Does Whatever A Spider Can, Possibly Including Horrifying People: Amazing Spider-Man 2 Video Game Trailer Released

So The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the next major superhero flick to come out after last week’s awesome Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but unlike that movie, Spidey is gonna be getting a video game adaptation to go with the new movie.

This, depending on your point of view, is either good, or terrible news.

If you are an optimist, it is good news. Because Activision’s Spider-Man 2, released in 2004, was, at the time, arguably not only the best movie adaptation video game since Tron, but the best superhero video game released until Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. Spider-Man 2 was the first superhero video game to not only allow a true open world for Spider-Man to explore, but it was the first to force the player to web-sling from actual buildings (Spider-Man on the Dreamcast was the first Spider-Man game in 3D with reasonable web-slinging, but it allowed the player to swing about 3/4s of a mile above Central Park, forcing the player to assume he was webbing off of helicopters, or perhaps The Watcher’s gonads). It had a reasonable and playable main storyline to go with the more realistic web-slinging mechanic, and it was a joy to play.

If you are a pessimist, you will remember that Spider-Man 2 for the original XBox was followed by Spider-Man 3 for the XBox 360, which I returned to Gamespot in disgust after spending nearly two full calendar days trying to get past Sandman in the subway level (I apparently did better than some people). And, while Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was nominally better, it lost its attraction for me about halfway through, when I realized I was web-slinging through what amounted to the zombie apocalypse. I am okay with the zombie apocalypse, but I would really prefer a shotgun to a web shooter. Or to almost anything else.

But with less than a month to go before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game is released, publisher Activision and Beenox have released a trailer for the game, which you can check out after the jump, along with my impressions.

Okay, there’s some cool-looking stuff in that trailer – I like the idea of fighting The Black Cat, and the voice over apparently by Kraven that makes it seem like he’s the only one who truly takes Spider-Man seriously is a nice touch that gives the part of me that has always loved Kraven’s Last Hunt a warm fuzzy feeling.

The downside to these eyes that have been watching video game trailers since about 1982 is that it seems that almost all the footage in this trailer comes from cutscenes. And cutscenes are always the prettiest and best rendered parts of games, and have absolutely fuckall to do with the experience of, you know, playing the Goddamned game. And the sequences that do seem like they are rendered from gameplay – the fight with the Black Cat most obviously – are slowed way the hell down and shown from a non-standard angle, which means it is almost impossible to tell how it will be to actually play the game.

I am trying to be optimistic here. After all, Activision is involved, and they published that awesome Spider-Man 2 game almost a decade ago… but they also published Spider-Man 3, Web of Shadows, and the adaptation to the first Amazing Spider-Man video game, which had a gameplay issue that I thought we buried in 2000 with the Dreamcast.

Ah well… I will still buy the Goddamned thing. Even the chance that a game might be as good as the open world of Spider-Man 2 means it will get my dollars. And in a worst-case scenario, it will mean that someone can buy the used copy of my game for five bucks off… assuming I give up more quickly than I did with Spider-Man 3. I think those two days saw the resale value of the game drop by 50 percent, because it was two days that word could cross the Internet about how horrible it was.

(via Comics Alliance)