{"id":5595,"date":"2018-09-10T21:19:38","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T04:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=5595"},"modified":"2018-09-15T10:52:38","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T17:52:38","slug":"ultimate-spider-man-ultimate-venom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/5595","title":{"rendered":"Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Venom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Treyarch Spider-Man games are notable for their lack of continuity with each other, even as they build on each other technically. It&#8217;s kind of like <em>Final Fantasy<\/em> that way, but a little weirder, because they&#8217;re all adapted from different versions of the Marvel universe, and feature different versions of the same characters. Their first <em>Spider-Man<\/em> was set in the &#8220;Earth-616&#8221; universe of the comics, where Spider-Man&#8217;s extensive rogues gallery is an established fact that the player is expected to be at least somewhat familiar with. <span class=\"footnote_referrer\"><a role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToReference_5595_1('footnote_plugin_reference_5595_1_1');\" onkeypress=\"footnote_moveToReference_5595_1('footnote_plugin_reference_5595_1_1');\" ><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_5595_1_1\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\">1<\/sup><\/a><span id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_5595_1_1\" class=\"footnote_tooltip\"><strong>[15 Sept 2018]<\/strong> Correction: The first Treyarch Spider-Man game was in fact a tie-in game for the 2002 Spider-Man movie. The game I describe here was developed by Neversoft, not Treyarch, and released two years earlier. Both of these games are titled &#8220;Spider-Man&#8221;.<\/span><\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_5595_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_5595_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top right', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });<\/script> <em>Spider-Man 2<\/em> was a tie-in game for the movie of the same name. The third game is <em>Ultimate Spider-Man<\/em>, and it&#8217;s based on the <em>Ultimate Spider-Man<\/em> comics series, part of the Ultimate Marvel line. I frankly don&#8217;t know a lot about Ultimate Marvel, but my impression is that it was in part an attempt at a more accessible Marvel universe, one that wasn&#8217;t dragging four decades of confusing and ill-planned backstory behind it. Characters were simplified to their most iconic forms, or at least their most commonly-familiar ones.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, Peter Parker is still in high school in this game. But he&#8217;s already an accepted part of New York&#8217;s superhero scene, with the result that other heroes can make random cameos. Johnny &#8220;Human Torch&#8221; Storm, for example, just shows up apropos of nothing early in the game to challenge Spidey to a race. Wolverine just shows up in a bar in one scene. At the same time, Peter is new enough at this that he hasn&#8217;t met very many of his villains yet. Boss fights tend to be preceded by introductions.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, the designers made the very strange choice of starting the game <em>halfway through<\/em> Venom&#8217;s origin story. The intro cutscene rushes through a condensed version of the &#8220;black costume&#8221; story &#8212; the Ultimate version, in which the living-symbiote-disguised-as-a-unitard is created in a laboratory, instead of being from outer space. We hear Peter narrate how the costume enhanced his abilities and made him feel great, but we don&#8217;t get to see or experience that for ourselves. Instead, we pick things up when the symbiote first bonds with Eddie Brock.<\/p>\n<p>The base concept of Venom is &#8220;Spider-Man but he&#8217;s a monster&#8221;, so playing as Venom is broadly similar to playing as Spidey, but he doesn&#8217;t quite have the same capabilities. The controls handle differently. His movements are more forceful than graceful. His climbing animation looks like it&#8217;s damaging the building. There are no &#8220;events&#8221; for Venom, no opportunities to rescue innocents. Instead, you can grab passersby with your tentacles and absorb their life essence to heal yourself. (There&#8217;s a nice little gameplay gag about this when Venom fights Wolverine in that bar I mentioned: whenever Wolverine retreats to heal himself, you have to decide whether to whack him with a tentacle to stop it or take advantage of the lull to grab a cowering biker or two.) And, generally, Venom is more powerful than Spidey, so his challenges are correspondingly more demanding. Venom is constantly under attack by heavily-armed soldiers sent to retrieve the symbiote.<\/p>\n<p>Also, the Venom scenes always happen at night. For the first several days of the story, there&#8217;s a consistent pattern of: Peter goes to school; Peter goes to the Daily Bugle; there&#8217;s a supervillain fight at one of those two points; Peter goes home to Aunt May; and then it&#8217;s night and there&#8217;s a Venom sequence. And it strikes me that this structure makes a whole lot more sense for the part of the story that they skipped over: the part where the symbiote is still with Peter, and takes over his body every night to go crime-fighting without his awareness. I speculate that this was the intended design at some point in the game&#8217;s development.<\/p>\n<div class=\"speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container\"> <div class=\"footnote_container_prepare\"><p><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_label pointer\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_5595_1();\">&#x202F;<\/span><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\" style=\"display: none;\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_5595_1();\">[<a id=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_5595_1\">+<\/a>]<\/span><\/p><\/div> <div id=\"footnote_references_container_5595_1\" style=\"\"><table class=\"footnotes_table footnote-reference-container\"><caption class=\"accessibility\">References<\/caption> <tbody> \r\n\r\n<tr class=\"footnotes_plugin_reference_row\"> <th scope=\"row\" class=\"footnote_plugin_index_combi pointer\"  onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor_5595_1('footnote_plugin_tooltip_5595_1_1');\"><a id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_5595_1_1\" class=\"footnote_backlink\"><span class=\"footnote_index_arrow\">&#8593;<\/span>1<\/a><\/th> <td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\"><strong>[15 Sept 2018]<\/strong> Correction: The first Treyarch Spider-Man game was in fact a tie-in game for the 2002 Spider-Man movie. The game I describe here was developed by Neversoft, not Treyarch, and released two years earlier. Both of these games are titled &#8220;Spider-Man&#8221;.<\/td><\/tr>\r\n\r\n <\/tbody> <\/table> <\/div><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> function footnote_expand_reference_container_5595_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_5595_1').show(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_5595_1').text('\u2212'); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container_5595_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_5595_1').hide(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_5595_1').text('+'); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_5595_1() { if (jQuery('#footnote_references_container_5595_1').is(':hidden')) { footnote_expand_reference_container_5595_1(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container_5595_1(); } } function footnote_moveToReference_5595_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_5595_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor_5595_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_5595_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } }<\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Treyarch Spider-Man games are notable for their lack of continuity with each other, even as they build on each other technically. It&#8217;s kind of like Final Fantasy that way, but a little weirder, because they&#8217;re all adapted from different versions of the Marvel universe, and feature different versions of the same characters. Their first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5595"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5604,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions\/5604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}