I'm pretty sure playing this at a friend's house when it was new was my first exposure to Spider-Man as a character. It's clunky and sometimes frustrating and you can beat it in 3 hours and maybe it's just the nostalgia talking but I still really like this game even now! A nice little adventure with a good amount of variety and enough unlockables to keep me laser-focused on it for years as a kid.

The presentation is extremely strong for its era. The voice acting holds up much better than most PS1 games and getting to hear Stan Lee's excited narration is such a treat. The soundtrack rules and the graphics are charming; the way the devs worked the low draw distance into the story as "evil fog" always makes me smile.

The most amazing thing about this game is that it still serves as the basic blueprint for today's Spider-Man titles in terms of abilities and controls; despite how janky its mechanics can feel in 2021, the foundation was solid enough that, outside of going open-world, no one's ever really felt a need to reinvent the wheel. Quite impressive for a licensed game from two decades ago!