by Erik Pearsall - November 21, 2005

It�s a bird! It�s a plane! It�s the wrong quip for this -Man suffix! Spider-man is back in his newest comic turned videogame! Enter Ultimate Spider-man, where not only does the player control everyone�s favorite spandex-clad protagonist, but the bad guy as well. Peter Parker as the Spider-Man, and Eddie Brock as Venom, are both legendary, and now we see if it can live up to its claim of being the ultimate game about Spider-Man.

Our fathers died to create me. And now, you will too.

There are practically two styles of play in the game, free-roam mode and story mode. The storyline of Ultimate Spider-Man is incredible. I enjoyed it for the number of cameos by other Marvel characters�Wolverine, Johnny Storm, and Carnage. The one difficulty that many hardcore Spider-Man fans will have with this game, is the lack of adherence to the original comics. Some boss characters were not even identifiable until after the battle and I found out that the burning Hulk-esque character was supposedly the Green Goblin.

In order to advance the storyline, Mr. Parker has to swing around the city and accomplish a quota of certain goals, such a save a number of citizens, race around town in a set time limit, or web up a gang for the police to find. In this period of �down-time� between story missions, the player as Spider-Man has free roam around a digital Queens and Manhattan. This �down-time� is also the least attractive part of the game. In contrast to this slow period in the game, are the difficult boss fights.

The storyline does hook the player in with enough force to make me want to get all of the city goals out of the way up in the front, allowing me the player to pass by the monotonous hero chores and bounce from one intense story session to the next. Throughout the story, you flip between Spider-Man and Venom, doing missions that occasionally intertwine with each other. It�s a great way to break up the monotony that all games build up while playing it for a while. The controls for each character are similar, but differ enough to where it takes a second to realize that you are not web slinging, or in the case of switching back to Spidey, you aren�t eating people anymore.

Hot tamale!

Ultimate Spider-Man lives up to its name in the graphics department. The artists who worked on this game created the ultimate visual playground through the story animatics and the cell shading on game characters. The cell shading is what makes the game feel fresh out of the pages of a comic book. The cell shading in Ultimate Spider-Man ends up looking like each time Spider-Man moves, he is inked and colored solely for that position. The final effect of the cell shading makes it feel as each frame of the game could have been pulled from a page of a comic. In fact, the game plays out as more of a motion comic book, with windows popping up portraying crucial game information, the Spider Sense alert, and text bubble exclamations (Fwaaping! Boom! Hiss!). The animatics that lead into each story mission are motion graphics that play out like a comic book. Since there is no player variable during a cut scene, the animators had more leeway in designing the cut scenes. The end product results separate cells with characters jumping between them, text bubbles, and lots of exaggeration. A single shot will be broken up into three vertical frames, with the character appearing from different angles in each pane. Overall, this game contains one of the most innovative styles that the writer has seen in a game in a long time.

I have just officially run out of ways to say, "Ow."

The sound doesn�t stand out as something that was either horrible of remarkable. The only thing that gets unnerving after a while are the quirky one-liners that Spider-Man likes to deliver, but that�s always been something that Peter Parker does. And those repeat with each boss fight you have to restart�and trust me, they get difficult enough to where you will need to redo them.

�Aw Shucks, I have to go race again?�

I found myself saying that quote upon returning to the city after a story mission, and finding out that I have to fulfill a new set of city goals before I could move on to the next area. There is little replay value, there is no difficulty setting change, and there is no two player Venom vs. Spider-Man mode. Aside from the collecting of tokens and redoing the races which you scored low on, both of which the writer assumes unlocks special features, there is the option to play in the free roam mode after the story itself is beaten. Playing as Venom in the roaming city is only a temporary fix however, as the excitement of getting chased by government authorities wears off�after throwing a car or hurting someone, the game becomes a wild, �Run for Venom�s life while causing as much damage as possible,� mini-game.

I'm the best at what I do, and what I do ain't pretty at all.

I as the reviewer jumped at the opportunity to work on and write about this ultimate Spider-Man game. It wasn�t necessarily the subject of the game, but moreover the artistic style that it was rendered in that had pulled me in. I had seen the commercials for Ultimate Spider-Man and grew curious whether or not the artists had rendered a motion comic book, and I was not disappointed. The cut scenes were motion comic book pages, The people at Marvel have done it again, breaking the conventional boundaries for what people consider as the norm. Oh, and there is the ever present product placement�did you know that Nokia is the official cell phone of secret government officials?

Ultimate Spider-Man is overall an enjoyable game, if not surprisingly short. The story mode in this game can be rented and finished in a weekend for the gamer who just wants a bite, but for those of you who enjoy the franchise, the art, or are easily absorbed into doing every meticulous side-mission, get the whole pie and this game will be a definite and well-spent purchase for your Playstation II console.