So I decided I would review Spider-Man 3 (The video game, of course) to pre-emptively cover another hiatus that I may or may not be taking in the near future. To the untold thousands of Redditors and other noobs that are trying out CYS for the first time: Welcome! Sometimes I do this to counteract the bad juju and invisible calories of leaving and coming back unnannounced.
When people start hiring even the big actors from the actual movie for the video game, you know something's wrong. Either they expect this game to be super-successful and have the biggest budget ever, or their names are the only goddamn thing that they expect will make people buy that rushed, rotted piece of shit. And since Spiderman 3 is a 360 launch title whose graphics look almost worse than its PS2 predecessor, it's safe to assume that this is going to be the shitty one of those two things. Well, come to think of it, a lot of the original cast voiced the video games, but since they finally got Franco in on this, and they still managed to fuck up, there's now another voice actor they've embarrassed making this shit.
Now, unlike a lot of people, I really like the Sam Raimi spiderman movies. They have just the right amount of absurdity, camp and seriousness to capture the ridiculous and emotional shit that was going on in the spiderman comics, only in a slightly more grounded manner. Toby Macguire is my favorite spiderman (But that's not really saying much, given the bucket of whale jizz that the Amazing Spiderman Movies were.) and the third movie is generally where everyone just got fucking tired of Sony's shit and threw it all together. Seriously, Venom practically looks just like a photoshopped Black Suit spiderman, not the hulking monstrosity that he should've been, and the suit just looks like someone threw spiderman's CGI model into photoshop and turned the saturation down to 0. Sandman was the only guy who wanted to be there, and he was probably the only one who managed to make the hashed-together-writing actually look good.
The game isn't that much different, except this time, you can feel just how badly everyone wants it to be fucking over with. I could even sense this when I first played this as a kid. See, way back when, I didn't know who Bruce Campbell was. I just knew that there was a hilarious, magnificent bastard narrating my favorite games. I would search every nook and cranny for his Atticus-Finch-like bonanzas of dry-witted wisdom. Fuck Morgan Freeman, the voice I wanted narrating my life was Bruce Campbell. But when I played this game, I instantly knew something was wrong. I realized on the very first level that something was profoundly off about Bruce. He was phoning it in! Why? I wondered... Then, as I ventured onward through the shitswamp, I slowly began to realize that the game was terrible, and Bruce knew before I even began to find out. He was trying to warn us all before we spent our precious time on it.
This game made Bruce Fucking Campbell sad. I can never forgive it for that. Hell, it made every cast member sad. The only people who weren't phoning it in were the non-celebrity actors who hadn't been in previous games, and they all sounded like they were either attempting to lighten the soul-sucking mood by hamming it up or just had no fucking idea what the line's context was. These voices are the first signs that almost no love was put into this game.
The second was the gameplay itself. It feels almost like Spiderman 2, except if Spiderman 2 had its quality and flow sucked out and replaced with glitches and terrible camera bullshit. The swinging was fucked up, the framerate was depressing, the camera made me sick, and don't even get me fucking started on those godamn Mary Jane missions. They added in a shit ton of new moves, which branched off into two different styles, standard red&blue costume-style, in which most of the things you do follow the standard Queensbury rules of Kung Fu, and "The Black Slime Is Taking Over My Mind" style, which causes you to fight "Un-Heroically", by punching people when they're down, grab people by the neck, and other things that real people would do in an actual fight. And at first, I thought that was great, but then I realized that the branches ultimately did the same thing and I may as well have gone with the branch that looked cooler and not spent my main save file doing the moral shit, because it looks like you get the same fucking ending either way.
Speaking of the ending, did I mention how shitty the boss fights were? That's right, in addition to turning the game into a crappy, samey "Upgrade your shit" brawler all too prevalent in movie superhero games these days, they turned the bossfights into crappy, samey, "Punch him for ten fucking minutes" shitfests. They went to absurd lengths with the storyline as an excuse to introduce new supervillains into the game in ridiculously contrived and retarded ways, as opposed to subtly introducing them into the storyline like in Spiderman 2.
In Spiderman 2, the fights are worked in creatively. Yeah, there's some weird, sketchy shit that goes on because the engine doesn't do certain things very well, but they find workarounds, they do fun, challenging things. Fun, bizarre environments like Mysterio's funhouse? Being able to take on big enemies like Rhino in the big open world? Yep, that's gone.
Let me describe to you all the INCREDIBLY FUN shit you'll be doing instead!
You can battle The Lizard with shitty quicktime events! No, not fun quicktime events like in God of War and such games, completely fucking shit "React to the thing!" ones repeated thrice over, before you take him on in exhilerating combat that consists of doing the same goddamn thing over and over again for five goddamn minutes. Then he enters phase 2, during which you climb up to fight him again! Not with the climbing and swinging techniques that they broke irreparably but with MORE FUCKING QUICKTIME EVENTS! You know the Kingpin, right? The awesome villain with all the swag of the Penguin and all the kickassery of Bane? Guess how his battle goes? You just go into his house and break his things, fight emo henchmen, and then dodge his shit and wail on him 30 times.
How about the big final boss battle? The one that they've probably spent the most time on? The boss battle featuring the most awesome spiderman villain of all time!? It's not an amazing rooftop showdown with a sandman giant the size of ten schoolbusses, it's the exact same fucking thing as the other two boss fights I described with MORE depressingly sketchy quicktime events, and the entire thing takes place in an empty square construction lot. I wish I was exaggerating, but that's literally what happens! WHY THE FUCK!?
TL;DR, this game depressed Bruce Campbell, it's a shitty, broken version of Spiderman 2, and you'll find more exciting combat in World of Warcraft. (No, that's not a compliment, MMO guys.)
