Spider-man: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing

CHENNAI: Right in the middle of what most gamers anticipated as a week bringing foreboding news (Last of Us 2 is now pushed indefinitely) — was an official image release from PlayStation of the new PS5 controller! I take this opportunity to push down these claims of Xbox being ripped off. The PS controllers have been beautiful instruments with consistent quality growth, and this year (although I am not too impressed with the controller being white), the sure-to-be-revolutionary DualSense is going to haptic-feedback (read: rock) your world. I also realised last week that it is not just the PlayStation that I am blindly biased towards.

When you spend a lot of time with limited human contact, it is hard to not introspect. Hmm no, let me rephrase — when you spend a lot of time in the same space it is hard to not be bored. In fact, you could be so bored, that you end up playing a game that you earlier considered beneath you. My bias against Marvel-driven stories was proved disastrously wrong by the two-year old PS4 game called Spider-man. Unlike most superheroes, Spider-man has a heart, and a social media account (he is very active on the Web, hehe). His kindness to citizens reminds me most of Bayek from Assassins’ Creed Origins. In fact, the initial radio tower unscrambling reminded me of Assassins’ Creed viewpoints.

But the similarity ends there. SM elevates itself beyond the petty repetitiveness of most mainstream games these days. It also elevates itself through the very speedy web-swinging. Side missions and tasks are diverse, and different ones unlock themselves as you progress in the main missions. It also doesn’t hurt to have a wide variety of skills, gadgets and suits to unlock throughout the game. Having explored the map thoroughly by finishing all side missions, I even found myself yearning to live in the SM’s New York City (and simultaneously became sympathetic to spiders around me). It is remarkable how they managed to map the entire city’s map (with the towers, parks and all!) onto the game, and made good use of the locations through the tasks.

I would even call the game ‘progressive’. My bar for progressive is quite low these days, and I am easily satisfied with the way this game has portrayed the few women, people of colour, public service officials, and portrayed issues like pollution, climate change and health services through the game’s missions. I rate spider-man a whole Eight legs out of Two for its swinging physics accuracy!

Love for spiderman
My bias against Marvel-driven stories was proved disastrously wrong by the two-year old PS4 game called Spider-man. Unlike most superheroes, Spider-man has a heart, and a social media account

Anusha Ganapathi  @quaffle_waffle