In the major canon of games there are basically only 5 worth talking about. There’s the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:2000 Spider-Man on the PS1, N64, and Dreamcast, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:2004 Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in, and finally (after a 14-year gap) 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Insomniac’s Spider-Man trilogy. Though Insomniac gave us the definitive Spider-Man games, there are many more outside of these five titles that have fallen into obscurity. In fact, from 1989 to the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014꧒, there was a new Spidey game almost every single year.

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People Keep Forgetting That Peterꦉ Parker Is Meant To Be A Loser

Peter Parke♊r is a lovable dork, and the animated show appears to nail that vibe.

It’s🐽 easy to see why only a select few stand out. 2000's Spider-Man was an evolution of the 2D beat-em-up Marvel games that added voice acting, a big comic book story, and impressive graphics (for the time), bringing Spider-Man’s world to life for the first time in games. Spider-Man 2 was the firsꦯt open-world Spider-Man game, which planted the seed for what a Spider-Man game could one day be, and Insomniac eventually made that dream a reality.

For ඣa number of years, Activision began to treat Spider-Man like an annual franchise similar to Call of Duty, meaning every 12 months the wall crawler got a new adventure.

The remaining Spider-Man games are just things that happened in between bigger milestones. Games like Edge of Time and Friend or Foe were born in the era of low-budget licensed games and launched so frequently that it was hard to even keep up with each new🌸 entry.

But some forgotten Spider-Man games shouﷺld be remembered. They may not live up to the true classics, but a lot of Spidey games from the Activision era were filled with clever ideas, complex comic﷽ book stories, and mechanics that made them feel ahead of their time.

Ultimate Spider-Man Felt Like Playing A Comic Book

Spider-Man with Beetle, Rhino, Venom, Nick Fury and Electro from the Ultimate Spider-Man game

I’ve played every Spider-Man game g𒀰oing back to the Maximum Carnage on the Super Nintendo, and one of the games I’ve always looked back fondly on is Ultimate Spider-Man.

Launching just a year after Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man has one of the most authentic comic book stories and aesthetics of all time. Co-directed by Brian Michael Bendis, the architect of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Spider-Man was a cel-shaded open-world Spider-Man game set in the then🀅-current continuity of the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series.

Set a few months after the introduction of Venom to the Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Spider-M🎃an followed Spider-Man and Venom through two separate, intersecting campaigns. It’s wild to think about a video game tie-in to a comic book series now - even one as famous as Spider-Man - but the fact we’ll never see something like that again is part of why I love this game so much. Also, Venom has never been as fun to play in any other game.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Was The Original Into The Spider-Verse

Spider-Man as well as the Noir, 2099 and Ultimate variants from the Shattered Dimensions game.

2010’s Sha𝓰ttered Dimensions was one of the last Spider-Man games published by Activision, and also one of the best. It featured four Spider-Men from four d🍌ifferent universes - 616 Spider-Man, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Man 2099, and Ultimate Spider-Man - who have to find broken fragments of a magical artifact to save the multiverse.

Each universe has its oღwn art style and unique gameplay, which makes it feel like you’re playing four Spider-Man games in one. I’ve always loved Spider-Man Noir’s black-and-white world and its emphasis on stealth. Each of the Spider-Men was portrayed by an actor who has played Spider-Man in different eras of the animated series, which added an interesting meta layer to this multiverse story. There’s also an𒀰 appearance of Spider-Ham in the post-credits scene. Who would have thought all the elements of the Spider-Verse were right there all the way back in 2010?

The sequel, Edg𓆉e of Time, unfort💮unately didn’t have the same juice.

There are other Spidey games I have a soft spot for. The 2001 sequel to the PS1 Spider-Man, Enter Electro, featured villains like Sandman, Shocker, and Hammerhead, all of whom were considered C-listers at the time, but Insomniac was clearly inspired. I also loved the 2010 mobile game Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, which was one of the earliestꩵ console-style mobile games with on-screen buttons.

What Insomniac has done with Spider-Man is incredible and I look forward to many mo📖re years of its style of Spidey games, but there are a lot of forgotten gems in the history of Spider-Man games that deserve to be remembered.

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Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
Action
Systems
Released
September 7, 2010
ESRB
t
Developer(s)
Beenox
Engine
Goliath Engine

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