Great Scott

Being a comic book geek in my youth, i do check in on my favourite series every now and again. Since Activision's first Spider-Man on the PSOne, i don't think i have ever played a bad spidey game with the last one being Ultimate Spider-Man. I have thankfully avoided the last few not because i heard they weren't any good but i just couldn't follow the direction of the game whether they were trying to be faithful to the comic or the movie.

Now the Amazing Spider-Man series is approaching its 600th issue, I was an avid collector after the 300th issue during the McFarlane/Larsen run and dropped out sometime after Mark Baegley began his lengthy run. Many years later i was introduced to the Danger Girls series which opened my eyes to a different kind of American comic outside the spandex hero genre. It also made me a fan of J Scott Campbell, who reportedly is a huge Nintendo fan and got his work first published in the very pages of Nintendo Power. Now Campbell is also pretty fond of the ole web-head as he has done some guest cover art for the Amazing Spider-Man series. Let's just say to be able to do guest cover art on a series like Amazing you must have a lot of clout and Campbell rightfully does. I planned to pick up the landmark 600th issue and also the issue after which Campbell has done the cover art for, having missed his last few i don't intend to miss this one being a fan of the black cat.

Where Nothing Amazing Happens

My gaming has been pretty inactive lately ever since finishing RE5 so naturally you can expect less updates as well. Playoff basketball and and comic reading are among the other things occupying my time thereby influencing me to play a little bit of NBA 07 on the PS3 and the PSOne Spider-man which are not exactly great blog material.

Fear not, things should get a little bit more interesting this week as my copies of Madworld and Yakuza 2 are likely to be making its way back from New York courtesy of stringfellow.

Does What A Spider Can

There was an article recently that suggested that superheroes are just too powerful to be portrayed accurately in video games. I on the other hand don't seem to think so, in fact just about the only sandbox-styled games that i would play other than SEGA's yakuza series happened to be comic superheroes games.

Back before free-roaming games became possible on console, there was one noteworthy superhuman game on the PSOne simply called spider-man. While it isn't sandbox-styled, it was one of the first that actually lets you do what a spider can. It was a game was made for fans of the comic book, from the rogue gallery of villians included to the hidden comic covers and bonus costumes spidey have wore over the years. It also takes its cues from the animated series with spidey voice-over done by the same lead actor and narration from stan 'the man' lee. You don't have to be a comic book collector to enjoy this game but you will definitely appreciate the little touches thrown in for long-time fans. It also benefit from the timing because the sam raimi's spider-man movies have yet to be released so the developers have the free reign to create an original storyline and pull the characters from the beloved comic book series. The problem i find with most superhero games these days are the developers aren't sure whether to follow the movie franchise or the comic storyline, most of the time meshing the movie plot with some familiar characters from the comic creating one fine mess. With the comic book industry in a state of flux, the movie franchise often take precedence these days so it's nice to pull one a retro game from a time when things are in the right perspective.