Kids today love Spider-Man; Marvel has done the best job possible with marketing. Stan Lee wasn’t shy about licensing, but they went from Mego Dolls and underwear to high quality animated cartoons featuring everything they’ve ever made; every kid knows at least a dozen of their characters and they aren’t starved for options to see them. I remember being 10, dreaming of just getting a single comic book with Ghost Rider, who I had seen in just the ads of other comics. The blood would have exploded through my eyes if he was casually riding his bike on TV alongside Rhino, Hulk and Black Panther like on this show.
The Playstation game in question has a different name every time I look it up for something, it was clearly and plainly called “Spider-Man” when I bought it, that shifted at some point to “Marvel’s Spider-Man” and now just “Marvel Spider-Man.” I used to care, I don’t any more, unless they were co-promoting with a movie, everyone just wants to call their game “Spider-Man” but they can’t because there have been so many. Marvel Spider-Man (2018) for the PS4 (and I guess the PS5 and Steam by now) is the latest in a long line of fun Spider-Man video games.
I never saw the Scott Adams text adventure. Rather, one of the first ones I remember is this little puzzle game from 1989. You’re Spider-Man, sure, but you are playing him as more of an avatar to solve platform puzzles. Mysterio has kidnapped Mary Jane, as noted in the opening non-cinematic, comic book style presentation, and then you’ll never see him or any other comic book character again until you get to the very last board. It looked great for its time (I think it looks good now) and gave a good taste of what moving Spider-Man around might eventually get to in games.
My nephew is three and a half and when he is at my house he asks if he can play “Pac-Man in boots” and Spider-Man, and on Sunday we played PS4 Spider-Man together. I was happy to see him have the gamepad do things. There is a “move” in the game where Spidey – by hitting L1 and R1 on the PS4 gamepad, will web a garbage can, manhole cover or post office box and spin it around and use it as an attack. He can do that now. I only had to show him what “L1” and “R1” was once and he had that move down. The secret to learning at this age is to have the positive feedback of a bunch of mail go flying when something crunches into a brick wall.
The controls for this game are pretty tight, though I had an Osia hearing device installed in/on my head this week. I am pretty sure that it runs interference with a wireless PS4 gamepad. I have been told by an audiologist that the transmission for the Osia travels the distance of a layer of skin and that’s it, so it is extremely unlikely that my hypothesis of interference is scientifically correct. That’s okay, they’ve doubted all the most brilliant scientists in the world at one time or another. I will be using this discovery – found not in the lab by book learners and titrators, but by a real person (me) having a real human experience – to get my Ph.D, which will be especially apropos, because a graduation cap is one of the very few hats a person with a BAHA device can wear.
He was avoiding the areas of the game’s map where there were some generic bad guys because he didn’t think he could defeat them all, so he was just using that move to throw garbage cans near regular New Yorkers that were out at night. He was concerned that he might hit them, which was sweet in its own right, but I got to basically tell him that anything he might do wasn’t that out of the ordinary to the people that live in this game’s city.
He is able to jump (The “x” button, it’s always time for a Sweet Pickles review) and shoot a web to start slinging, and he’s good at running up the sides of buildings. PS4 Spider-Man is a great game for adults, I just want to make that clear. They implemented an entire living city, it positively pops, the missions are fun, there’s a zillion things you can make Spidey too (a zillion VERBS!), you can “be” Mary Jane at one point, it’s easily one of the 200 best games ever made. But I don’t want to talk about any of that.
My nephew got Spidey on the roof of a tall building. There was a much shorter one below us. It was night, and the lower building had one room with a light on. I said something to the effect of, “Hey, that one – the light’s on, I bet someone is working in there!” And my nephew started shooting webs at that window. I laughed when he did that, and he joined me. He asked me to pretend like I was working and he shot at the window in the game and I pretended that my work was interrupted and that I was surprised by the web slop smacking the window behind me. We enjoyed a video game in the purest way possible. We were just using it to for imaginative play.
It had nothing to do with the actual game. Which, again, is great and you should get it. It had nothing to do with anything: no cheevos were won, no plot was advanced. But it was something I’ll always remember. Just how much fun we had, just spinning webs at the city itself. I had so many great video game memories growing up. It was, as they say, amazing to make some new ones with him.