Review – Spider-Man: Friend or Mere Acquaintance

In another installment in my untimely series on finding something to hate while surrounded by the best games in years, here’s another look at games that ate shit in 2007.

Until recently, the Spider-Man franchise had been the only comic book license that somewhat translated into an enjoyable gaming experience. Next Level Games, a company that specializes in cramming a licensed properties into games that have nothing to do with the license they are based on, must have won some sort of raffle to be awarded the development of Friend or Foe. Any company that works solely in licensed games is going to suck worse than a circus put on by disabled veterans. Anyone who tells you different is Next Level Games.

With hands full of cash and laps full of stripper, Next Level Games didn’t waste time on relating this game to the movie or even comic when they had already developed what I can only assume would have been called Mario Strikers Love Corndogs if Nintendo had called them first. Five seconds after putting the disk on, you can tell how much time they spent playing face pong with Vancouver’s titties for hire instead of working on this game. Their own logos as well as the, Wow-did-I-just-pop-a-boner-Official-Movie-Merchandise logo aren’t even high resolution, but rather downloaded via cellphone from the champagne room and slapped into the game’s opening credits.

However, Spider-Man Friend or Foe represents advancement in videogame technology beyond any that I could have imagined in my lifetime. This game uses a highly sophisticated monotony calibration that caused my Xbox360 to sprout a peripheral (Microsoft proprietary, of course) which grabbed me by the neck, turned me around, thrust my face into the couch and shot the disk at my now vulnerable ass crack. The console, now equipped with Spiderman Friend or Foe speech technology, robotically chortled that if I wanted to play any more of this repetitious bullshit I should just call to mind the three mind-numbing hours of pressing X that we had already endured, adding something about, “more than just the CD,” if I ever tried out this game again.

Granted, it was an awful experience, (getting raped by the Xbox was pretty bad too) but you have to hand it to Next Level and Activision for such breakthrough technology. I had to put my 360 on eBay because I’ve sort of lived my life by this rule that I won’t split the rent with anyone (or thing) that’s either willing to rape me or has already done so. But, I have to admit the fucking thing was right to do what it did.

The single best thing about Spider-Man is that he’s never been dragged down to the New York City Department of Children’s Welfare to answer questions about his underage male sidekick.

Because his sidekicks have all been hot chicks. Until now, apparently. For reasons not important enough to leave Hooters and write an explanation for; Spider-Man now teams up with his enemies and what looks like a couple of seriously fugly step sisters of the girls he used to hang out with. The Black Cat is practically the Grandmother of nipple-slip defying costumed women, and yet in this game she looks like an even more ape-faced Barbara Bush. The image to the left is an actual screen cap of Corky the Black Cat (and the low-res main character in this “Next-Gen” game.)

In 1996, congress passed the Fair Representation in Electronic Media Act that ensured all women who appeared in video games would conform to or exceed body proportions set by Lara Croft. How did the women in this game get left behind, rendered as shapely as a twelve year old boy? Because this law-breaking threat to our freedom came out of Canada, I guess. Why else would we be missing a chance at rotating an in-game camera around a costume that only zips to the navel?

I understand that this is a button masher, but a tournament of Hungry-Hungry Hippos has less repetitive gameplay. The reason for the excess is that before you can actually do whatever a spider does, you’ve got to punch every box, brick wall, rock, vase, and priceless artifact of a long dead civilization to find coins.

I fully expected to hear Spider-Man shout, “Eets-A-Me! Spidah- Mahn!” Perhaps Uncle Ben once said, “With great power comes the responsibility to vandalize everything around you.” Always one to interpret Uncle Ben’s words in a way that make his life more depressing, Spider-Man now finds himself punching more lamp posts than faces. At least the secret items that you have to find to get max erectile girth are hidden completely in the open. Saying that this is intentional because this game was intended for a younger audience is an insult to children. Two six year olds playing hide and seek in a completely empty room would have more trouble finding their objective than finding the trinkets in FoF.

Other “Least Hidden Secrets of the World.”

If you’ve always wanted to pretend that you are a game tester, this one’s full of broken level geometry and glitches. If you wanted a new drinking game, chug one every time something shows up on-screen that would make zero sense in the Marvel Universe. You’ll be dead from alcohol poisoning in twenty—three seconds.

Oh shit, and I almost forgot to mention… Superman64 was the worst fucking game ever.