This game is so shoddy and buggy yet is somehow more fun than it has any right to be. It honestly feels like a reskin of some generic beat em up. The four playable characters look different, but play essentially the same. There is a "special" that is kind of different for each character but functionally the same. Spiderman shoots out a weird web thing, Black Cat swings her whip, Namor punches out lighting and Hawkeye shoots his bow. The bow attack is the only move that feels different. It can be inconsistent to pull off this move. You have to push the jump and attack button at the same time with little room for error. This resulted in me using the special half the time I tried. Whenever you use a special, you lose HP.

What's strange about this game is how HP works. The more credits you put into the game, the more your HP increases. It seemed to be roughly 1 credit = 400 HP. Most enemies hit for about 4 HP (excluding bosses). If you put in 5 dollars you basically have 8000 HP. It's not too hard to avoid damage either so you basically become immortal.

The game also makes use of vector scaling. In the first level you fight Venom. After beating him he absorbs this weird stone tablet that makes him gigantic. No idea what the tablet was because it doesn't come back for the rest of the game... But when he becomes big, the screen zooms out and becomes a shooter (not a good shooter mind you). In these shooting sequences, you can actually just ignore every enemy and walk to the end. Unlike normal gameplay, there aren't soft locks that force you to kill all the enemies until you get to the boss.

Bosses die quick and can be stun locked. There were a few times where my friends and I formed a sandwich around the boss and punched him to death before he could even move.

So yeah, gameplay is pretty trivial, there are constant issues with layering in the graphics where shadows will cover player models or you will clip through a surface because of how poorly made the game is. The best part is "the walk." You can't run in this game and all characters walk at a dawdling pace. Spiderman looks drunk the way he lazily sways his arms around. When he punches, he has his feet planted firmly next to each other and leans forward, not using his hips. It's impressive. The most terrifying part of this game are in the final stage's ape men. They have rubbery arms, potbellies and shriek like banshees. The way their bodies move is pure nightmare fuel.

As mentioned in the title above, I was very curious how many people worked on this game. When credits rolled... not a single credit was listed besides it was made by Sega. Clearly they were relying on brand recognition between Sega and Spider man. It got me playing, so mission accomplished.

Fun time with friends though. Just bring beer. It is basically "so bad It's good."

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be required…” -The Gospel of Luke 12:48 [NASB]

In the 90’s, Sega and Marvel Comics came together to produce a Spider-Man arcade game, one of the forgotten Spidey games in history. I remembered this game chatting with readers in our comment sections since we recently covered beat ’em ups in our Elemental Challenge, and also because they’ve released yet another Spider-Man movie, Homecoming. In case you don’t want to see Uncle Ben get shot and hear his “Obligation of Nobility” again (spoiler, Uncle Ben dies?), or if you don’t want to stir up old nightmares about Tobey Maguire’s cry face, you can read the following review on a Spider-Man video game that’s actually good. Please disregard that Sinister Six game on the NES… it’s LJN.

Spider-Man: the Videogame was something that really fascinated me as a kid, for a few reasons. One, it was a beat ’em up, in other words: a highly accessible and straightforward coin-munching romp representative of a genre I enjoyed. I always sought out these sorts of games in the arcades I frequented and infrequented.

Two, it featured frickin’ Spider-Man. Spider-Man and later Batman were my childhood favorites before I turned to the dark side (colloquially DC Comics). Spider-Man comic books were the earliest comics I remember buying with my own ill-gotten gains. The 90’s Spider-Man animated series was a perennial staple in my diet of cartoons, until I grew up and wondered why they all talked at the pace of Speed Racer. I loved Spidey’s candy-colored world, his villains, and his powers. His snarky optimism was a big draw for me as a kid. I collected Spider-Man action figures and trading cards (remember those Marvel cards you put together in sets of 9 to make bigger images?).

Reason three why this game captured my heart: I only saw and played it once. I never played it again, as a kid. I now remember looking for it in the arcades whenever I went but its elusiveness eventually let it slip out of my mind. I wouldn’t rediscover it until I was an adult and then all those memories came back, how I first encountered that four-player cabinet in some dark, brick room at an airport, how I pumped in quarter after quarter but had to give up anyway when it was time to go. Walking away from an arcade machine you’d just put real money into before getting a game over, just so you know, makes for a horrible, sinking feeling in your gut, causing you to hate your parents until dinner time.

Spider-Man: the Videogame was notable for the sheer amount of characters that populated it. Their designs are based on the work of Spidey artists from the 60’s through 80’s. A lot of these, if not all of them, are the character designs I usually think of when you talk about Spider-Man, Black Cat, Kingpin, Hobgoblin, Scorpion, Venom, and so on. The game is populated with tons of bosses and mini-bosses that cover the bulk of Spidey’s baddies but there are also other Marvel antagonists thrown in, namely Doctor Doom, the last boss.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/spider-man-the-videogame-1991/