I'd like to say "this hasn't aged well" and be done with it, but that is NOT ALLOWED! If I said that, they'd put me in the stockades again, and I'm not going back there!!

I never got into the Ultimate Spider-Man comics back in the day. I don't like to dog on anyone's art, but Mark Bagley's interpretation of these characters was always a barrier, and it turns out they look pretty bad when rendered through a Nintendo Gamecube, too. However, if you asked me what my favorite pre-Marvel's Spider-Man game was at any point prior to this last weekend, I'd say Ultimate Spider-Man. Probably talk about how good the web-slinging was, or how neat the stylized comic book panel cutscenes were.

It's easy to assign a high level of quality to something you haven't touched for about twenty years.

Everything in this game feels weightless, Peter most of all as any punch to the nose will send him flying several miles away, rag-dolling at maximum velocity into the cold depths of the Hudson. Combat, traversal, even the level of mission variety just feels so flat, so bodyless that at several points I started to question if I accidentally downloaded a beta. I remember it being better than this, but apparently I just got way into a budget mid-2000s action game. I remember booting this up just to swing around for hours, not really doing anything. Real "playing with rocks" behavior.

Turns out me not actually doing anything when revisiting the game is partly a consequence of the game providing nothing to do. Side missions are divided between races and "tours" of combat that send you between points to beat up a few bad guys. Occasionally you'll be called upon to stop a crime in progress or swing someone with a tummy ache to the hospital (Spider-Man is a friend to those with IBD), but there's just not much going on in New York. Unfortunately, the game forces you to complete a pre-requisite amount of these missions before continuing with the story, and despite never being a tall task, it is incredibly mind numbing.

The main story missions are lacking in variety, too. Almost all of them follow the same pattern of chasing a villain from Spider-Man's rogues gallery and then doing battle with them. The chase sequences are lengthy and lacking in any sense of flow, and battles largely boil down to dodging attacks while waiting for the enemy to become vulnerable, then doing a hit-and-run for a small amount of damage. My favorite. There's like, five things to do in this game and they're all unengaging.

I don't even care for the story, which treads a bit too close to "it's all fate" for my liking. Peter and Eddie Brock's dads were both working on the Venom symbiote prior to their deaths, and apparently some of Richard Parker's DNA made it into the suit (he came a little), which creates a unique bond between it and Peter. I think part of what makes Spider-Man so appealing is that anybody could be him, Peter was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Ultimate's story takes away from that and is worse for it.

Peter is also written to be an insufferable jerkass with no redeeming qualities, something Sean Marquette does an admirable job at capturing with his line delivery. Don't get me wrong, while half of Sean's acting credits in games are cited as "reused grunts," I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor who was turning in the performance expected of him. I pin the blame on bad writing and poor direction.

anyway, i'm giving this game an extra star because it never at any point made me play as Mary Jane