SM2 vs USM

There's an article in the Escapist that discusses Spider-Man 2 and Ultimate Spider-Man.  One thing the article talks up is how you occasionally, in Spider-Man 2, might have a side-mission and a main-mission competing for your attention.  Truly the dillemma of a hero - do you make it to your meeting with Mary Jane or do you stop the mugging?  I have to shamefully admit that I strenuously argued for cutting that feature due to the technical headaches it was causing us;  and the only reason we kept it was because it would also have caused plenty of headaches to cut it.  Not that I didn't love the feature, mind you.

They go on to say that USM fails because switching from controlling the hero to the villain ruins your identification with the hero.  Hmm.  I have to disagree.  Venom isn't the real villain of the piece;  it's more like a buddy movie where one of the buddies likes to feed on innocent humans.  I do think there was a subtle flaw in USM, and that was the bifurcation of the city-exploring half of the game and the story half of the game.  The way USM works is you, as Spider-Man, do a number of side events in the city - and then you can trigger a story mission.  The story mission can be about either Spider-Man or Venom, (I was tempted to say "you or venom" there, adding weight to Spanner's point, I suppose) and even if it's about Spider-Man it might take place in a much different location from where you triggered the mission.  The end result is that the illusion that you're in a world is smashed - which, in my mind, is the whole reason to have a continuous world in the first place.  To the USM team's credit, they didn't want it to be that way - originally, you were going to be able to manually switch between Spidey and Venom and pick up where you left off along either storyline - but time pressures at the end got in the way.

Another thing the article talks about is "Being Peter Parker" - this is, of course, something that comes up at the beginning of each iteration.  In the movie, he's Peter Parker for the majority of the screen time.  In the game, you're Peter Parker for maybe 1%.  Is that right?

There are a zillion reasons why we never pushed the Peter Parker angle.  For one:  it's hard.  How do you make a game out of being Peter Parker?  Would it be like Facade?  Would it be like the egregious stealth portions of the first Hulk game?  Would it be a dating sim - maybe you can choose whether you date Mary Jane, Betty Brandt, or Black Cat - the licensor tends not to go for things like that.  (Peter Parker dates Mary Jane, end of story, sayeth Marvel and Sony/Columbia.  And, no, he has no dark side that you get to explore.  You can't be evil Spidey - the #1 thing our focus testers asked for. Fogettabout it.)  So, at one level, we didn't do it because we lacked the balls.

But the bigger reason, for me, is that my motivation in playing a videogame is different from my motivation in seeing a movie - when seeing the movie, the story is paramount, and although I identify with Peter Parker, it's not at the same level as the videogame, where I *become* Spider-Man.  And while I like identifying with Peter Parker, I don't want to become him.  Hell, I'm enough like Peter Parker in the real world already.  When I start playing a game, it's because I don't want to be Peter Parker anymore.  I want to be Spider-Man.

Comments

[Craig Ewert]

"...the licensor tends not to go for things like that. (Peter Parker dates Mary Jane, end of story, sayeth Marvel and Sony/Columbia. And, no, he has no dark side that you get to explore. You can't be evil Spidey..."

That's why I hate to work on licensed games. It always seems to happen, and the licenseor never seems to care about the quality of the game that is harmed. If I wanted to make you cry, I'd tell you about the "Road Runner / Coyote" game.

[RodeoClown]

I don't like the idea of playing as venom because I LIKE TO BE THE HERO.

I don't care about switching viewpoints, that doesn't bother me, but I really don't want to hurt innocent civilians. I LIKED the side missions in SM2, I liked racing to the story point, but saving someone from falling along the way. It made me feel heroic.

Eating bystanders doesn't.

[jvalenzu]

Yeah, I've heard that sentiment before. Maybe it's just prolonged exposure to Spider-Man gameplay mechanics, but I was really excited by the Venom playable character. Don't people like comics because they like the villains too?

[zachary j gamedesigner]

Switching viewpoints is stupid, though I enjoy playing as venom, just that I'd rather have a full game as one or the other, or optional. It sucked ass in halo 2, for what it is worth.

[RodeoClown]

I liked it in halo 2.
Because I never 'became' the master chief, more just played through his story, I had no problems switching to the arbiter.

I noticed that when you were the arbiter, you never really fought humans, so you were pretty much the good guy still.

[jvalenzu]

I wouldn't mind sales as awful as Halo2.

[Hamumu]

Great, a post where I can complain about my shelf-level event in Spiderman 2!

I was enjoying zooming around the city, and GRADUALLY developing my swinging skills (man, it's hard, there's like 50 buttons involved!), when I got told to go to the stadium for a showdown with... um, Mr. Jetpack, we'll say for lack of memory. SUCKS. I quit playing after 5 tries at the 'obstacle course' part where blocks are sliding around and lifting you up. I got further each time, but it wasn't fun, I was sick of it, and each part was harder, while still making you repeat the entire thing if you failed. The wonky camera and controls made it far worse (I don't know how they could've been done better, given the freedom to crawl all over things, but nonetheless, they are wacky as hell). I'd jump onto some block and end up crawling a completely different direction than I intended, at which point it flips over and I get shot.

It's been on the shelf a few months. I may try it again, but I've played several other games to completion in the meantime, not to mention rocking the Hero an awful lot (but those orange buttons are overwhelming... I've been redoing Normal to 5 stars on all songs instead). I'd just as soon start SM2 over as continue from that point. At least then I could hone my spidering skills a bit before getting to the pain again. And I have MGS3 I could be doing instead.

[Jamie]

You should have seen the mission before we made it easier. There used to be this hampster wheel in the level and you'd have to run in place, using just the right pressure on the analog stick - and there used to be no checkpoints - and...

But, yeah, you're right, and sorry. There were a few punishing missions in SM2 where we expected you to have techniques that it turned out most of our players never developed - in that mission there was the tiny tactical jump - players got really good at the charge jump by that point but not the tactical one.

The process looked something like this:
- kleenex test
- realize it's too hard
- make it easier
- repeat
- oh my God is that the TIME! Let's ship this sucker!
So who knows, maybe one more round of kleenex testing and tweaking would have saved it.

In the perfect world, you wouldn't ship until you were happy with the results of your last kleenex test.

[steve]

I loved SM2 - it was the perfect super-hero game experience. I've played past the movie plotline and through 50K hero points level twice. All I would have changed for the sequel (besides new characters, natch) would be to add the ability to mark your own destinations on the navigation map, because I kept getting lost on my way to Mary Jane's house.

That said, I'm leery about being forced to play Venom in USM, and I'm even more reluctant to make him feed off of civilians. I don't even think he does that in the comics...

[Chris Busse]

Thing is, this isn't everyone's perspective. Focus test after focus test had people enjoying Venom more than Spider-Man. It was a huge concern for us that this was a Spider-Man game, and we needed to make Spider-Man as fun and compelling to play as Venom. We finally achieved a balance with a slight leaning towards Spidey right at the end of development in our focus tests.

That said, there are many things that are better about SM2, for sure. Looking back on it, I wish we hadn't gone for the open city, it never came together, and detracted from the strengths of the game's true nature: a more linear story focused game.

I think this article is spot of for some people, and completely off the mark for others. He alludes to God of War as being a better game than GTA, while that may be true from some artistic standpoint, it certainly wasn't from a commerical viewpoint, God of War maybe made a profit, but was no runaway success.

PS: Steve, in USM it does.