Spider-Man PS4: 10 Ways It Owes Its Success To The PS2 Spider-Man 2 Game
Be Greater. Or at least aim to be greater than the masterpieces before you.
To the young and blissfully ignorant among you, it may seem like video games and superheroes are a combination that could never fail. To the older and more jaded out there, there still exists a time before Arkham Asylum, a time that stretches as far back for some as Superman 64.
Why it took so long for the gaming industry to finally get a handle on making at least passable superhero outings for home console is the type of philosophical pondering that kept Plato up at night.
Thankfully the dark days are behind us, the days of half baked arcade games and senseless movie tie-ins. These are the days of the Arkham games and Insomniac's breathtaking opus that is Marvel's Spider-Man.
But back in those dark days, where every terrible superhero movie needed and equally terrible tie-in game, there existed one hope on both fronts; Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. It stands in truly hallowed halls as simply one of the best games in a generation of pure classics. And gamers have been hailing it as the definitive Spidey experience for nearly two decades.
Not until Insomniac came along did it seem it could ever be topped. And in a way it still hasn't been really, since you could never make a game as pristine as Marvel's Spider-Man, without taking a few lessons from the original.
10. Manhattan Island As An Open World
Any kind of open world was rightfully considered a treat back in the early 2000s, when most gamers had just graduated from platformers to the meatier content offered by the PS2 et all. Linear level design still dominated the landscape (though this was not a negative) so for a developer to invest so much into developing an open world was quite the gamble, especially for a game that only existed to help sell a movie.
Thankfully, Spider-Man 2's New York sandbox was a delight. While not as finely detailed or brightly coloured as Insomniac's rendition, it nevertheless managed to pack in a plethora of New York iconography and provide density and variety that set this installment apart from prior games, which suffered from cloudy rooftop and blocky corridor syndrome.
Almost every Spidey game since has attempted to follow this formula, trying to flesh out New York with greater depth for its favourite web slinger, and the PS4's contribution is no different.