The Technocratic Spider-Man

here cemented all the writing problems that would go on plague the sequel. I was more forgiving of them originally, given Miles Morales's standing as a halfway-game between numbered entries. I had assumed the full sequel would be back on the right track, with a more rich and interconnected web of side stories—more like the first game! revisiting the whole series now, turns out Marvel's Spider-Man 2 somehow has even less meat on its bones than this launch title reskin raytracing demo. ouch. here's hoping Marvel's Spider-Man 3 is... better?

oh god. they're gonna do the Red Goblin in the sequel, aren't they. man. never mind. it's over.

a long silent trek along a single-textured canyon. no palpable sign of your advancement but the slow-creeping growth of a massive structure in the distance. as you finally round the corner and view the structure in its totality, you marvel at about two dozen polygons—together representing an airship in the shape of a duck. you turn around. you consider the road back to the level EXIT sign. twenty minutes of have passed since you last saw it. twenty minutes idly holding the analog stick forward, occasionally dodge-rolling to break the monotony. refusing to dodge-roll for a few moments when the sticky momentum stop at the end of the roll animation begins to bother you at the base of your skull. you consider dodge-rolling all the way back. you turn back around. you stick-press a little closer to the airship duck. a gold playstation trophy dings into the upper right corner. a platinum playstation trophy alights in its place a moment later. you pause the game. you quit to the menu. you go do something else.

all this and more can be yours for only .49 USD.

i’m really getting my money’s worth out of this new PS5

the closest insomniac has yet come to capturing the exact texture of a comic book. this is some marv wolfman, bill mantlo type stuff. my review may as well just be a compilation of cover images for the issues it most inspires me to reread.

one of the first spider-man books I ever owned was a mid-2000s trade paperback called Spider-Man vs The Black Cat. my dad bought it for me at the Borders in the lobby of his office. it collects her first six appearances. baby kieran went cover to cover on it so many times the binding is now in tatters. so, of course this little nugget of story DLC sings to me.

playing The Heist again five years later, and after fully ingesting my lukewarm plate of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, I arrive at a great yearning. oh, ye sleepless ones! return to the way it was!

more of this! god please, more of this. no more drones. get the spider-man branded Uber for Superheroes out of the game. instead: more games which feature spider-man traveling of his own narrative momentum to Locations, seeking to perform Actions, all the while interacting face to face with Characters. please! and if you absolutely must deliver the majority of your story through phone calls and audio diaries… imbue them with as much crackling drama as they’ve got here, where Peter and his ex-girlfriend’s father subtly interrogate each other over the phone without the other realizing.

insomniac. you were so good at this before. what happened?

better than it has any right to be! those animations are crisp, dude...

the first time I pressed the jump button and little cokey did an airborne somersault, I yelled. the moment I discovered his super saiyan charge ability, I yelled louder.

research has led me to discover the rest of the games developed by the team behind Coca Cola Kid, Aspect Co. they made the Naruto: Ninja Council games! many of the 8-bit Sonic games for Master System and Game Gear came from them too, with the exception of Yuzo Koshiro's Ancient's Sonic the Hedgehog. neat! the competent and stylized platforming of Coca Cola Kid no longer comes as a surprise.

nothing like a great 3D platformer to smoothly transition one out of a Gaming Hiatus.

by the end of the introductory stage of Forgotten Land, I was transformed. before, I lived a life of ambivalence as regards nintendo's little pink puff baby. now, the urge to play their every interactive adventure overwhelms my senses. kirby, in their magnanimity, breathes new purpose into my small existence. my life now splits into two distinct eras. there was a time before; I live now in the hereafter.

I love kirby, and you can too!

Baby's First RPG, and the first Game Boy Color game I ever owned.

sometime in 2006, my local target had a stockpile of these for dirt cheap. they must have been there for years. would have been a hard sell at first, given that there was a shiny new GBA version on the shelves at the same time. in the years between the game’s release and my chancing upon it, the GBA copies were all snatched up. only the dusty GBC boxes remained.

(in retrospect I can say: those poor kids that got the GBA version! they missed out on the real deal)

my young eyes lit up as I noticed them on the clearance rack. before I could trail too far behind my mom and the shopping cart, I pulled the arm of her sweater. I pointed up at the my then-favorite little wizard guy. the boxes were lined up on the top shelf, and my growth spurt was still a number of years out. she looked over the box. the label in the corner said it would work on my Game Boy Advance.

"that's the one you've got, right?"

I enthusiastically confirmed.

my mom was a librarian, and had already encouraged me in reading the first three Harry Potter books. JK Rowling wasn't a Public Sicko yet, so it was still morally okay to be a fan. I had been going cover to cover on those early books for as long as I knew how to read. by this time I had already worn a Harry Potter costume for Halloween at least twice. our DVD copy of Chamber of Secrets was used with such regularity that the cardboard sleeve for its case had begun to warp from the oils of my grubby little child fingers. if my mom was ever going to buy me a game months removed from Christmas or my birthday, it was going to be this one. to my great joy, she did!

little did I know playing it was going to be as much of a learning experience as reading my first novel.

knowing only games where one button jumped and the other button punched, the menus and numbers of turn based combat were completely alien to me. "grinding" was not in my lexicon. I brutishly forced my way through. "don't walk into the glowing beans" was my strategy for winning, which complicated things when my little friend Harry was never strong enough to defeat bosses with the basic attack spell alone. pokemon barely touched my childhood; this was my equivalent to fighting the elite four with nothing but tackles.

as my elementary years passed, I kept going back to the big translucent cartridge in my bag full of GBA games. every time I did, I had figured out something new about gameplay, or menu navigation, or like, basic math. I got to experience it anew every time. I still do now, replaying the game in an emulator as a studied and grown-up RPG enjoyer.

(sidenote: even now, all 8-bit music sounds to me like Chamber of Secrets. its status as the GBC's final game means it was the endpoint for that sound chip; the final compositions for a format then thirteen years old. they do not disappoint. those tracks are vivid, draining every last drop of auditory depth out of that ancient little game box. while first exploring Raya Lucaria in Elden Ring earlier this year, I put on these old wizard school tunes. it was bliss. good work, Ian Stocker!)

(text originally written 4/25/2022, for an essay about sharing the art you love with the people you love, finding catharsis in frivolous trinkets, and buying a new computer. relevant passages for Cibele reproduced here with minimal edits)

phone newly cased, figure freshly unboxed, my new computer still had 48 minutes of updating to go. My roommate's kitchen tasks concluded themselves. Our conversation lulled. She took a call from her boyfriend in the other room. I closed my door, sealing the music into my own bedroom. just me and the Forth Wanderers. I tidied up a little bit. I flipped back through the book I had finished earlier: Cara Ellison's Embed With Games; a chronicle of her year doing gonzo journalism on the independant game development scene back in 2013. crashing on couches all over the world, she wrote profiles of fascinating artists all working in the most exciting mixed-media art form we've got, as of this writing.

I had been keeping a list of whose games I wanted to immediately seek out after finishing the book. the first was Nina Freeman, starting with her then-in-development game Cibele. I found her itch.io page on my phone. thirty nine minutes to go. I paid eight dollars for her game. I scrolled through the rest of her published works. I spelunked into some of the poetry on her website. twenty three minutes to go. some of that poetry was included in Embed, offering a glimpse into the work she discussed in her interviews with Ellison. I was really taken by them. they portray an honesty and an open sexuality, revolving around the kind of online communities which don't exist in quite the same way anymore.

the game she was working on was about falling in love with someone through an MMO, circa 2009. getting to know someone through hours of daily cooperation online. taking suggestive photos for your e-crush on a digital camera, transferring them from SD card to computer, and sending them over email. virtual connection spilling over into our real lives in larger doses, before micro-blogging and content algorithms and endless streams of disparate video strained that connection into something even thinner. something almost entirely one-sided. I knew I needed to play her game. it was going to be the first thing I did once my computer was finished. twelve minutes to go.

finally, the wait was over. I input all the passwords that needed inputting. I clicked all the update buttons I could find. I tested the keyboard for a minute. I still like my Keychron better. I tested the camera. it still sucks. they've been putting the same iPhone 4S front-facing camera in these things for the better part of a decade. it's ridiculous. I tested how hot the thing runs while editing video in Final Cut Pro. finally, I don't have to fear for my computer setting my wooden IKEA desk on fire. all that done, I installed and played Cibele.

it was beautiful. it was voyeuristic, and it was uncomfortable, and it made me laugh out loud for no one, and I loved it. it was art. you should play it too. it's only about two hours long. it should run on anything. I dare not say anything about its particulars—those are best discovered on your own.

back in high school, my AP composition and language class was among the easiest A's I ever earned. we wrote essays maybe once monthly, answered comprehension questions for books I had already read, and read from a book about syntax extremely occasionally. what I'm saying is: there was a lot of downtime. somebody must have thought we sixteen year olds would better osmose the material if we had days of nothing in between. and you know what, maybe they were right! I'm sitting here now, six years later, writing words in the English language; I must have taken more away from that class than I did pre-calculus.

for the entire year, there sat a cart full of school laptops at the front of the classroom. I don't know how or why they never left. teachers at my high school were supposed to reserve the carts for a day at a time. we didn't have that many carts! I suppose Mrs. Comp and Lang used her argumentative prowess to secure their long-term home. in any case, we were supposed to use the computers to... write? I guess? google historically important essays, and rub our chins in admiration of their stirring prose? feed our few free clicks to pay-gated online publications? well, we rarely did any of that. we played agar.io instead. every single day.

four friends and I arranged our desks into a row in the back of the classroom, turned in any homework from the night before, and unless it was a blue-moon-adjacent day of planned academic enrichment, we all logged on and embiggened our cultures for the full class period. my username was always "peenboi". if ever you had fifteen minutes of microbial growth gobbled up by a big dot named "peenboi", that was me, and I'm not sorry. it was more fun than reading the opinion section of the New Yorker.

that little witch lady's fetch quests were the only semi-interesting section of the game loop. every time I was forced to progress the story instead of mindlessly increment some stat or other, I was reminded that those stats were going up for absolutely no good reason. utter waste of time. deleted from my hard drive out of fear; I knew I would have plunked down further hours of my life simply out of inertia if I had kept Integrity and Faithlessness within controller's reach.

perhaps worthwhile to the most fervent number-clutchers in the game liking community, though only after all the better RPG franchises have been exhausted. I still have too many good games to play to settle for this one.