The Amazing Spider-Man: Game Boy
May 9, 2009 - 10:07 pm - Posted by Luke C.
Spider-Man has some pretty difficult powers to emulate in a video game. Making Wolverine’s claws and regeneration? That’s easy. Laser eyes, super strength, the ability to throw fireballs? Easy, easy, easy. Swinging around New York at breakneck speeds dangling from a thin line of artificial spider silk? That’s not so simple.
However, someone apparently thought they could do just that in 1990, and on the original Game Boy, even. While the game does allow you to swing on webs to cross the screen, you can only do it at a single height right smack in the middle of the screen where anything above ground height can hit you, and it’s even harder to move quickly and accurately while swinging than while walking. Even worse, in over a decade of owning this game I’ve never found a way to consistently trigger the high jump that leads into the swinging.
The story is about what you’d expect from a superhero game released almost two decades ago: Spider-Man’s girlfriend has been kidnapped and now our hero has to beat up each of his major villains until he gets her back. A short dialog between Spidey and the next boss precedes each level, but the dialog is nothing to write home about and the most Spidey will about the previous boss is, “Well, So-and-so didn’t tell me where MJ is, who’s next?”
The game is pretty much what you’d expect mechanically, too: the goons in each stage walk towards you until you’re in range, then strike with a reach just slightly longer than your own, your jumping kick is far and away your most useful attack, and bosses tend to be difficult until you figure out their pattern. You can fire webbing as an attack, but it’s not especially powerful and your web supply is pretty severely limited – goons will drop webbing for you, but anything they drop disappears when it hits the ground so you’ll have to be fast.
Even the good parts are admittedly mediocre. The fact that you can continue from more or less where you died is quite nice, but really highlights the fact that you need that feature. This game also impressed me as a kid when I kicked a goon on the side of a train and he really looked like he’d slipped off, but even then that simple trick wasn’t enough to really make the game fun.
Overall, back when I was a kid and only had half a dozen games I could play on the go or when someone was already using the TV, I thought this was a fun game. Today, however, unless you have a pressing need to play a Spider-Man game and all you have available is one of Nintendo’s old grey bricks, I’d pass on this game.
This game looks fun but after reading your review, I’ll take your advise and stay clear of this Game Boy game.
I’m glad to know I’ve saved at least one person, then.