The Besties - Marvel's Spider-Man 2 vs. Literally Every Other Spider-Man Game

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a triumph, boasting double the standard number of Spiders-Men playable in a single installment of this long, storied franchise. But is it better than literally every other Spider-Man game? Let's find out by comparing them one at a time, shall we?Also discussed: The Way of Kings, Killers of the Flower Moon, Teardown Art Vandals DLC, Super Mario WonderSubscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I got my spider-sona. What? Very excited. You know, in Spider-Verse movies, there's all these different spiders, and now people are just coming up with their spider-sonas, and it's like them, but if they were a spider person. And I'm very excited about mine.

He's called Daddy, and he's a daddy longlegs. He's got eight big longlegs that come out of me, and I basically have a mouth on my butt, and it's very venomous. This-man bites a lot yeah and uh it's amazing to me that no one else has thought of this all the other spider guys yeah no one else is doing biting but i i do it incredibly venomous i am dude i'm gonna i'm spider bear i'm kind of like a furry, sexy Spider-Man. Little, you know. Do you bite?

No, I'm like a sexy bear Spider-Man. Okay. Griffin, can we go back to the idea that like. Stout. Venom definitely bites. Venom bites. Venom is not a Spider-Man. He's an alien.

And I'm pretty upset that you would actually say that what you just said i'm sorry pretty upsetting to me and the other spider guys yes i'm sorry i guys i don't want to do this to griffin like while we're recording but i think he might be lying no no no no no no i googled griff Spider-Man, and this is what came up. Just look right in the slack. Whoa, that's Peter Griffin dressed as Spider-Man. So, yeah, that is what I look like. I mean, that's what my spider-sona looks like is Peter Griffin,

but he doesn't have the legs out. The legs are under the suit. There's eight long legs in the mouth on his butt. Oh, that's why I can't see the legs in the photo. Yeah, really strong. My guy is. He is an unlockable character in Spider-Man 2. You gotta find

all the pizzas. What are some of his catchphrases? Oh, yeah. I mean, Daddy's home. Oh, that's good. Hey, are your eight limbs all arms, all legs, what's the blend? I'm pretty sure legs is right there. Give me the KFC.

Russ, this is so funny. Shut up. Give me the KFC bucket breakdown on your appendages. Three of them have feet on the end. Five of them have hands. You would expect those numbers to be even even sure but do you walk with the hands can i and then like you walk with the hey plant can you walk with your hands no but like a lot of so then why would you think that Daddy can do it? What do you think dogs do? We can't get into this because I'm talking about Spider-Man today, not Dogman. Oh, I'm sorry.

You're talking about Griffin. I'm talking about Daddy today. And I can't believe that two of us didn't even want to play in this space. I just don't even know why. I mean, if he's got arms, why has he got, why is he long legs? He's got five long arms, three long legs. So shouldn't he be long arms if he has more arms than legs is what I'm saying. Two normal legs that are mine.

Okay. Two arms that are mine with hands at the end of it. A proboscis. Thank you, Justin. It comes out and it has a little, The whip come out the proboscis. It's got a little... It has a little face on the end of it like alien. Yeah, a little tongue.

Good. He sucks to look at. He's got so many things coming out of him. That's the terror that lurks in the night. But Craven saw me and it really... It turned his name quite literal. Yeah. Because he got very scared.

He got scared and ran away from daddy. Did he not Google that word before he picked that as his name? literal yeah he got very scared he got scared and ran away from daddy did he not google that word before he picked that as his name craven yeah or daddy craven oh okay i did google daddy before and i saw some stuff but i went ahead and powered on through with it yeah it's such a strong daddy's home fresh it's good fresh is worried because he Googled Craven for Daddy. Right. Yeah. And that's a different website. That's fine.

That's Daddy's only fan. Guys, look, I have decided that I indeed also have a spider persona. Oh, thank Christ. Spider zone. That's great. I'm the itsy bitsy spider. And in case you guys are not aware I generally broadly speaking go up the water spout there is one weakness that I have

Rachel ideally the volume should just fade out at this point I do have a weakness do you guys know what that weakness is I'm gonna guess the rain generally the rain yeah also asthma but mostly the rain yeah

wait is that sorr theme song and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week with Spider-Man in it. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Frusciano, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Frosch, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest at home interactive entertainment. It is a video game show. It's a club.

Just by listening, you're a member of the club. Welcome to the club. We're happy to have you. Today we're going to be talking about a new entry in the long line of Spider-Man video games. And it's, wait, this can't be right. Spider-Man 2. They've done that. That certainly can't be it.

I believe the title is Marvel Spider-Man 2. Not Marvels. Just Marvel. They just put the name in the company. Marvel is Spider-Man. Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Marvel presents Spider-Man. What is Spider-Man 2. Marvel presents Spider-Man. What is it, Plant?

What is it? It's a sequel to the previous Spider-Man game that was exclusive for a while to the Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. But this time, it's you as Peter Parker and you as Miles Morales. At the same time, two Spider-Men in one game? Spider-Man 2 more like spider-men 2 unbelievable unbelievable work thank you so much uh we're going to uh talk about that and so much more i bet if i had to guess but uh first let's take a quick break do you think it's like...

Do you think the people at Sony are happy they finally made a real PS5 game? You know? Wow. Go ahead and explain that. So, like, they've made other games, right? Sure, games have come out on the PS5. But when they showed that original

PS5 demo and they're like, here's what it is. You can go anywhere at any time you can warp through portals into the other end of an open world and i was like hey that sounds really cool and then they didn't really make that game until now but now it's here well what about ratcheting clank what about what about ratcheting because yeah those Yeah, those were like predetermined portals and you weren't really zipping around the world that fast. Also, you don't do a lot of

there are portals in this but not like a ton of portals. Have you tried fast travel in this game? The fast travel is unbelievable. It's the most unbelievable fast travel I've ever seen in my life. I think we've gotten off the rails a little bit. We are on

the rails. The fast travel is fucking incredible. It is very good. This is an entire episode about fast travel. I think Chris Plant's claim that this is the first ever, quote, next gen feeling game ever made is ridiculous, but I'm glad. It is also distracting from the main

discussion. I didn't say next gen. I said PS5. But anyway, here's what we're going to do. Is that a bad take? Sure. I didn't say next gen. I said PS5. But anyway, here's what we're going to do. Is that a bad take? Sure. I don't care. Leave it in the comments. Actually, don't.

Spider-Man 2 is so good. And I am saying that as somebody who did not really enjoy Spider-Man 1. And I would like you all to help me figure out what did they change to make this game really click. Double the Spider-Man. there was only one before and now there's two of them so if you get bored with one you press double up you press the miles button griffin is is of course uh well i mean i know you're i know you're not really kidding but uh thematically and narratively it is able to do a lot more interesting stuff by comparing and contrasting two spider-men at very different points in their lives yeah you're able to get

the like if you end up doing teen peter right i kind of think there's two different routes you get you do teen peter who has all those high school things then it's like adult peter trying to manage a love life and a job and stuff like that. And you kind of got both in this game, which is, is cool. And it also allows Spider-Man to have conversations with somebody else who like actually can contribute to the conversation in some way, other than giving him the address of Kingpin's, you know, laundromat. That's actually a gambling front. I mean, he can talk to MJ. They have a good relationship.

This is the relationship for from mj mj has a 40 hour a week with a job with a super demanding boss named j jonah jameson she is on the edge of getting fired and every fucking five minutes her boyfriend is like mj i need you to give me the address of the zoo. She's like, Peter, fucking dude, I have a job. I'm going through copy edits right now. Maybe later. It's like, I'm feeling a dagger. Do you have any leads?

It's like, no, do your fucking job. I'm literally a reporter. You're literally asking me to work for free for you. I do love when she calls you and she's like peter i'm really worried about my job and just our family right now and you're like yeah yeah gotta go gotta fight these five guys and then like you call back you're like hey sorry i wanted to talk to you and she's like yeah so peter i'm really worried about my job and our family right now and you're like oh wait wait. I found five more guys. The best one of those I had was, I was talking to MJ about our relationship.

And then I'm like, hold that thought. And I get another call coming in that is also MJ. But she just wants to bullshit about the lizard or something. Yeah, cool. Anyway, Peter, find that guy right now. Gotta go. And he's like, sorry, MJ. Sorry about that.

You just got really excited about the lizard for a second. I did not play very much Spider-Man 1 or Spider-Man Miles Morales because I'm pretty well burnt out on open world games. Playing this one really took me back to ironically enough the sort of halcyon days of spider-man 2 the movie the game uh which was my favorite spider-man title i think until this one uh because i cannot get enough of just swinging around and beating asses this game has some of the best...

I remember the first time I played Batman Arkham Asylum. And I was like, the game of ass beating has changed. This is a new echelon of ass beating as represented in video games. And I don't know that I'm ever gonna feel that. The ass beating in this game is on a completely different level. I could just...

This game could be one room with a hundred dudes in it who just keep respawning infinitely and me and my friend Miles just beating their asses over and over again. It is so good. How do you all feel about the murder that Spider-Man does? He doesn't do murder. He does. It's debatableatable they're all fine

they they do little bits there's the the famous thing from uh the previous game was when you knock somebody off a building at the very last second he would like sling some spider web on them and stick them to the side of the wall right yeah it was good but here it's like you are on top of a car. You pull a guy out of the vehicle. You slam him against it like oncoming barricade. And then you stick the corpse to the car to be like, hey, you know, I just want I want that. I want the cops to be able to clean this up pretty easily. So here's the thing. There is a moment in the game when Spider-Man uses his webs to seal a wound like someone has been bleeding

and he'll use his webs to like seal it. I think he was just like doing that nonstop whenever anyone is like scalding. Yeah, regenerative web magic. I mean, I'm just saying, I think he's very concerned about the populace. Both of them are really. I mean, Miles is as well.

That kind of fits the big theme of this game too, which is Spider-Man is like a paramedic slash fireman slash city engineer now instead of a spider cop. He's got great benefits. He must be having an impact on taxes, right? Like, this guy's doing everything. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. He works for free.

There's a lot of city damage is the problem. So I think it probably bounces out. We're all over the place. What would you all like to talk about first? Would you like to talk about the story of this? Or would you like to talk about the side missions? I want to go back to what we were talking about earlier regarding the two Spider-Men. And why it helps this game versus the original Spider-Man or Miles Morales. honestly i thought were both good games but i think this one is on another level because not

only you get getting the two perspectives that justin was mentioning earlier but you're also getting a pacing solve which was always an issue with these games where or really any open world game where you kind of feel like you're in this grind of like mission, mission, mission, mission with the same person. And it's really hard to like engage with that for a long period of time. Now, granted, there are side things you can do. You can fucking spice plants or whatever shit he does. But broadly speaking, if you're sticking to the story, it can be a little draining. Whereas I think the fact that you are bouncing between the two really does help that a lot.

I think the fact that you are bouncing between the two really does help that a lot. I mean, GTA 5 was another example of this where I thought, you know, you go from a Michael mission where you're driving around to a fucking Trevor mission where you're, I don't know, helicoptering in jet skis. And that does help. Game of the West, they don't feel drastically different. There are some tweets like Miles has like his camouflage abilities. They get a little more differentiated as the game goes on but um you know it's not that it feels necessarily different uh but it is different who you're spending time with like you just have different vibes yeah i definitely agree i mean the the thing that i didn't even totally grok until i spent an entire game playing with

both of them is that like miles sense of humor is just like totally different from peter parker's sense of humor yeah which is great i mean that's like yeah miles is funny yeah yeah well actually the one large laugh i did there there i did get a like an out loud laugh out of a peter parker joke which involved bears and honey but broadly speaking that's probably right. It's a lot of bad jokes. Sounds fucking funny, man. Sounds really good.

I'm coming at this from an interesting place because I don't know 100% what is new in this game as compared to the past ones, just because I didn't spend a ton of time with them. I want to give a special shout out, a special commendation to the web wings which i believe is new it's a true innovation in the web swinging game like just exploring this giant new york city map with no loads whatsoever uh in the traditional web swinging style is really

great being able to do a slingshot maneuver where you launch yourself forward at like a thousand miles an hour off of the Chrysler building and then popping out your web wings and just zooming across all of Manhattan in like 25 seconds is some of my favorite open world exploration stuff I've ever done. I've never actually used the fast travel because I can do what I've just described, and I don't know why you would ever want to get around any other way. Well, sometimes you got to go five, I mean, sometimes you got to cross the whole island. Yeah. That can get a little, especially if you're trying to like wrap up a mission. The fast travel, Griffin, you have to try it though. It's incredible you fast travel to the exact point that you choose in the city which is drawn around you as you fly into it like it is you zoom in you basically pull up the

map you're like i want to go here and then instantly the map zooms into where you were like located pointed on the map and you're instantly there flying it's like the those the crew games that ubisoft oh god yeah yeah they're exactly like good chris plan's always bringing up the crew and everyone always loves to talk about the crew can i talk about the i want to talk about the uh side missions and pacing too oh cool yeah i think i think this is pretty inspired there's a trend in like triple a gaming of like okay we have side missions and then we'll just make it so there are infinite of them and you know the game just never ends what a joy um here there's the kind of ebb and flow so you have to or you have the option to kind of like save sandman's soul by finding leftover pieces of Sandman crystals

throughout the world and whenever you like break one open you fight some Sandman enemies and it's just a good like option to like learn some basic fighting mechanics against little critters but rather than this extending through the whole game you can actually finish this within like the first three or four hours there are only so many of them and then it's just done and you get like you get a story complete for it and there are new side mission things that appear throughout the game so there's one about uh the flame i think what's called the fire the flame i i don't know but it's like a group of fire cultists who are in the game and they're they're the idea of having your side missions be closer almost to traditional missions makes it so much more

rewarding even if you're doing the same gameplay over and over again getting just a little bit of a narrative morsel and then also it not wearing out its welcome and then changing it up at some point it just makes it so much more um enjoyable and so much more uh i guess meaty than yeah i think recent examples that i mean not this isn't even recent but i think witcher 3 obviously did side missions incredibly well but more recently you know we were just talking about cyberpunk you know same studio and they take this approach with all their side missions where there's always some sort of narrative hook to it. There are a lot of missions in this game, like more genuine, like mini side mission things where you really just like go to a rooftop and fight a bunch of guys. And that's fine.

Like, honestly, it's good to have the option. Like, I know I'm going to take something that's going to be 10 minutes versus two minutes. But it does offer you a lot of variety in terms of how you're filling your time. I don't love the mini games. Oh, they're terrible. The sort of mini game side missions are, I would say, the weak link so far. I have spent maybe like three or four hours with this game because we were traveling all last week so I didn't get to

play quite as much as I wanted to so maybe this is something that improves but like there is a photo sort of side quest Oh that's kind of cute. I like the photo one. It's alright. Yeah you just go to where there's photo icons There's some really bad

so basically you take a picture of a Robbie Robertson, the bugle, and he's like, he will then wax poetic about New York. Like whatever you just took a picture of, like a hot dog car. He's like, Oh,

I love the hot dogs in New York. Russ, you, and you must have been stoked to learn about so much kind of New York. Yeah, I didn't know. Most of what I knew was Dwayne Reed centric. So I was really interested in falafels or something that's kind of New York. Yeah, I didn't know. Most of what I knew was Dwayne Reed centric. So I was really interested in falafels

or something that's sold in New York. I was very surprised to learn that. So cool, yeah. Now, I actually like the photo thing. I will say, Griffin, and maybe you haven't gotten to it yet. There are side missions. There are like mini puzzle side missions

where you have to like complete a dna strand and shit like that oh that makes a return huh yeah those are terrible gmos but great source gmos that there's also drone flying that is just i only did that one time yeah there's a lot of that too i here's what i'm gonna say whenever there's like a puzzle consider hitting start and selecting the skip puzzle option which they've included wisely because you can just instantly skip the puzzle and it doesn't even shame you for it it just says puzzle complete and the story moves along it's fantastic yeah it's great it's great i will say there are there are not actually there aren't a ton of these at least so far in the game like there's if you're doing all the side stuff there's like 30 or 40 of the side stuff you deserve whatever you get you know i mean you can't i'm sorry you're

you're willfully doing things you don't like to get 100 i have no pity there are even moments in the main story where they'll be like oh shit we need to craft an antidote for blah blah blah and it'll show you like a strand of like 50 molecules and you'll be like maybe big nope i mean can somebody explain what the story is um it's very clever actually uh craven the hunter sort of notorious metahuman from from marvel frequent foe seems like maybe they're gonna make try to make him a hero so he can have his own movie uh craven the hunter has come to uh new york like in the aftermath of spider-man and spider-man miles morales to basically like a lot of these guys that he put away he's either trying to like free them or convert them back to their villain form,

or in some cases, just rile them up. He wants to hunt them, no? Isn't he doing a predator where he wants to hunt them? That's the second part of the paragraph. Yeah, Russ, you got a little ahead of me, but sure. So he's doing all these things so he can then hunt them. Yeah. As my associate has pointed out, so hopefully.

And basically, Spider-Man is trying to stop Kraven from killing supervillains, which is like, it's a killer premise. And it also helps to like narratively do different stuff, like fill the world with more compelling characters. Because you have characters like Tombstone, for example, is just working a crappy job at a carnival and Kraven's trying to bring him back in. You talked about Sandman and how they tried to get Sandman back in the game. And I think it makes these guys a lot more compelling

and it forces some questions onto the Spider-Men of what are the limits that they are willing to go to and like what makes someone irredeemable etc etc but that is like the the sort of wide-ranging arc of the story and then venom is also there venom is up and then venom shows up i yeah i i think also part of the like uh if spider-man one is about police, Spider-Man 2 is about city support. There's like a very clear metaphor here about like recidivism or like people staying out of jail. And I don't know. There's a surprising amount of dialogue about people who it's like, oh, Tombstone, he was bad.

But now he's like really trying to make an effort to be good. And like what does it mean for a supervillain to like come back into society and really that's like that's an ongoing theme for spider-man as a character the idea that the reason he doesn't kill people is because he believes that people are inherently redeemable and they have you know whether it's mental illness or whatever it is that they're dealing with he he thinks that they can be reentered into society. Which makes it so weird he murders everything. They're fine.

Webs. Yeah, they're okay. Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. What did you all think about the opening with Sandman? I think that opening sequence does a great job of selling this idea of having two different Spider-Men that you are going to be going on this adventure with. Like the constant team-up attacks that they are doing, both against Giant Sandman and his little friends that he makes. That is the highlight, I think, of the game for me. I was not joking when I was talking about how good the ass beating is in this game.

Because pretty much any time you do a takedown or combo finisher or whatever, the camera will just kind of whip around. And then all of a sudden, whoever you are not controlling in the moment will zip in, web up a guy guy throw him in the air so that you can like stomp his ass down into the ground uh every time i feel like there's infinity animations of that uh and it is it looks like it's so incredible i was talking with russ about this it's incredible the extent to which it looks like a cinematic like yeah it looks like how did you guys know that i was gonna step on this specific spot that would make this animation look so cool but it it's every time it feels like a magic and what's amazing to me is that it's not a story mission thing so i was like just exploring the world

and there was just a random like you know criminals robbing a bank mini mission thing and i jump in there and not only is there another guy there's another guy already there kicking ass it was like mile i was playing as peter and miles was already beating them up i was like who is this oh shit it's miles and then it started like dropping in some of those co-op team you know yeah the team moments which are just yeah just visually stunning and they're unique to the different people that you might find in the world uh in in some truly incredible like jaw-dropping ways i i i uh want to raise my one sort of like actual major issue with this game and i and i by the way i think this is a fantastic

thing and i don't even think that this is necessarily something where like oh you guys really should have fixed this i have a big problem in in this game and a lot of games of this type, but certainly this game. It has a lot of sequences where you are playing as Peter Parker or Miles and you are basically like slowly following someone around and talking. And these are usually like big story moments or build-ups to story moments right they're they're moments where a lot of narrative needs to be conveyed to you and it's really hard to do it like while you're i don't know flying a pizza through the air to the hospital or whatever it's also pretty front-loaded where the first five hours of the game has a lot of it yeah it does seem like it diminishes over the

course of it but i yeah i do agree they were kind of pacing you can change the pacing yourself with some of the side missions and stuff so it doesn't seem so egregious but like when you hit one it feel it felt to me at least like it's so it feels so much more boring because you know how fun it is to be spider-man yeah and swinging around and like so that's that's hard enough it just the reason i wanted to raise it is so much of this game is about like what is the best way of communicating this character in a video game medium right like what makes the spider-verse work so well is they say what is the best what is the best way of capturing what spider-man is and make the most about being an animated movie like we're going to make this

what's the strength of that and comic books are the same way right there's very rare segments in comic books that aren't about that communicating to you with these still images it just feels like they haven't figured out a way to make the story beats or the narrative or the human aspect of it work in a spider-man game because as soon as you slow down and turn it into a movie you are then competing with a lot of other like yeah world-class storytellers that you can't necessarily like compare with with like digital simulcra and and all the other you know weird stuff about it being an interactive medium at a certain point i would be okay with cut scenes just coming back in a thing like this i feel like you can tell it's

made by our generation is now the executive producers and directors of these games and our generation came up with things like, do you all remember the game The Path by Tale of Tales? Yes. Yeah, so The Path, for people who don't know it, the whole point was you were an old woman walking in a graveyard on a path, and that was it. And at the time, that felt revolutionary

because it was a video game where you either weren't doing like arcade-y puzzle solving or shooting people and the path had a huge huge influence on the uncharted series and they've credited it for the moments in uncharted and now last of us where people don't shoot things they like talk and it can seem silly now but that was like a bold, innovative feature to do other things other than murder in these sorts of games. And now in this game, there are so many moments that I feel like if I had played in 2010, where you as Peter Parker play basketball, while listening to the shins, I would have been like, this is absolutely incredible. And now nothing about it feels really that revolutionary because Peter's doing plenty of other interesting things in this game that are not killing people.

And they're finding ways to communicate that character, I think, really well, even in the rest of the game, not just these points. And for me, the moment where it really kind of fell apart is there's a scene where you're at an amusement park and peter can ride on all these different rides and do all these different games with mj and one of them is on a ferris wheel and mj gets some like pretty tough news and the only option you have as peter is to clap and cheer so she's like hey that's really hard. But, you know, I still love you, Peter. And then you just go, woohoo! Yeah! Woohoo! Sometimes they do have fun with that, though, in that camera game.

A lot of times when you take pictures with somebody, they're like, was that a... What are you doing, Spider-Man? Spider-Man, why are you taking pictures with me? Imagine Spider-Man dropping out of nowhere clicking the camera and swinging away i do think it it's uh not as egregious as it was in god of war ragnarok which i thought was like paced way worse than this um i think in this case it at least um again relatively minimizes those walking talk last week had this issue sorry what was the game we played last week last week we had like a lot of front-loaded boring stuff assassin's creed

yeah yeah yeah yeah similar um but i i think they get over it thankfully and and do lean into the stuff that they're very good at and also i think a lot of the character stuff that they're trying to convey through these walking talking cutscenes are conveyed through phone calls and various cutscenes. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the game's a little chatty for my taste. I feel like there is a bit of Marvel overwriting that is happening here. Sometimes I just want to, like, you know, web sling. You don't want to listen to the Danicast?

Not always. I like the Danicast? Not always. I like the Danicast. Me too. I don't like having J. Jonah Jameson piped into my ear. I feel like I should be able to turn him off. It's rude. Hey, just so we don't get emails, Plant, the path was Little Red Riding Hood.

Oh, oh. The older lady. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That's no problem. Hey, if you haven't dug into Tale of Tales, they got a wild – they're still up and running, man. They got a wild catalog of games. I think they like publicly retired from games at a GDC.

That's wild. But maybe they might just never stop doing it. Yeah, they're a lot. Hey, should we take a break from talking about this awesome game to talk about more spider-man yeah yeah i think we should let's do it okay so justin has requested a very specific b segment and we're gonna try to see how this goes justin is clearly the spider-man expert on the besties and he believes that he would be capable of tier ranking every spider-man game ever made and it's a lot of games

so we're gonna condense the list though just so we're gonna cut out some of the some of the you know spin-offs where he appears in shinobi for some reason yeah no thank you uh but we're gonna try to do this and we're gonna try to do it quickly so starting with 1982 spider-man on the atari 2600 and odyssey 2 this is a truly terrible game uh the the webs come out so fast you won't believe it but you can even in this first version you can uh uh swing sort of it just sticks to the side of the building you swing around it's garbage d-rank uh yeah this is a d-rank okay quest probe featuring spider-man is that a spinoff that is no it's not a spinoff it's an adventure game um that is they're okay they made another one of these you remember these griff we used to play these at the radio station i do yeah

quest probe featuring the hulk too and it was like type in zork like uh i'm gonna give it a c that's interesting the amazing spider-man and captain america in dr doom's revenge that is a mouthful ms that's a good one hell yeah that one kicks ass uh i'm gonna give that one a it's very is there's not a lot of flexibility but it is a good first step i might give it that one i was gonna see okay the amazing spider-man 1990 on the amiga ms dos no i wouldn't play that one okay spider-man versus the kingpin on the genesis master system game gear etc hell yeah the now we're getting now we're getting somewhere. This is like late in the life cycle of the Genesis. Was it 1990?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm conflated. It was one of the last Master System games. Yes, there you go. Right, okay. And then made it to the Genesis. Spider-Man on the Genesis.

It wasn't, I remember this one not being very good. Yeah, I remember fighting a lot of zoo animals in this game. Yes, there are. Oh my God, Griffin, you're right. It's also quite short. But yeah, this one, I'm going to give this one a D as well. Okay, Spider-Man the Video Game, 1991 arcade game. An arcade game?

Yep. I'm not sure. Oh, okay, so much for expert. Spider-Man. Hey, dude, I was a child. Spider-Man. I'm not sure. Oh, okay. So much for expert. Spider-Man. Hey, dude. I was a child. Spider-Man. I was a child.

Return of the Sinister Six on the NES Master System and Game Gear. Yeah, now we're talking. See, this is not a good game. There are very few good games until you get to the 2000s. Honestly, a lot of them were pretty bad what about spider-man and x-men in arcades revenge uh that one is so fucking chunky you would not believe it you would not believe it you would not believe how bad they made these look look at the can you look at a screenshot for this game it looks like fucking garbage i mean the box art looks pretty cool it's so yeah i know it's so chunky it looks bad it feels bad all the x-men

feel like junk this is a d um spider-man and venom maximum car are we skipping are we are we mindfully skipping all the game boy games it just requested i specifically requested that i mean you can't see anything on those these screens they are uh very small spider-man and venom maximum carnage uh the spider-man stuff feels okay the venom stuff feels uh uh this is the snes one right yes yeah yes uh the venom stuff feels like they do have some cool the box art is fucking good can you see the box somewhere it's just we'll include it in the newsletter it's it's killer it also has like two little pictures of spider-man and venom at the bottom so like you're just sure like oh yeah they'll be there yeah i don't love i don't

love this uh this is like a very straight up side scrolling beat-em-up kind of thing um i'm gonna give this one a c okay 1995 was a crazy year for spider-man games because there was the amazing spider-man lethal foes on the snes lethal foes i don't know that that ever came to america okay well there was also venom slash spider-man separation anxiety on the snes and uh genesis yes uh that's another one so this is from a time in the 90s where the anti-hero was very good. So do you remember everything in the 90s was about

Spawn and stuff like that. Spawn and trying to make Venom happen. I mean, very similar to the one that came before it is that side-scrolling beat-em-up thing. I think it's a very not great use of Spider-Man if he can't be swinging around.

This is a D, too. This is a D. Okay, 1995 also had a game called Spider-Man on the Genesis. That might be the same game. I can't tell. Let me look. This may be an adaptation of the animated series that was going at this time. Oh, yeah, it was. Yeah, based of the animated series that was going at this time.

Oh, yeah, it was. Yeah, based on the animated series. This is like a side-scrolling adventure thing. I don't think this is very fun. It is better than the beat-em-up thing, though, because there is a little bit of platforming. If you're not platforming, it's not Spider-Man. I'll give this a C.

Okay, The Amazing Spider-Man Web of Fire on the 32X. I'll take this one, Juice. Thank you, Griff. It fucking sucks. Yes. It feels like they made this one for $14 in six days. It is not good. The animation is kind of cool.

It feels terrible to play. Everything about it is bad. It's just you going through mazes where you have to figure out which walls and floors you have to punch through and but it's not really communicated very well and it it looks and feels and sounds like we can agree though of course that it is a fucking sick name yeah sure that's such a cool name for a video game it's uh it's a shame that it was better um there's a game called spider-man the sinister six which is the only game on this list that does not have a Wikipedia entry.

Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one. Okay, we're gonna skip ahead to where I think Justin's meat and potatoes are. Spider-Man 2000. Yeah, so this is when we are starting to get into actual decent Spider-Man games. This is the Neversoft one, right? Neversoft was the first company

to actually kind of figure it out. They do have open web swinging. You can swing where you want to. The animation is cool. It looks like the 90s TV show, but it's got its own sort of vibe.

It's not like doing anything unique with Spider-Man itself, but it does it's got its own sort of vibe. It's not like doing anything, um, uh, unique with Spider-Man itself, but it does like feel the most like Spider-Man out of any game. This is a new era. I give this one a B. Okay.

This is probably the most intimate of the Spider-Man games. Spider-Man two enter Electro. Yeah. Uh, very, very, very similar. And animations are cleaned up. you got a bit more to do

uh it is not a gigantic leap forward over the first one i give it is this the one that they delayed because it was supposed to come out in september 2001 um yeah so they yes this game was supposed to come out in september 2001 and they delayed it so that they could remove references to the World Trade Center. And what they did is they just, the two towers are there, but they just kind of made a little bridge between them. So it just looks like one sort of oddly shaped building. And they were like, good, good enough. Publish, print it. it's gold um they also changed some level names um they had levels called crash flight downward spiral aces high and top of

the world which they changed all those level names as well wild 2002s oh, did I rank that? Yeah, that was a B. 2002's Spider-Man. This was the first movie game in Spider-Man the movie. This is okay. They were doing some interesting stuff with bringing in Peter Parker. The city is really the best it has looked. The city is really the best it has looked. You got, I think, I think Tobey Maguire did the voice in this one.

And it is very half-assed. I mean, really, young Tobey is drunk on the power of being Spider-Man. He did not show up for this recording. The city is sick, though. I give it a, I'm going to give this one a B, too. Okay. Spider-Man 2, also from the same developer, Treyarch. How many Spider-Man 2s at this point are we up to? Probably three or four.

Yes. Yeah, we've done a lot of Spider-Man 2s. The others may as well not exist. Yes. This is it. This one looks a lot better. Like the evolution of the visuals is coming together really nicely at this point. Have you seen it recently?

Have you like watched gameplay recently? No. Is it bad? It does not age well. Well, compared to the past though is what I'm saying. Yeah, but it came out in 2004, which is like pretty close to GTA. And it looks like a dinosaur compared to gta 3 but it feels fun you get little girls balloons out of the sky you

deliver pizzas to the worst song ever put in a video game yes i i will hear no uh no ill speaking of spider-man 2 the movie yeah i think i might give this one a actually i think that this one is gonna get an a i'm sorry that doesn't look up to your standards that's okay okay uh ultimate spider-man 2005 uh b no c actually i okay ultimate spider-man looks the best uh that but it is a big step backward with like the uh level design it takes it like it makes it feel a lot more controlled uh and you lose uh lose the free swinging. Was this the cel-shaded one? No, we're not there yet.

Yes, this is the cel-shaded one. Oh, yeah, I like that one. I think Spider-Man 2, I'm trying to remember. I missed an important point in the evolution. I think Spider-Man 2 is the first one that does webs that anchor to a specific point that you are swinging. Rather than it just being in space, basically. Yes. There's a lot of this web swinging in this new Marvel Spider-Man 2 that is built on the shoulders of what they did with web swinging in Spider-Man 2.

It was an important game. Yeah. Treyarch nailed it. It's really important. They are the first ones to start to figure it 2. Yeah. It was very, an important game. Yeah, Treyarch nailed it. It's a really important, like, they are the first ones to start to figure it out. Yeah.

Spider-Man 3, 2007. Spider-Man 3, is that when they started hitting the quick time events? They started to do some real quick time magic. Some real stinkers there. This was also based on the movie.

It has the great, very meme heavyheavy QuickTime event where Spider-Man swings into a building to disarm a bomb, but if you miss the QTE, you just land next to it, and then it quick zooms in on a woman's face next to the bomb, and she just says,

I'm going to die. Boom. It's great. It's really fucking funny every time. It's okay, though. I'm going to give it, I'm going to give this one a C. Spider-Man Friend or Foe, also 2007.

This is an incredible stinker of a game. You would not believe it. It is a sort of retelling of the first, like the movies, but the bad guys are like fun, and you like team up with them this is a b-nox joint and uh it is a bizarre unenjoyable uh thing it is it is bad is a bad game that one gets a i'll give that one a d spider-man web of shadows 2008 fucking hell we're really getting into it at this point um web of shadows is the last good one of this era web of shadows is actually pretty decent you have some cool uh like team ups um some combo abilities that are kind of cool where you get like

wolverine to do a combo attack with you, shit like that. So that stuff is cool to be able to call in Wolverine and Venom and stuff like that. And they do some good stuff with combat in this one too. You start to see more of a combo meter that builds up to these super abilities. Yeah, I'll give this one an A. Yeah, contextually, an a spider-man shattered dimensions 2010 okay this is where it's getting bad so they had the great idea of putting in

the other dimension you could be like noir spider-man and right yes um and it is ambitious that's the word griff that's the word it is ambitious Ambitious. That's the word, Griff. That's the word. It is ambitious. They're trying to do a lot of interesting stuff, and they don't quite get there. You're also losing... My biggest problem with it is

you are taking a step away from the open world thing, and you're back to level-based, which just feels like such a downgrade after you've been able to swing around all of of new york it it is uh that is my big problem with it gameplay wise it's sound but like i i feel like at this point not having the open world is is a big upset big ups to mph though for getting in on this one on peter on peter parker yeah this was mph He was also doing it on an MTV animated series. Oh, that's right. At the time.

That I think is how he got the gig. Spider-Man Edge of Time, 2011. The worst. The worst. I fucking hate Edge of Time. It is a third-person game where you are switching back and forth between 2099 Spider-Man and regular Spider-Man.

It all takes place in one building. It is unbelievably garbage. I think this one, my review of this one is still out there. I hate it. Edge of Time, it sucks. Looks like you gave this one a 2.5 out of 5 on the Joystick Star Scale. That seems pretty generous. That sounds like me. What? That's generous, 2.5 out of time. It sucks. Looks like you gave this one a 2.5 out of 5 on the joystick star scale. That seems pretty generous. That sounds like me. What? That's generous. 2.5

out of 5. Uh, well, they made us both. AOL made us both of all the scores. You know. No. That's not true. I mean, imagine a game getting a 5 out of 10, man. I mean, it functions. I'm bringing in some baggage to it, too, which I'm trying to recognize. The Amazing Spider-Man

2012. Okay. There's a lot of Beenox games I'm trying to recognize. The Amazing Spider-Man 2012. Okay. There's a lot of Beanox games I'm noticing. Beanox got their hands on this one and they did not let go. Yeah. This one is like, eh. It's open world Spider-Man. It's a return to open world Spider-Man, which is cool.

It just doesn't feel, it's not that fun with like the combat and the gameplay wise. The animation of it, especially the swinging looks great i mean it's so nice to see like a fully rendered like spider-man back and i have also for the record i've always liked the amazing spider-man costume with the yellow eyes and the sneaker inspired boots and stuff i've always liked it that's not relevant uh b c c uh okay so the next one is the amazing spider-man 2 came out in 2014 uh is this also b-nox this is also b-nox before they made b-nox stop they're not they weren't allowed to do anymore this is b-nox's last one i think yeah this is the last uh i don't think it's the last Beenox game, but this is another bad game. Man, I'm watching a video of it.

This game came out in 2014. That's wild. It looks so shitty. It looks really bad. It's easily worse than the one before it. They were trying to keep up with the release of the movies, which is a formula for disaster i think anytime you're trying to time with movie releases uh this one is gonna get a d okay and that actually yielded the longest break in any of the spider-man game releases yeah it was dry dry four years went by before marvel's

spider-man in 2018 on the playstation 4 i, this is obviously the high watermark at the time. This is, I don't need to contextualize it too much. It is a great original take on Spider-Man, of which there have been so few. It's probably arguably the first. I mean, the game's always been sort of like non-canonical, but in terms of its willful diversion from the canonical Spider-Man storyline, I think it's a first in that regard, which is super duper smart. I will give this one an A. Okay. Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales in 2020.

Yeah. I mean, it's just a better version of Spider-Man. Yeah. It's going to get an S. They got rid of all the stuff that didn't work. They tightened it up. They have a more interesting main character. The writing's better. And especially if you're playing on the PlayStation 5, it's a fucking

spectacle. So yeah, that gets an S. As does Spider-Man 2. I mean, as long as we're... I'll just skip it because we just talked about it. But yeah. It's on a really good trajectory now. It's a really smart way of using licensed property. and you see the pitfalls of it before this i think like trying to time it to movies or comics or whatever's happening

i think is is i think it's really cool to have their own franchise and there have been very few great spider-man games i don't know why i played them all a lot more than superman though that's true yeah this game has i would say spider-, I would say, Spider-Man 2. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, sorry, has better flying than any, maybe any superhero game I've ever played, but definitely any Superman game I've ever played. Man, I meant to say also, in Spider-Man 2, they give you so many abilities and powers. many abilities and powers. What is cool about the challenge of this game that I think a lot of superhero games where you can, you know,

you basically out maneuver out power, anybody you're up, up against the challenge of this game is keeping all the plates spinning. It's like the challenge that they've created is trying to remember all of the different things you can do in a given moment. Cause if you're not like on top of that you'll regularly go a long time without forgetting oh i have a bomb that sucks everybody into the middle of the room that i can use on them um that's a really it's a really

smart way of fixing that like power imbalance it's just making you so powerful that you get a little overwhelmed with the options okay we did we did it. Well done, Justin. I'm very impressed. Good work, buddy. I feel good about it. Your life is not wasted. There are a couple of good... Not all the portable ones are bad for whatever it's worth. We have to cut it off at some point.

Anything on the front of honorable mentions? anything for on the front of honorable mentions um i got in the analog pocket limited edition transparent purple it looks sick as fuck uh and uh i reached into my considerable collection of game boy color and game boy advanced games and pulled out a pokemon traded card game for the game boy color uh just because i was messing around with the iPad app. And I played a bit of that. The thing I spent the most time on when we were traveling, I read and finished The Way of Kings,

which is the first of the Stormlight Archive series from Brandon Sanderson. Good epic fantasy, big ass book, like 1500 page, big old boy um but but really really sick um i think i liked it even more than the mistborn books which is the other trilogy of his that i've read um they they are very comparable i think but i read the first three of these and i tried and it took too long before i read the fourth one and it was like i was trying to read a german textbook about bridge engineering yeah it's uh it's a it's a it's an

astonishing amount of world building that goes into these books i couldn't understand i feel the same way we're like i spent a couple of months reading this book and i finished it and it was great and then i told rachel how long it was and she was like you could have read like four or five other books in the span of time and that's it's tough to kind of reconcile that i am i'm super into it and i'm very curious in how the story develops with the idea of jumping into the next just cracking another one at the first page is like so daunting yeah um but it it uh it rules i've been i've been really reading a a ton more sort of sci-fi fantasy stuff uh over the last couple years and this it's been a uh it's been very exciting and cool so it's a good book i played

the free dlc for teardown called art vandals I think I put it a while ago and I might have mentioned it a while ago, but I went back to it and decided to beat it just because more DLC is about to come out as part of their console release. The game is finally hitting consoles in November. And man, I wish there were more games like this. The vibe of it is like

the closest that I've experienced to the vibe of Tears of the the kingdom just in terms of the like non-linear puzzle solving elements of this game and uh i just fucking love it and it i think they've done some optimization on the steam deck because it really does super well on the steam deck uh the fan doesn't even kick on while i'm playing this game which is pretty impressive because crazy crazy crazy shit happens. So if you like nonlinear puzzle-solving games

where you blow houses up using sledgehammers, check out Teardown. I reviewed Super Mario Bros. Wonder over at Polygon, and I know that we will talk about it next week, so I won't say a whole lot other than it is absolutely fantastic and i love it on plants advisement i read uh killers of the flower moon um which i the same author wrote uh lost city of z which i had read before and really liked um this is a it's a marvelous book um it is it is a very it's a marvelous book. Um, it is, it is a fair, it is a difficult bracing read about a chapter in American history that I was

like, shamefully pretty unaware of. Um, but that seems to be thematic to the book, I guess that, that is a, an aspect of it. And it is,

uh, really, really tough, but really, I think, uh, fascinating and, uh, illuminating and but really, I think, fascinating and illuminating and absolutely captivating. I listened to literally the entire thing on my journey back from New York Comic Con. Couldn't stop. It is fascinating and well worth a read, I think. Are you going to try the wager after this?

You know what? It is on the list, but I am currently, I went back to Shadow and Bone, and the second in that series is Siege and Storm. I think it's called the whole Grishaverse thing. I just needed a little brain bath. I like to mix it up, but yeah, that is on my list. Cool. I think we did it. I wanted to mix it up, but yeah, that is on my list. Cool.

I think we did it. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the Besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Forry Kust, IRD Brandon, and I'm in pain, constant pain. Thank you for writing reviews for the Besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone else for sharing the show or subscribing to the newsletter at besties.fan which is a lovely place to recap uh spider-man games and the other games we talked about and just sharing the love that is the community oh you can also submit questions when we do reader mail uh we pull them from the comments of the newsletter now so go over to besties.fan if you haven't done that yet oh and one other special treat this uh this week a photo of all four of us together for the first time in like a decade

wow yeah yeah i know incredible see how age comes for everyone we look fucking good like we do we look so much better than we did 10 years ago yeah we weren't eating really good food for us then. You know, like a supply of only freezer pizzas doesn't do the body well. I mean, that wasn't it for me. It's just as I've gone sort of silver. There's a distinguished nature to my beauty now. You're a mystique. You're right.

All right. That's going to do it for us, folks. Until next – what are we doing next week super mario just said it yeah it's super mario wonder plant kind of took the wind out of our all right yes i wonder if you asked what else i was playing that's what i was playing mario's back he's back and he's done taking your shit pratt is back and he's ready to party next week on The Besties, be sure to join us again next week

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