Ultimate Spider-man for PS2 – Retro Review

In my last blog entry, I gave a Retro Review of Spider-man: The Game, in honor of the recently released movie. In keeping with that id, I decided to dig into the crate-o-games yet again, and pull out another PS2 classic based on your favorite web-head: Ultimate Spider-Man!

To begin with, this game has aged REALLY well. The game is 7 years old, and plays really well!

One of the first things you will notice about the game, is the graphics. They are amazing! However, to be honest, Cell shaded graphics are always going to look amazing. Cell shaded games from 7 years ago, are going to look as good as cell shaded games from today. Still, the Cell Shading style fits well with the game, since it’s based on a comic series, and not any type of movie.

So, since I was impressed with the graphics, I tackled the controls. To my surprise, the controls were actually quite responsive. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, and could definitely use a little refining, but compared to the controls in Spider-Man: The game, they were a work of art. Sure, it needed some work, but I was able to play it with minimal frustration toward the controls.

The sound too was great! Everything from the voice acting to the sound effects helped add the comic feel to the game experience.

One thing that was nice, was the fact that your webs had to catch onto buildings in order to swing. This might not seem like a big thing in todays age, but the Spider-man games were notorious for just letting your webs stick to the clouds. You could swing all over the city, even if you were higher than any of the other buildings in the vicinity.

When all is said and done, this game is a treasure! It’s aged well, and upon replaying it, was actually better than I remembered it being!

Villains Spotlight

Hollywood has created some incredible things. It has bestowed upon the masses everyting from historic recreations to epic end of the world disasters(And of course let’s not forget several zombie plagues) but in the end their villains seem to always lack something. They just aren’t effective!

I mean, correct me if I am wrong here, but I always got the impression that hollywood badguys were supposed to be the ultimate criminals? I mean why else would James Bond, MacGyver or Spider-Man have to be the one to throw down with these Maestros of crime? If so, If they are considered to be Top of the Food chain in the underworld criminal empire, then why do they always suck so badly when it comes to killing their nemesis? Why after managing to knock their enemy out, do they decide to strap their foe into some time delayed killing device? Something like a Car crushing machine, a burning rope hanging over a container of molten liquid or a time bomb strapped to a chair? Why in the name of crime do they do that? Then, to make matters worse, apparently their schedule is so busy that they have to leave the goodguy there alone, because CLEARLY their plan is so fool proof that the hero will die!

Of course in the end, the hero of the tale does manage to get free(Surprise!) and then foil mister baddies plans.

Does any of that sound like something that someone who is supposed to be considered the ultimate evil would do? Seriously? They are top shelf bad guys, yet their method for killing sucks! I mean, the common thug has a better kill ratio than the super dudes. I mean thugs will just shoot the good guy in the face. See? Problem solved, not much chance of him freeing himself, and it’s much quicker, which would give the evil dude more time to make his rounds and reach his appointments, cause as we all know, bad guys always have appointments and are very very busy!