What.
Spider-Man 2 beat the shit out of Spider-Man 1.
salwon
1942
I’m pretty sure they’re on Gametap, at least the first one is.
Edit: Damn you work, causing me to miss thread updates! I will add substance, I suppose: the first one is FAR superior to the others. Don’t worry too much about and past Sands of Time.
I can’t really come up with a functional translation for “undermining association.”
Work is causing your sentences to make no sense! Damn it to hell!
Is Sands of Time the one I should play? I think I did 2 minutes of research on this months ago and came to that conclusion. Or are you talking about the 80s original?
Dean
1945
Depends on PC or console. The PC version of Spider-Man 1 was shit, but SM1 on console introduced the open world webswinging. I didn’t play Spider-Man 2, but I thought the overall criticism was MOTS and they got the webswinging wrong.
No, 2 got the swinging perfect, but the combat was weak. 3 completely threw out a brilliant system, but improved slightly on combat.
I don’t recall 1 being that mechanically artful, or the city being very interesting.
salwon
1947
Yes…work is causing my poor grammar…
But yes, play Sands of Time, don’t worry about the other two (unless you thought SoT wasn’t EXTREME enough).
The old old ones are an interesting case study for how frustratingly punishing platforming used to be.
What.
Spider-Man 1 on the console had lots and lots of tedious indoor battles and awful stealth sequences punctuated by the occasional outdoor webslinging thing that could be tenuously called free roaming because there were a bunch of buildings and you could go to the tops of any of them while your webs stuck to The Divine Fingers of Christ and you were propelled along by unicorn farts and leprechaun dreams.
Spider-Man 2 was in a vaguely realistically modeled New York City where you could go anywhere and there was actually stuff to do there. Most of that stuff was pretty stupid, but it was still stuff. They still had some tedious indoor missions, but not a lot of them, and they totally got rid of the stealth bullshit. The combat system wasn’t a whole lot better, but at least it had more variety. It also had bullet time, for some reason. I never got why they felt the need to add that.
And the web-slinging in Spider-Man 2 was awesome. It was what web-slinging should be like. I never played Spider-Man 3 after seeing it get savaged, but I remember being profoundly disappointed at how simplified slinging was in Ultimate Spider-Man. In Spidey 2 you were slinging using buildings and getting up to insane speeds as you careened down the street.
Also, Spidey 2 gets my Bahimiron Jew Pride Award for having the most Jewish sounding NPCs. “Hey, Spiduhman! You’re a mensch, bubeleh!”
It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure the brilliance of 2 was that each trigger was directly tied to the web release of an arm. Simple and intuitive - you could easily control exactly where you wanted to go, and the rhythm you’d develop gave you a real feel for the motion. It was perfect.
In 3, I think one trigger shot a web and the other made you release it … or something. It felt like someone looked solely at a technical control challenge, and completely ignored the effect of the earlier system.
Dean
1950
Well then I’ve got my Spideys wrong. So his top 5 game would be Spider-man 2.
Any others?
To be fair, I tend to think of Spider-Man 2 as The Spider-Man Game, and not as a sequel.
Tankero
1952
Psychonauts, Prince of Persia, Spidey 2, Dizzy,… And I’d wager Okami. No, wait, that’s 6 since Portal has to be in there. Maybe Psychonauts doesn’t rank…?
Kareem
1953
I played all the Prince of Persia games on PC and never actually had any problems. I have no idea what bugs you guys are talking about.
As near as I can tell through the blur the games on his list are Portal, Silent Hill 2, PoP: Sands of Time, Spider-Man 2 and Fantasy World Dizzy.
… all solid games, but an iffy “top 5 of all time”, IMO.
I disagree. While the style of the sequels aren’t quite as good, the gameplay (espcially the fighting) is better.
Quitch
1957
Not sure WTF Spiderman 2 is doing there, but the others sound in line with his tastes.
Agreed. And I agree with Yahtzee that the gameplay in the second game was the best in the series. It really did address all the shortcomings of the first game perfectly, from a gameplay perspective. It’s just a shame they had to add the weird atmosphere, crappy dialog and the woman in a metal bikini that turns out not to be relevant to the game at all.
The D’haka sequences, the combat (and more importantly the ability to shorten most combat by throwing your foes over ledges), and the timed destruction sequences all vastly improved the gameplay over the original Prince of Persia.
Spider-Man 2 has a lot of problems, but it and Halo are the only two original X-Box games that I immediately went through and beat again when I got my 360. Web-slinging in that game is, by itself, enough of a reason that it will always be on my top 10 until another Spider-Man game comes out that captures the same thrills.
Hudson
1960
I know this is a cheezy thing to defend his statement on, but how many non-sports series even had 3 games during the last generation, much less 3 above average games?
It’s like GTA, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell… There were 4 Final Fantasies but 2 of them weren’t main line. I’d take the GTA lineup over Prince of Persia, but it’s definitely arguable.
