I was playing this, and I webbed up an oil tanker that was going explode (this makes it not explode) and Peter goes “geez, if i’d webbed that up a second later…😬” but of course, it would have been fine, they never explode. Nothing bad can happen in this game.
Got me thinking how much more I would enjoy that other game: a version of a spiderman game where you actually have to face consequences for the occasional failure/miscalculation/oversight/fuckup/hard choice. Spiderman movies (and probably comics, whatever, I’m not a nerd) are all concerned at some point with how he is viewed by the community; which is often negatively. I want to have to manage that stuff.
Spiderman 2 has you occasionally end a little “crime reported” sidemission by having to carry someone off to an ambulance; it’s the jankiest, least-fleshed-out part of the game, but what if it was a consequence for failure instead of just a random thing? You show up, fight a bunch of guys who want to blow something up, you fuck up, it blows up, and the mission becomes rescuing people from a burning building and salvaging the situation as best you can. You can fail that too, and people are upset with you. You get blamed, and that affects how people talk to you on the street. Your vigilantism becomes a more thankless task, and now when someone actually does cut you a break, it matters.
I’m always swinging past a crime I don’t feel like addressing, and I think there should be consequences for that. Why is Spiderman all about being incredibly stressed out, but the Spiderman game is a pure power fantasy? If you’re okay with consequences, there’s automatic depth: I can’t be in two places at once, and two crimes are happening. Make me choose, just by which one I go to. Make it matter how fast I get there. The more I level up and gain skills, or just get better at the game, the more likely I can actually handle both – maybe not perfectly, but I helped!
Which is a staple of those films: juggling too many responsibilities, not always succeeding. In all those films (not just, but especially, the Raimi ones) spidey “just can’t win”, not just in reconciling multiple identities and schedules but also at every turn in his daily spidermanning; there’s always an impossible choice to make. Not here! Everything is neat and manageable, there is no monster you can’t put back in its box same-day, and nobody really minds what happened in the meantime. And there’s clearly a deliberate choice, and it’s a huge bummer, not to deal at all with the “secret identity” issue in these games. Everyone Peter and Miles know pretty much know they’re spiderman, and you never have to be out of costume except in really specific handholdy scripted walkntalks.
The entire vibe of the city is off, too: the game is obsessed with New York being amazing, bodega bodega bodega, but the whole thing feels like a cheap hollywood facade. Everyone loves spiderman. Everyone loves New York. Nobody is doing it tough. Nobody’s homeless, nobody’s desperate. Everything is clean, even the trash is clean. Everyone loves the city, and it comes off ingenuine, not just because of the stilted voice performances and saccarine writing but because the city feels too perfect to love. What are we fighting for? It’s an expensive dollhouse, and no matter what I do everyone will love me except J Jonah Jameson, and that’s as a joke.
I do actually like this game a lot; I guess I’ve 87%’d it, and I’ll still jump back in to swing around, but the more I think back on it the more I’m disappointed. It’s broader and shallower than ever, and I can’t imagine how they do another one without thinking quite a lot harder about it.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
AAA superhero games suffer even harder than comics and movie adaptations from the “Superman can’t actually change in any significant way or be examined deeply enough to effectively redefine any of his core identity traits that we consider to be the franchise’s bread and butter” by virtue of being power fantasies and immortal “IPs” and the weird conservatism and lack of true social-political agency that is kind of baked into the superhero genre in its most conventional expressions. But at the same time it’s ripe for, practically screaming out to be, subverted and critiqued – Watchmen and a few other works are regarded so highly partly because they are filling a gap everyone knows is there. And even lots of parodic superhero stuff does kind of the same thing, acknowledge the stuff we know would be happening. So I think there’s a huge opportunity for a game to come along and do a lot of this stuff you’re talking about. And Spiderman has been a progressive enough franchise that it’s more likely to come out of there than say, Batman or Superman. But it’d be a real tone shift and it’d pour cold water on some of the power fantasy aspects, and executives would get pretty twitchy about that. I hope a good creative team gets the leeway to do it someday. I’d play it.
I think a old spiderman game had a thing where if you ignore helping people in the world enough then people see spiderman as a enemy/bad person and you will be attacked while swinging around sometimes. Everybody seemed to despise the mechanic from what I remember.
I think with the level of crunch and the like that programing in multiple ways for every mission to go doesn’t seem particuarly feaeible or something to justify using up so much dev time and budget on sadly as intresting as it could be.
“In this game, it is good to kill a Spider Man from time to time, to encourage the others.” – Voltaire or some other supervillain IDK.
There has been at least one time where a Spiderman game had some consequences: https://youtu.be/ngORPZj4wwY?si=1FEaHBMC8Y-3RG0w
The people yearn for Infamous.
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