Let's talk about Spider-Man games! (or Superhero Games in General)

i saved up for arcade’s revenge as a kid, as the idea of a game with both spider-man and the x-men sounded incredible to me.
it’s shit

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so i’m up to what i imagine is the last major section of this game, and it’s definitely both the best and the worst part. i totally felt a sense of glee when this game’s version of the sinister six assemble and beat the shit out of spider-man, especially because they are pretty straightforward comic book versions of those characters and not at all like their MCU counterparts. the boss fight with electro and vulture was also great, i really wish there was more stuff in this game like that. in combat they seem to really want you to be able to stay airborne, but then introduce all these enemies that trash you for doing that to add to the challenge. it makes sense from a challenge standpoint but like, it’s spider-man. he should be able to take out all these people without his feet hitting the ground. i think bouncing off of walls should be easier/more useful, and also there should be more combat moves where you leap directly from one enemy to the next. anyway i liked that fight because it forced you to remain airborne for pretty much the entire battle.

on the other hand, the random encounters on the street are just totally unbearable at this point in the game. it took me a while to figure out the best way to proceed is not to stop to fight every random group of enemies you encounter, but to just zip through the unmarked groups of enemies on your way to an actual destination. but still the snipers and rocket launchers are super annoying to deal with, if you’re not moving quickly enough they can kill you before you even have a chance to figure out where they are… i get what they’re going for but it’s a bit much imo

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yeah the sinister six are great and they still almost blow it because the late game is so muddled

I liked this extremely mainstream, conservative, expensive game but they were on a knife edge

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Make sure you’re crafting the suit mods. The right combination trivializes the combat even at the highest difficulties. I used the kinetic power cells, threat sensor and web striker mods. The power cells increase the rate you generate focus and web striker generates focus with each web attack. Threat sensor slows time after a perfect dodge.

I play very aggressively and use my focus to do the finisher moves which replace my gadgets. I like the spider drones a lot. For me the combat didn’t actually get fun until after I’d invested time unlocking skills and crafting suit mods and gadgets. It’s dumb but you have to unlock the ability to disarm enemies with your web via the triangle button. I’ve unlocked and fully upgraded everything though so I can disarm any enemy, either their weapon or shield.

Combine that with the basic moves like the uppercut that sends enemies airborne and yanking them around with triangle and all the gadgets and I just melt through groups of dudes.

I played through the dlc this weekend and started a new game+ on ultimate difficulty. It’s a blast but the real challenge would be trying ultimate difficulty without a fully powered up character. I think it would just be very tedious for like the first half of the game or so. My main criticism of the game’s combat is that they make you unlock a bunch of really basic stuff that should just be there from the start because fighting groups of bad guys isn’t that entertaining until you actually have all those different options at your disposal.

It’s like the Arkham games but all the gadgets are even more superfluous and unnecessary but the game is even more boring if you aren’t using all of them all the time.

It’s the curse of aiming for mass market appeal. The game has to be accessible to unskilled players so they can’t force you to learn how to play it in a more interesting way or make that the default way to play. It would be better mechanically if there were more of a kind of rock-paper-scissors aspect to it where certain enemies were more vulnerable to certain gadgets (as it is now most of the gadgets just stun enemies in different ways) and you had to really learn their patterns and whatnot.

That said this is probably the best Spider-Man game so far simply for the fact that the animation is masterclass, the graphics are like top 5 best graphics tier and I can play as both og Scarlet Spider AND Cyborg Spider-Man.

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So spider-man is 100% the most easily gamifiable major super hero, right? Even though no spider-man game is perfect, I feel like all the recent ones are better realizations of the character than any other super hero game

It’s weird that there hasn’t been a better iron man game though

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@Telengard’s studio is making the VR one right

He definitely checks off the boxes for a good video game: He’s fast, he swings around New York (iconic location), he’s colorful and cracks jokes, easily relatable on a human level, etc. If you can make a half decent swinging system and a good looking New York you’re like 75% of the way there to a decent game.

Also megaton news announcement: Sony bought Insomniac. Probably not surprising if you’ve kept up over the years. Besides Sunset Overdrive I can’t recall their last non-Sony exclusive game. And since Spider-Man was their highest selling game it’s pretty much guaranteed they’re doing a sequel which should sell some PS5s. If the ending of Spider-Man is anything to go by the next game will focus on Green Goblin and the Symbiote so I’m hype.

I’m getting close to finishing my current new game+ but I keep putting off moving the story along to grind out the benchmark challenges. They’re just grindy “Do X move a million times” challenges but I’m doing them because I really don’t want to be completely done with the game yet. I guess I could keep 100%ing and new game+ing it. Really I’ll probably just keep it installed until the sequel is out.

I inhaled Spiderman the past week, finished it tonight. It was a real joy of a toy, just so easy to have low stakes fun with it. Never played SM2 but the web slinging here tickled my spidey sense hugely. just felt good to move around the city and my favorite missions were things like drone chases and pigeon catching. I also really liked snapping landmark pictures and wish there had been a deeper angle to that.

there’s a little bit too much stuff though. I never crafted a single new suit aside from the comic book one because it looks so pretty and probably the whole game should have just been in that style. none of them actually make a difference? never used the special suit abilities (which activate with R3+L3) even once. I changed the suit mods maybe one time after choosing initial loadouts. again, no reason to change that I could see.

combat becomes pretty fun after you spend several hours fumbling around with it and unlock the necessary skills like Mech was saying. it’s still a little ropey for my tastes and there are too many buttons with different contextual uses involved. i still don’t really understand the mechanics around crawling up a wall vs running vs sticking to a wall then dash punching, perching vs slinking along a ledge vs normal walking etc. running on walls was never not an exercise in frustration. gadget-wise i only ended up really liking to use the web bombs and impact webs, and sometimes the electro webs. again, too many options with not that much use case between them.

I refuse to believe that Spidey doesn’t have binoculars in his lenses though. Correct me if I’m wrong but there’s no way to do a first person scope out? weird omission.

I am somewhat amazed that 18 years after GTA3 the go-to AAA game structure has changed not one iota from that template.

the only stuff I have left to do are bases and crimes, and those are so repetitive I don’t think I will bother. and I don’t have any desire for NG+ (why?) or Ultimate Difficulty so I think I’m done here. still $20 well spent IMO

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They should give Iron-Man to the Omega Boost team.

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http://www.polyphony.co.jp/products/

Polyphony Digital who refuse to list Omega Boost or Motortoon Gran Prix on their history?

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motor toon gp 2 is a better game than gran turismo, those people are idiots

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Idk The Punisher is basically already a video game protagonist, if someone made a half-decent game for him it’d sell like crazy.

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the arcade game was good, and people seemed to like that game from like 10 or so years ago wherre you could torture people with power tools

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The gatorness on any modern Punisher game, one way or the other, would be unbearable

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I wonder if they’re regretting using like four movies to set him up as Tony Stark’s successor

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does this mean he’s finally going to fight paul giamatti instead

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“hey where’d those glasses That One Guy gave you go?”

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the time is right for tobey to return.

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there’s a video of thomas jane drunk at a comiccon and some red state media guys come up to him to talk punisher and he’s all slouched back over his chair and says “I don’t think we’re going to get along” and throws a paper plane at them

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