We are in March 26, 1990. The more popular Amazing-Spider Man game of the same year was still four months away, but developer Oxford Digital Enterprises pounced and released their version first for the Commodore 64 and Amiga, before porting it to most notably the Atari ST later. Considering that the other game released for a handheld device only (the Game Boy), there wasn't really any competition between both games, so this narrative I just created is probably incorrect.
But here it is, The Amazing Spider-Man, published by Paragon Software (NA, Empire Software for EU) and being so far inferior to the Game Boy game that even the description of it on Grouvee reads "Not to be confused with the Game Boy title released in the same year". Or how about the Marvel Fandom Wiki having a page for the Game Boy game, but no mention of this one.
To keep it short, the plot in this game revolves around Mysterio, who kidnaps Mary Jane. That's it. There is a comic book style presentation of the story and then there is one happy ending image at the end, but that's it. You didn't play these platformers for their stories though, so what was gameplay like? Well you were controlling fat Spider-Man.
With that, let's dive into each aspect of my reviewing system one by one, starting with, very briefly, the story.
STORYTELLING: Again, you didn't play these games for their story, even though games like Ninja Gaiden obviously did at least make an effort in that regard during this time (the sequel released only two weeks after this Spider-Man game). We do rate story(telling) though, so let's see. As mentioned, the beginning of the game, at least in some versions (the Atari version didn't even have these from what I've seen), shows us three slides of images designed like in a comic book, where we see Mysterio kidnapping Mary Jane and Peter Parker being angry. That's pretty much it. Environmental storytelling is pretty much non existent throughout, there is little sense to be made with the sheer randomness with which assets were used, most even being unassociated with Spider-Man (there are a lot of R2D2s running around in this game).
GAMEPLAY: When I say "fat" Spider-Man, I mean it. The first image of gameplay you see is Spider-Man hunched forward like he's either been playing too many video games and ruined his posture or gained a ton of weight or he has significant back problems. Moving forward reveals even worse truths. Spider-Man walks as if he is carrying a bag filled with 200kg of sand and when he jumps, he does levitate for a good 3 seconds, but only jumps up a few inches overall. When he falls down, he often lands flat on his face and walks around sniffing the floor for a good few feet before you can manage to make him stand upright again. When he climbs walls, he doesn't climb up or down like a spider, but more like a cat, using both arms simultaneously first, followed by both of his legs to push himself forward.
Long story short, the animations are very bad, funnily so. The slow movement just makes it worse, because funny bad is always manageable, but boring bad is just a slow death to the players enjoyment. I often look at gameplay online after I finish playing and pretty much always do I find hundreds of nostalgic comments that range from "this was my childhood game" to "this is one of the greatest games ever made", and while some of the former was present with this game as well, most did acknowledge that this game is actually just not good. Doesn't mean the memories weren't precious of course.
Progressing in this game is done by climbing in a very slow pace, by using your web to fly over enemies and by activating buttons that allow you to progress forward. If you position yourself correctly, you can even shoot your web to access buttons that are otherwise inaccessible. Enemies in this game are skeletons, rats, R2D2s and basic humans, among others. Rats for example follow you around, while most of the others have a set route which they follow. Most enemies don't bump into you, but they rather just walk past you, and every second that you are in contact drains your health. Your health bar is displayed as a standing giant Spider-Man to the right of the screen. His body starts turning into a skeleton with each percent of health that you lose, starting from his feet all the way to to the top of his head. Once he is a full skeleton, the game ends.
There are some OK ideas here, but overall it is just not fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is no voice acting, but in the Amiga version, there is the oddest remix of a male and female voice saying Spider-Man, making me feel glad that no actual voice acting is in the game. Well, there is the "ugh ugh ugh" sound when you or enemies take damage, which just sounds unsettling.
I didn't figure out a way to turn off the music and only display sound effects, but I have seen plenty of videos with that kind of alignment. For me, the music played nonstop and it was just one track being put on repeat. Music in this generation of video games was pretty catchy most of the time and this was certainly OK, but not something I would want to listen to outside of this game. Plus some variation would have been nice.
Sound in this game is abysmal. The sound of the web, the sound when you step onto a platform and the annoying click it makes at the end, the aforementioned damage noise, the awful sound of doors opening and no actual sound for a lot of the moving platforms, enemies and effects (which I guess I should be glad for) mean that the overall sound design is just very poor.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: There are just a bunch of random assets used and placed to create levels that make sense from a level design standpoint, but little sense from an artistic standpoint, let alone from a Spider-Man universe standpoint. Not much to like here either.
ATMOSPHERE: The incoherent art design and world building, an average singular track vs. poor sound design (if you use music, you can't really hear the sounds, so pick your poison, though I'd choose the music) and a game that is not a looker even for its time and you got a game that is bereft of atmosphere.
CONTENT: Once you get past the slow animations, the poor controls and everything else, the puzzles in this game are actually interesting enough and the game does offer a challenge to those looking for one. There isn't that much variety in what this game offers though, it's a lot of buttons pressing to unlock other buttons to press, which open up new locations or make your enemies fall to their deaths.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: This isn't actually that bad. The game misses some variety, there isn't really anything to unlock, but there are puzzles present and some that require some brain power to solve. There is also some good interconnectivity here and there, meaning a previously inaccessible area can be unlocked as you progress, leading you back to a previous room, where a previously "non-pressable" button can now be pressed to progress elsewhere. It's not always intuitive, it's repetitive but it's probably the best part about this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: Apart from the web swinging, which is 'unique' but in a bad way, there is nothing here that stands out.
REPLAYABILITY: If you do enjoy this game, there is of course the added incentive of beating your high scores and your times. There isn't much leeway in how you can complete this game, there isn't that much creative space for that, but you can always try to be quicker and receive less damage I guess.
PLAYABILITY: The game works well, the only issue I had was that sometimes I would clip into a level below the one I was on and the game would glitch out for a second. There is even a clip of someone glitching his way from the early stages all the way to the final level, if you want to check that out.
OVERALL: Definitely the worst game of this challenge so far and will probably find its way into the Top 5 Worst Games of the Year by the time I finish 1990. Or I've been relatively lucky with the first 4 games and this is what a good chunk of 1990 will look like. I doubt that though. Don't play this game if you're looking for a fun platformer, there are hundreds of better options out there in this time frame.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- Nothing. I couldn't find a single magazine that reviewed this game at the time. I did find the Game Boy in every single one though.
But here it is, The Amazing Spider-Man, published by Paragon Software (NA, Empire Software for EU) and being so far inferior to the Game Boy game that even the description of it on Grouvee reads "Not to be confused with the Game Boy title released in the same year". Or how about the Marvel Fandom Wiki having a page for the Game Boy game, but no mention of this one.
To keep it short, the plot in this game revolves around Mysterio, who kidnaps Mary Jane. That's it. There is a comic book style presentation of the story and then there is one happy ending image at the end, but that's it. You didn't play these platformers for their stories though, so what was gameplay like? Well you were controlling fat Spider-Man.
With that, let's dive into each aspect of my reviewing system one by one, starting with, very briefly, the story.
STORYTELLING: Again, you didn't play these games for their story, even though games like Ninja Gaiden obviously did at least make an effort in that regard during this time (the sequel released only two weeks after this Spider-Man game). We do rate story(telling) though, so let's see. As mentioned, the beginning of the game, at least in some versions (the Atari version didn't even have these from what I've seen), shows us three slides of images designed like in a comic book, where we see Mysterio kidnapping Mary Jane and Peter Parker being angry. That's pretty much it. Environmental storytelling is pretty much non existent throughout, there is little sense to be made with the sheer randomness with which assets were used, most even being unassociated with Spider-Man (there are a lot of R2D2s running around in this game).
GAMEPLAY: When I say "fat" Spider-Man, I mean it. The first image of gameplay you see is Spider-Man hunched forward like he's either been playing too many video games and ruined his posture or gained a ton of weight or he has significant back problems. Moving forward reveals even worse truths. Spider-Man walks as if he is carrying a bag filled with 200kg of sand and when he jumps, he does levitate for a good 3 seconds, but only jumps up a few inches overall. When he falls down, he often lands flat on his face and walks around sniffing the floor for a good few feet before you can manage to make him stand upright again. When he climbs walls, he doesn't climb up or down like a spider, but more like a cat, using both arms simultaneously first, followed by both of his legs to push himself forward.
Long story short, the animations are very bad, funnily so. The slow movement just makes it worse, because funny bad is always manageable, but boring bad is just a slow death to the players enjoyment. I often look at gameplay online after I finish playing and pretty much always do I find hundreds of nostalgic comments that range from "this was my childhood game" to "this is one of the greatest games ever made", and while some of the former was present with this game as well, most did acknowledge that this game is actually just not good. Doesn't mean the memories weren't precious of course.
Progressing in this game is done by climbing in a very slow pace, by using your web to fly over enemies and by activating buttons that allow you to progress forward. If you position yourself correctly, you can even shoot your web to access buttons that are otherwise inaccessible. Enemies in this game are skeletons, rats, R2D2s and basic humans, among others. Rats for example follow you around, while most of the others have a set route which they follow. Most enemies don't bump into you, but they rather just walk past you, and every second that you are in contact drains your health. Your health bar is displayed as a standing giant Spider-Man to the right of the screen. His body starts turning into a skeleton with each percent of health that you lose, starting from his feet all the way to to the top of his head. Once he is a full skeleton, the game ends.
There are some OK ideas here, but overall it is just not fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is no voice acting, but in the Amiga version, there is the oddest remix of a male and female voice saying Spider-Man, making me feel glad that no actual voice acting is in the game. Well, there is the "ugh ugh ugh" sound when you or enemies take damage, which just sounds unsettling.
I didn't figure out a way to turn off the music and only display sound effects, but I have seen plenty of videos with that kind of alignment. For me, the music played nonstop and it was just one track being put on repeat. Music in this generation of video games was pretty catchy most of the time and this was certainly OK, but not something I would want to listen to outside of this game. Plus some variation would have been nice.
Sound in this game is abysmal. The sound of the web, the sound when you step onto a platform and the annoying click it makes at the end, the aforementioned damage noise, the awful sound of doors opening and no actual sound for a lot of the moving platforms, enemies and effects (which I guess I should be glad for) mean that the overall sound design is just very poor.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: There are just a bunch of random assets used and placed to create levels that make sense from a level design standpoint, but little sense from an artistic standpoint, let alone from a Spider-Man universe standpoint. Not much to like here either.
ATMOSPHERE: The incoherent art design and world building, an average singular track vs. poor sound design (if you use music, you can't really hear the sounds, so pick your poison, though I'd choose the music) and a game that is not a looker even for its time and you got a game that is bereft of atmosphere.
CONTENT: Once you get past the slow animations, the poor controls and everything else, the puzzles in this game are actually interesting enough and the game does offer a challenge to those looking for one. There isn't that much variety in what this game offers though, it's a lot of buttons pressing to unlock other buttons to press, which open up new locations or make your enemies fall to their deaths.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: This isn't actually that bad. The game misses some variety, there isn't really anything to unlock, but there are puzzles present and some that require some brain power to solve. There is also some good interconnectivity here and there, meaning a previously inaccessible area can be unlocked as you progress, leading you back to a previous room, where a previously "non-pressable" button can now be pressed to progress elsewhere. It's not always intuitive, it's repetitive but it's probably the best part about this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: Apart from the web swinging, which is 'unique' but in a bad way, there is nothing here that stands out.
REPLAYABILITY: If you do enjoy this game, there is of course the added incentive of beating your high scores and your times. There isn't much leeway in how you can complete this game, there isn't that much creative space for that, but you can always try to be quicker and receive less damage I guess.
PLAYABILITY: The game works well, the only issue I had was that sometimes I would clip into a level below the one I was on and the game would glitch out for a second. There is even a clip of someone glitching his way from the early stages all the way to the final level, if you want to check that out.
OVERALL: Definitely the worst game of this challenge so far and will probably find its way into the Top 5 Worst Games of the Year by the time I finish 1990. Or I've been relatively lucky with the first 4 games and this is what a good chunk of 1990 will look like. I doubt that though. Don't play this game if you're looking for a fun platformer, there are hundreds of better options out there in this time frame.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- Nothing. I couldn't find a single magazine that reviewed this game at the time. I did find the Game Boy in every single one though.