieve it on the PlayStation. Much of the game is spent on rooftops with the city cloaked in (narratively excused!) green fog, rendered as a set of the tops of buildings floating in the ether. You also just have to try not to think about what the web is attaching to above Spider-Man. The only thing that stretched my tolerance a bit too far was when the length you can swing occasionally changes to suit the convenience of where the game wants you to go, sending you plummeting into a gap that you could normally cross.

The game always comes back to that swing, but it mixes things up frequently along the way, with boss battles, skyline chases as pursuer and pursued, and climbs up buildings being destroyed by police helicopter missiles. Ironically in this episodic approach it comes close to the format of many a disappointing movie game circa 1990, but it is coherent enough to avoid the same fate. Spider-Man controls as Spider-Man the same, whether he’s sneaking around vents inside a bank or luring Rhino into headbutting electric things. Even as someone who has never got into any format of Spider-Man, the sense comes through strongly of the developers having enormous fun with a big toybox they’ve always wanted, and mostly doing a good job of sharing that experience with the player.

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Top of the charts for week ending 16 September 2000:

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Top of the charts for week ending 23 September 2000:

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