Man, what the fuck?

Ok, now I’ve gotten that out of my system. I was really psyched for SM3 because I absolutely loved Spider-man 2 for the Xbox. I thought it was the best Spidey game ever done, and I was really looking forward to having a next-gen version to swing around with.

Enter Spider-man 3. A great game with the most awful camera issues I’ve seen in ages. There is a good game here, folks. Unfortunately it needed about another month of polish, and not to be rushed out just to coincide with a movie release. In 2004 Treyarch proved to me that a movie and/or comic book license video game could be good. And now in 2007 they’ve reminded me that slaving your release date to marketing does nothing good for a video game. Just release it when its ready.

I would have been happier if it were a completely half-ass money-making scheme. It would have been easy to just avoid the game altogether. But there are the makings of a solid title here. You can tell the guys at Treyarch wanted to make a good game. It’s there, it’s just covered in some flaws that you can’t turn a blind eye to.

Aside from the awful camera problems, there are some glitches. I see civilians sinking into the pavement, bugging out completely. Once I tried to wall crawl and for some reason Spidey reversed himself, clinging to empty space and scooting his back up along the side of a building. And of course, the camera wanted to be behind him, but, hello, there’s a fucking building there, so it went batshit insane as well.

The graphics are pretty sub par for “next-gen” as well, but most of the time you don’t even notice. It just makes the cutscenes unpleasant to look at.

But I’m going to play it anyway. Because despite all of its faults, it is still really fun swinging around the city. It does have good moments. And frankly, after a couple hours of playing, I’ve gotten so used to wrangling the haywire camera that I am no longer quite so jarred by it’s malfunction.

It’s like if you’re lopsided room, and you tilt your head to the side. Voila, the room is no longer lopsided.