Spidey! On PS3!
Your friendly neighborhood wall crawler is going next-gen, and we've got the first peek.
Published: February 22, 2007
Most licensed games are crap, it's just one of those video games truisms that never seems to change. Oddly enough, though, games based on comics seem to do better than most Hollywood properties -- at least in terms of capturing the feel of the source material. The action RPG feel of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and the free-roaming sandbox gameplay present in games like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction matched the comics' feel perfectly. Perhaps none of those games have captured both the feeling of the film and printed page as well as developer Treyarch's Spider-Man games.
The first game was, if nothing else, fairly pretty, and captured the look of the film characters well, but if you fell as Peter Parker in his jammies, you just died. It wasn't until the sequel that the world finally opened up and became something you could freely explore from the top of the Empire State Building to the streets of Manhattan that it all clicked. The comic-infused Ultimate Spider-Man nailed the look and feel of the comics, but it dumbed down the controls that gave Spider-Man 2 its "wheeeeeeee!" factor, and most saw it as a step back.
But not Treyarch.
No, they see it as a different take on the universe, but one that is still viable, and they pulled from all of their Spidey games -- Ultimate included -- when they dug into development on Spider-Man 3. Taking the best parts of just swinging around Manhattan (arguably the best part of the best game, Spider-Man 2) and combining it with the core themes of the movie opening on the same day as the game's release while giving the player the ability to pick and choose how they let the storyline unfold was paramount, and from what we've seen, it could indeed be the best digital version of the wall crawler we've seen.
The crux of the game experience is two-fold. Though Treyarch consciously chose to avoid using footage from the movie in the game (in fact, the movie is only a chunk of the total game experience), they studied the footage that director Sam Raimi had given them and tried to match up the visual style of the game's cinematics with what you'll see on the big screen. This means all of the cutscenes in the game are rendered in real-time with the game's engine, and also presents one of the bigger new additions to the familiar gameplay in the form of "cineractives" -- sequences that have you pressing buttons during cutscenes in a throwback to Die Hard Arcade or Shenmue or, most recently, Resident Evil 4 and God of War.
Thanks to some fantastic animation and well-directed scenes, the cineractives allow Ol' Webhead to pull off moves that would be impossible in-game but are often scene in the comics or bigger parts of the movies. Stuff like vaulting over, under and through a handful of cars being chucked up into the air while using spider-sense to slow time looks as awesome as it sounds, and it lets Treyarch flex their animation muscle a little.
Being a next-gen game, though, it should look cleaner, and smoother and be more detailed, and we're happy to report that Spider-Man 3 is, of course, bigger and deeper than any previous game. The leap to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have done the franchise a world of good -- at least in terms of making that digitally replicated version of New York more rife with little explorable nooks and crannies. Once again, you're not forced to follow a single path, and can take the game at your own pace. In fact, the freeform aspect of the gameplay has been bolstered even more, allowing players to pick and choose how they progress through story-based missions both from the film and stuff created in the game.
Though the story itself is being thickened up with some villains from the comics that have been given a face lift, the core theme from the film is still the Black Suit, the symbiote that first attaches to parker, augmenting his abilities but bringing out his darker side, and then eventually goes on to bond with Eddie Brock to become Venom, one of Parker's greatest foes. The game attacks this duality by giving you the ability to play as both versions of Spidey, as the more "plain" red-suited version and then later as the darker, enhanced variant.
No matter what the costume, the combat in the game has been given an overhaul. The combo trees have more branches (including the ability to use more web-based attacks), and depending on the version of Spidey you're playing as, you'll have more agile or aggressive movesets to choose from, but it also makes him a darker, more morally questionable character, and as a result, you'll see things like tackles or much harder hits coming out of the character.
In the end, the game is still about choice. You can choose to head down one of the dozen or so story threads or just zip around the city. A new overhead map tells you how much crime there is in a part of the city and how well you're liked by New Yorkers and you can now duck into some buildings, but at no point are you forced to clean up the city or head into a mission. With prettier visuals, deeper controls and a return to the rush of just exploring the city, choice is indeed a very good thing.
The first game was, if nothing else, fairly pretty, and captured the look of the film characters well, but if you fell as Peter Parker in his jammies, you just died. It wasn't until the sequel that the world finally opened up and became something you could freely explore from the top of the Empire State Building to the streets of Manhattan that it all clicked. The comic-infused Ultimate Spider-Man nailed the look and feel of the comics, but it dumbed down the controls that gave Spider-Man 2 its "wheeeeeeee!" factor, and most saw it as a step back.
But not Treyarch.
No, they see it as a different take on the universe, but one that is still viable, and they pulled from all of their Spidey games -- Ultimate included -- when they dug into development on Spider-Man 3. Taking the best parts of just swinging around Manhattan (arguably the best part of the best game, Spider-Man 2) and combining it with the core themes of the movie opening on the same day as the game's release while giving the player the ability to pick and choose how they let the storyline unfold was paramount, and from what we've seen, it could indeed be the best digital version of the wall crawler we've seen.
The crux of the game experience is two-fold. Though Treyarch consciously chose to avoid using footage from the movie in the game (in fact, the movie is only a chunk of the total game experience), they studied the footage that director Sam Raimi had given them and tried to match up the visual style of the game's cinematics with what you'll see on the big screen. This means all of the cutscenes in the game are rendered in real-time with the game's engine, and also presents one of the bigger new additions to the familiar gameplay in the form of "cineractives" -- sequences that have you pressing buttons during cutscenes in a throwback to Die Hard Arcade or Shenmue or, most recently, Resident Evil 4 and God of War.
Thanks to some fantastic animation and well-directed scenes, the cineractives allow Ol' Webhead to pull off moves that would be impossible in-game but are often scene in the comics or bigger parts of the movies. Stuff like vaulting over, under and through a handful of cars being chucked up into the air while using spider-sense to slow time looks as awesome as it sounds, and it lets Treyarch flex their animation muscle a little.
Being a next-gen game, though, it should look cleaner, and smoother and be more detailed, and we're happy to report that Spider-Man 3 is, of course, bigger and deeper than any previous game. The leap to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have done the franchise a world of good -- at least in terms of making that digitally replicated version of New York more rife with little explorable nooks and crannies. Once again, you're not forced to follow a single path, and can take the game at your own pace. In fact, the freeform aspect of the gameplay has been bolstered even more, allowing players to pick and choose how they progress through story-based missions both from the film and stuff created in the game.
Though the story itself is being thickened up with some villains from the comics that have been given a face lift, the core theme from the film is still the Black Suit, the symbiote that first attaches to parker, augmenting his abilities but bringing out his darker side, and then eventually goes on to bond with Eddie Brock to become Venom, one of Parker's greatest foes. The game attacks this duality by giving you the ability to play as both versions of Spidey, as the more "plain" red-suited version and then later as the darker, enhanced variant.
No matter what the costume, the combat in the game has been given an overhaul. The combo trees have more branches (including the ability to use more web-based attacks), and depending on the version of Spidey you're playing as, you'll have more agile or aggressive movesets to choose from, but it also makes him a darker, more morally questionable character, and as a result, you'll see things like tackles or much harder hits coming out of the character.
In the end, the game is still about choice. You can choose to head down one of the dozen or so story threads or just zip around the city. A new overhead map tells you how much crime there is in a part of the city and how well you're liked by New Yorkers and you can now duck into some buildings, but at no point are you forced to clean up the city or head into a mission. With prettier visuals, deeper controls and a return to the rush of just exploring the city, choice is indeed a very good thing.
