REVIEW - Spider-Man | GBC | 2000

GENRE(S): Action / Platform
RELEASED: September 1, 2000
AVAILABLE ON: GBC
DEVELOPER(S): Vicarious Visions
PUBLISHER(S): Activision

While Neversoft was working on the PlayStation game entitled Spider-Man, Vicarious Visions was cooking up a handheld "version" of the game for the Game Boy Color, also to be published by Activision and scheduled for release a few weeks after the big one. Although it came out around the same time and has the same cover art as its home console counterpart, Game Boy Color's Spider-Man is naturally a wholly different game than the eventual multi-platform title, but also has a totally different storyline. The big one saved Spidey's reputation on home consoles, did the little one do the same for him on handhelds?

No.

An explosion at Dr. Curt Connors' lab leads Spider-Man to the trail of a new, mysterious villain, who has managed to enlist the help of Venom and Hobgoblin.

Activision's Spider-Man resume is glazed with good, great, if not fantastic titles, starting with Spider-Man on the PlayStation. Fully aware of the Game Boy Color's limitations, I expected this game to be of great quality of its own kind, perhaps a good shot of the unique on the side. Well, the Game Boy Color version of Spider-Man is your extremely standard, run-of-the-mill platformer. Not quite the stain in the history of the franchise as the three games for the original Game Boy were, but after such a strong performance as the console "version" of the game, its quality is disappointing, to say the least.

They should've named this
Spider-Man: Attack of the
NES Sprites.

The graphics and sound are pretty good. The last Game Boy Color games I played were the Mega Man Xtreme games, which looked awful - in comparison to those games, Spider-Man looks great. The animation is smooth and everything's just dandy on the visual front. The music's more than a little bit repetitive, but professionally sequenced and quite catchy, especially the title tune.

The controls are the game's downfall. The scheme is clever enough, but Spider-Man's fast and floaty movement just isn't for this hectic environment. Collision detection fails constantly, enemies spawn like crazy, and very often you'll find yourself surrounded, punching and shooting web like there's no tomorrow and still getting your ass kicked 'cause your attacks just won't connect, instead they go straight through enemies. The levels are lengthy and repetitive, and with just about the whole game wide open from the beginning, you won't always know where you need to go to make progress. It's frustrating as hell to make it to the end of a level just to find you cannot proceed from there. The storyline is thinner than a twig. They could've at least used the storyline from the console counterpart; this is kind of like an origin story for the Lizard, and not nearly the best one we've seen. The intro's cool, though.

I've heard the sequel's more like it, so I'll head into that without further due. This was quite the disappointment, but like I said, not the worst handheld Spider-Man game by any measure.

UPS
+ Light entertainment, easy to learn
+ Good graphics and sound

DOWNS
- Bad design
- Fast and floaty
- Run-of-the-mill
- Generic storyline

< 5.8 >