2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man ($6.99), with its implementation of a true open world Manhattan to play in, felt like an excessive celebration of how far the platform had come in terms of technology, with a framerate to match that decadance. Total Mayhem ($6.99) showed off the power that smartphones brought to the table, while still having that amateur production feeling many mobile games of the period had. The iOS Spider-Man games aren’t all that different in that regard. Spider-Man 3 was a QTE fest, Web of Shadows used an awkward Bioware-style moral dichotomy, Shattered Dimensions had Arkham-style stealth levels, and the console Amazing Spider-Man had support for motion controls. Spider-Man 2, no doubt riding on the back of Grand Theft Auto, introduced an open world, something that has gone as well with Spidey as anything ever could. Spider-Man on the original PlayStation nicely demonstrated both the rise of polygonal graphics and their hard limitations via the poisonous gas that prevented you from going down to the streets. Maximum Carnage on the Genesis and SNES showed the popularity of belt-scrolling beat-em-ups in the 16-bit era. As such, they tend to look to trends for inspiration, and we can see that pattern in many of the games. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it’s because they release so regularly and haven’t found a unique voice the way Batman recently has with the Arkham series. Spider-Man video games act as little mini time capsules of the video game industry.
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