Ultimate Spider-Man
Hands-on with Treyarch's Ultimate take on Your Friendly Neighborhood Wall-Crawler.
Published: September 5, 2005
Making a Spider-Man game after Neversoft finally demonstrated that it could be done (and extremely well) in 3D is a tall order. Luckily, Santa Monica-based Treyarch has been involved almost from the start, first porting Neversoft's project, then finally embarking on their own version of New York based on the first Spider-Man movie.
It was a perfect vehicle for their work, and being that the movie was, in a word, awesome for a comic book translation, it helped sell what was an otherwise bland game, and paved the way for a sequel opportunity.
To say that Treyarch made the best of that opportunity is the understatement of the century. Spider-Man 2 captured the exhilaration felt as the CG Peter Parker zipped through the streets of Manhattan high above the traffic. It took a while to get used to the physics-based controls (Spidey's webs actually stuck to stuff, and you swung on that axis), but this was exactly like what Parker had to deal with.
Zipping around the city was a pure blast, and made for some fantastic sandbox moments. Unfortunately, once you stopped swinging and got down to the actual missions, the game more or less fell apart. Repetition, a linebacker Peter Parker model, look-alike pedestrians and hundreds of little girls losing their "ballonie" sucked any lasting fun out of the game.
Now, untethered from the limits of what the movies decreed, Treyarch can once again turn to the real source material that all comic book games should be pulling from: the comic books. In this case, it's actually the Ultimate Spider-Man mythos, a basic retelling of Parker that shifts things down to a slightly younger level, gives him back the web shooters and introduces villains and love interests with far more teenage angst and relevant issues than the original comics.
Take that for what you will, but it does make for some cool dynamics. For instance, in the Ultimate timeline Peter and Eddie Brock (who eventually bonds with the symbiont to become Venom) are childhood best friends. The slight reshaping of familiar characters from the Spider-Man history is a nice way to keep things familiar for the die-hards while targeting a slightly younger audience for newcomers.
This is the angle Treyarch took with the their fourth proper Spider-Man title. It's a perfect fit, and moreover all of the things that were good about the old games -- the personality, the animation, the presentation - all of it has returned and better than ever before. We got a chance to spend a fair amount of time with the game recently and the experience completely blew us away.
The first time Activision invited us out to play Spider-Man 2, it was nothing short of a religious experience playing the game. It just felt right swinging around, and for the next couple of days, we would catch ourselves playing Parker after a couple of drinks (okay, so that was just one person - one guess as to who). The fact that Treyarch could top themselves and create an experience as equally indelible is remarkable.
While our hands-on time was relatively short with the game, some core things stuck out. We got a chance to fight Venom on a dark and rainy football field in a scene pulled right from the pages of the comics, then swung around the city and got used to the new feel of things. The look of the game comes from something Treyarch is calling "3D Comic Inking Technology" and while we hate adding to any company line, it is more than just a fancy-pants version of cel shading.
Part of this comes from two things: first, all the models aren't just surrounded by thick lines; various parts on all the characters have varying line weights and thicknesses just like the Mark Bagley art they were inspired by. Secondly, all of the characters have tons of little touches, lines and filler details that combine with the completely seamless models (no more misaligned bits of Spidey's suit around his torso or shoulders), to literally gave the game the feeling of a comic book brought to life. As the characters turn and move, the shadows fall across them and shade them as if each frame was hand-drawn.
We can't hammer this home enough: the game looks like a comic in motion. Every single frame of animation and every little movement just looks and feels right. This is in no small way a byproduct of how the game handles cutscenes, seamlessly breaking out into paneled artwork and handling all of the characters movements with a level of quality that puts Treyarch arts on par with the animators at Naughty Dog that give Jak and Daxter a Disney-quality animated production.
It was a perfect vehicle for their work, and being that the movie was, in a word, awesome for a comic book translation, it helped sell what was an otherwise bland game, and paved the way for a sequel opportunity.
To say that Treyarch made the best of that opportunity is the understatement of the century. Spider-Man 2 captured the exhilaration felt as the CG Peter Parker zipped through the streets of Manhattan high above the traffic. It took a while to get used to the physics-based controls (Spidey's webs actually stuck to stuff, and you swung on that axis), but this was exactly like what Parker had to deal with.
Zipping around the city was a pure blast, and made for some fantastic sandbox moments. Unfortunately, once you stopped swinging and got down to the actual missions, the game more or less fell apart. Repetition, a linebacker Peter Parker model, look-alike pedestrians and hundreds of little girls losing their "ballonie" sucked any lasting fun out of the game.
Now, untethered from the limits of what the movies decreed, Treyarch can once again turn to the real source material that all comic book games should be pulling from: the comic books. In this case, it's actually the Ultimate Spider-Man mythos, a basic retelling of Parker that shifts things down to a slightly younger level, gives him back the web shooters and introduces villains and love interests with far more teenage angst and relevant issues than the original comics.
Take that for what you will, but it does make for some cool dynamics. For instance, in the Ultimate timeline Peter and Eddie Brock (who eventually bonds with the symbiont to become Venom) are childhood best friends. The slight reshaping of familiar characters from the Spider-Man history is a nice way to keep things familiar for the die-hards while targeting a slightly younger audience for newcomers.
This is the angle Treyarch took with the their fourth proper Spider-Man title. It's a perfect fit, and moreover all of the things that were good about the old games -- the personality, the animation, the presentation - all of it has returned and better than ever before. We got a chance to spend a fair amount of time with the game recently and the experience completely blew us away.
The first time Activision invited us out to play Spider-Man 2, it was nothing short of a religious experience playing the game. It just felt right swinging around, and for the next couple of days, we would catch ourselves playing Parker after a couple of drinks (okay, so that was just one person - one guess as to who). The fact that Treyarch could top themselves and create an experience as equally indelible is remarkable.
While our hands-on time was relatively short with the game, some core things stuck out. We got a chance to fight Venom on a dark and rainy football field in a scene pulled right from the pages of the comics, then swung around the city and got used to the new feel of things. The look of the game comes from something Treyarch is calling "3D Comic Inking Technology" and while we hate adding to any company line, it is more than just a fancy-pants version of cel shading.
Part of this comes from two things: first, all the models aren't just surrounded by thick lines; various parts on all the characters have varying line weights and thicknesses just like the Mark Bagley art they were inspired by. Secondly, all of the characters have tons of little touches, lines and filler details that combine with the completely seamless models (no more misaligned bits of Spidey's suit around his torso or shoulders), to literally gave the game the feeling of a comic book brought to life. As the characters turn and move, the shadows fall across them and shade them as if each frame was hand-drawn.
We can't hammer this home enough: the game looks like a comic in motion. Every single frame of animation and every little movement just looks and feels right. This is in no small way a byproduct of how the game handles cutscenes, seamlessly breaking out into paneled artwork and handling all of the characters movements with a level of quality that puts Treyarch arts on par with the animators at Naughty Dog that give Jak and Daxter a Disney-quality animated production.
