Ultimate Spider-Man – Part 1-2
Venom is alive! He’s eating children (and adults) to sustain his parasitic existence. What does this portend for Ultimate Spider-man!?
Streamed on my Twitch.
You can find Andre on his Twitch channel.
The thing that stands out immediately to me, all these years later, is how fun it is to embody both Spider-man and Venom.
There are certainly problems, mostly with the game’s camera. And yet, there’s just enough skill to the web swinging that anyone can pick it up, but there’s an intrinsic reward in mastering the fundamental mechanics. This style of physics-based web swinging, which started in the 2004 Spider-man 2 movie tie-in game, was further refined into what we have here. Insomniac would go on to damn-near perfect it in their games, but they were handed a solid foundation to work off of. Even now, just exploring the map as Spider-man feels great. I could just swing around for hours listening to a podcast or Let’s Play in the background.
Similarly, Venom sells the fantasy of being this big, hulking monster that preys upon humans in order to survive. Where Spidey emphasizes agility, Venom is about raw power. Big movements with crunch and impact, to make the player wonder why anyone would dare to stand against them. Again, this is the template Insomniac would go to work off of when they made Venom playable in one section of their own Spider-man 2. There, they too did an incredible job.
I have a feeling once I’m done here, I’ll keep the game installed on my emulation so I can fiddle with it when I’m in the mood to just swing around.
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