I think I can state that this is the WORST fucking Spider-Man game ever released in the post 16-bit era.

Let’s have a top ten list of why it is FUCKING SHIT shall we? I would warn for spoilers, but frankly the story is a bit stupid, so nobody will care.

1) It costs £37.99 to buy, the standard price for new games in the UK. That’s fucking retarded. There’s barely £15 worth of gameplay here. I got a 25% discount from work (£28.49) and I also traded in Far Cry: Instincts (which I completed last week) and an unboxed Wario Land 4 and paid the rest off with a credit note (in store credit for the yanks). I didn’t pay any money for the game at all and I still feel completely ripped-off. Hell! I’m starting to think that renting it would have been a complete waste of money and I get 10 free rentals a week from Blockbuster! That’s how much of a bloody rip off this piece of fucking shit is.

2) They fucked up the web-swinging. In Spider-Man 2 the web-swinging was PERFECT. You could get you’re momentum up and be travelling at ludicrous speeds. Sure it took a while to get used to, but when you did, it was perfect, being able to turn quickly helped a lot in the time trials and hitting out multiple webs helped a lot. In this? You have a maximum web speed of REVERSING SNAIL. Which makes the …I dunno 5 Spidey chase scenes completely fucking irritating. You can only hit out one web at a time so turning is fucked up. I buggered up the Green Goblin chase SEVEN FUCKING TIMES because the game wouldn’t let me turn quick enough.

3) The chase scenes are a joke, not only is the web-swinging annoying to the point I was swearing and spraying spittle at the screen, but the fact that the camera can’t be locked on to the fleeing enemy so you can have NO idea where they have gone despite being no more than 10 ft away from them, causing you to fail the chase sequence. RETARDED!

4) Playing as Venom is a fucking joke. I thought “sweet, I get to eat people!” and I did. And that’s it. The game doesn’t give you ANY other sequences for him. Just “Beat up and eat the people near you.” Hell, the Hulk game is about nothing more than smashing shit yet Radical Entertainment managed to put some variety in it. He doesn’t web-swing, but leaps massive bounds at a time, nothing wrong with that in itself, except in the chase sequences. The Electro chase has got to be the hardest in the game because you can only jump a set distance and regularly, Electro will head upwards onto the high building roofs. If you don’t judge a jump correctly, too bad sonny-jim! You’re fucked! Start the entire scene 5 minute chase again!

5) The “free roam” missions. They’re even more repetitive than Spider-Man 2! And there are less of them! You are FORCED to do 2 specific types every chapter (mostly 2 of the same type). Checkpoint races, which because of the crappy swinging are shit. And “Comat Tours”, in these you run up to group of thugs, defeat them, run to another set of thugs, defeat them, then run to another set of thugs…repeat between 5-8 times and you get the point. And you HAVE to do these or can’t continue the story. And the locations of these missions on the map have the same colour icon , which means you can spend time looking for a bloody Combat Tour icon and find nothing but time trials. The game also forces you to collect the various tokens dotted around. In Spider-Man 2 I didn’t really bother, but in this you HAVE to find at least 15 I think in order to progress through the game, WHAT THE HELL? STOP MAKING ME COLLECT USELESS SHITE! There are still the “random” ones like in Spider-Man 2, which you have to do, but those I don’t mind as at least they change things a little.

6) Crappy little “save the civilian” things DURING boss battles/chases. For example, during the chase with The Green Goblin, you have to help some civilians from being crushed by debris. While you’re doing that, Gobby shoots fireballs at you while you are unable to move doing this crappy little “test your strength game.” So if you’ve gotten blasted by him a couple times during the chase, congrats! You’re about to die!

7) The draw distance is appalling. To the uneducated masses, a games draw distance is how basically how far away the game can render its textures. For example, Far Cry on the PC had a massive draw distance and if you got high enough, you could see everything quite clearly. In Spider-Man 2, the draw distance was OK, but not full. If a building was about a mile away, you could make out its windows and such. And if you looked down you could probably see all the cars moving. In Ultimate Spider-Man, the draw distance has to be about…what? 100ft max? Look at that New York amazing skyline! Full of…brown and grey rectangles…whoop-de-fucking-shit. And the pop up is horrendous, you won’t actually see any enemies or cars on the street till you get within 50ft of them. Appalling, absolutely appalling.

8) I swear to God they’ve somehow managed to make the city smaller. It’s pretty much all there like in Spider-Man 2, but it’s just so…cramped? It just feels like they’ve scaled it back. Or maybe it’s the fact that due to the absolutely crappy web-swinging, I didn’t want to go exploring to see how far the city went.

9) Its short…amazingly short. I completed it in 5 hours and 20 minutes. And what is there to do afterwards? Bugger and all.

10) The story is somewhat of a muddle. It’s decent enough by most standards but it just plain daft in others. OK I know everybody knows her name, but Mary Jane never gets called by her name ONCE in the entire game. There may be a few people who have NO clue who the fuck she is. Especially since this is the Ultimate universe and not exactly canon. Also, the Beetle releases the Green Goblin, who turns up in the Latvarian Embassy…AND NO FUCKING EXPLANATION IS GIVEN FOR THIS! And come to think of it, why is there a Latvarian embassy? As far as I know from the Ultimate universes entry’s on Wikipedia, Dr. Doom doesn’t rule Latvaria, but used to rule some private land in Denmark or somewhere. I think Latvaria as a whole is barely mentioned in the Ultimate universe, so why all of sudden does their embassy have The Green Goblin in it? Also early in the game Peter discovers these black cells in his blood, obviously part of the symbiote. But they are never mentioned again until the last act. When CARNAGE shows up. The cells in Peter’s blood wanted to rejoin Venom; Ok I can buy that…SO WHY THE FUCK DO THEY TRY AND BEAT THE FUCKING CRAP OUT OF VENOM THEN? BLOODY HELL!

There’s one or two other reasons, but these are the mains ones.

However, it’s not all bad. The graphics for the characters are spectacular, and the boss fights good fun. The voice acting is the best since the PS1 game.

Want my advice? Rent the game. Don’t bother buying it. You’ll be done LONG before you have to return it. Want to buy a Spider-Man game? Buy the Spider-Man 2 movie one, if just for the web-swinging. It’s dirt cheap now new and even cheaper pre-owned. But do NOT buy it, if you do I will fucking castrate you. Yes, even if you’re a woman! I’m not sure how I’ll manage it but I’ll give it a damn good try!

Also,

NAKED HITLER!

And finally, Nigel McMulls is a fucking lying bastard and I hope his testicles shrink. YOU WANNA LIE TO YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT KNOWING ME NOW NIGEL?

I have some fan art to post…but I frankly can’t be arsed right now, sorry Beverly, I will put it up eventually.

Right, I picked up Far Cry: Instincts last week, and it’s rather good…to a certain point. Anybody wishing to miss spoilers better stop reading, this is the only warning you’re getting, so don’t go down to the next paragraph.

So anyway, towards the end of the game, you come across what essentially, are zombies. Though not dead, they do what every fucking zombie in a game does, run at you and try to bite you (while also using guns).

I am sick to fucking death of having stupid arsed zombies in games. Seriously, take Halo for example. The Covenant are intelligent enemies who are intelligent, they adapt to you, there are many tyopes of them, they look great, and most of all are FUN to fight. Then we have the flood. Who do three things:

1) Run at you.
2) Shoot a gun and run at you.
3) Run at you and explode.

That’s BORING. The Covenant actually put up a decent fight, hide behind cover, try and outflank you, the Flood just charge and hope you die. It’s boring. I used to be scared by zombies (I saw one of George Romero’s films when I was about 7, stuck with me) but now the fucking things bore me. Half-Life, Halo, Wolfenstein (duh), Far Cry, Dark Watch, Zelda, Doom, Psi: Ops, Metroid Prime, TimeSplitters the list of games with boring zombies goes on. For fucks sake let’s look at how threatening zombies are:

1) While most zombies in games and some movies can run decently fast 9/10 you can outrun them. Fuck, you can out-WALK them! “Oh no, the zombies are gaining on us because we’re standing still, we better break into a stroll if we hope to live!”
2) They fall apart in a light breeze. In Far Cry for example, most zombies dcan be killed with 3 bullets from any gun. Yeah scary, most of the mercs take at least double that unless you go for a headshot. The only exception to this rule are the Flood, who seem to randomly be able to get up after a shotgun to the chest, but stay down after a second, and the ones from TimeSplitters who need a headshot. I stood on a spider recently and that took at least two stomps to make sure. A zombie would fall apart from the air my foot moved.
3) THEY ALL LOOK THE FUCKING SAME! OK, I know most enemies in games have similar templates, but at leass there’s a variation on the theme. In Far Cry for example, all the mercs have different outfits. In Half-Life there’s a good variety of enemies. The zombies in Far Cry all wear black shorts, and most of the ones in Half-Life wear labcoats, and in Half-Life 2 a few variants but still rather similar to each others. HIRE A GODDAMN TAILOR YOU UNDEAD FREAKS! YOU ALL DEAD, DON’T YOU ALL HAVE LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES YOU CAN CASH IN ON? BASTARDS!
4) Zombies make crap conversationalists. “Urgh, blargh, rargh, bleargh”…yeah. Try discussing philosophy with a zombie and they’ll most likely try and eat your leg.
5) I suppose the fact they’re trying to kill you is annoying in itself, but it’s pretty low on my priorities list.

So –please, game developers STOP THINKING THAT PUTTING ZOMBIES IN YOUR GAME ADDS DRAMA! I’VE KILLED MORE ZOMBIES THAT WERE IN ALL OF GEORGE ROMERO’S FILMS! ALL ZOMBIES SUCK!

Except Jesus, he’s cool. Rock on Jesus.

And we’re back with our regulary scheduled wackiness.

Two new fan arts this week. The first is a collection of sketches from Phelix. The second is from Boogalajub and is of Blasphemy.

No rant today, as I have just learned that Eastwood has broken his hand, so I’m not really in the mood (initially I wanted to mock him, but he said he’d rip my testicles off and eat them. I’m very attached to my testicles). So let’s all wish him well, OK?