What is Spider-Man?

Attention, comic-book fens. Feel those Spidey senses tingling? It's time to slip into a femous superhero costume, strap on a couple of web cartridges, and save the world from villainy.

Spider-Man is a slick third-person actionadventure with flashy fighting moves that features Spidey, the popular web-slinging, Marvel Comics hero who has entertained American youth for decades with his comicbook capers, newspaper strips, TV series, and a new big-screen movie.

Spider-Man’s alter ego, as anyone can tell you, is Peter Parker, a young journalist once nibbled by a radioactive spider. That atomic spider-bite infected Parker with all kinds of powers, including spider-like agility, superstrength, and a tingly spider sense that warns him of impending danger.

Now you can be the crime-fighting Spider-Man. As Peter Parker, you attend an important meeting where Otto Octavius, also known as Dr. Octopus, is introducing new technology he claims will benefit humanity. Suddenly, an impostor in phony Spider-Man tights drops through the ceiling and steals the new invention.

Spidey gets the blame, of course. It's up to you to dodge cops and villains while you use your superhero powers to clear Spide's good name. You'll fight gaggles of henchmen, rescue hostages, defuse bombs, solve puzzles, and face formidable boss enemies through 34 levels. The henchmen are pretty dumb and easy to handle, but bosses, including such cretins as Rhino, Venom, Scorpion, Carnage, and Mysterio, are tough adversaries.

Fighting moves are plentiful in this 3D-roaming world, and the melee action is a real kick. The true excitement, however, comes in calling on spider powers to leap chasms, crawl on ceilings and walls, shoot webs at villains, and swing from building to building on long silken threads. There’s a multilevel training section to test and improve your abilities. You can play with four levels of difficulty, including a simplified Kid Mode. As you play, you unlock classic comic book covers from the Marvel series, alternate Spider-Man costumes (each with its own properties), and a character viewer that will give you 3D images of Spidey’s worst enemies and best friends, complete with biographies.

The game’s controls could be easier. Originally designed for PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Nintendo 64, Spidey plays well on the Mac. And while playing via the keyboard or a joystick will work, you need at least eight control buttons for all the fighting-move combinations, so without a game pad, play is awkward at best. The catch is that game pads work via InputSprockets, which Mac OS X doesn’t support yet. But the game is cool either way; if you don’t already have a USB game pad, go buy one — even if it doesn’t include Mac drivers, USB Overdrive... lets you use any USB pad on a pre-OS X system, and someday It'll do the same in OS X.

In addition to pad-dependent controls, the story is linear, and graphics are flat and underwhelming. Nevertheless, the game captures the spirit of classic Spider-Man comics and weaves a web of pure gaming enjoyment. If you’re down with Spidey, you'll chuckle over the basic silliness of the story and swing straight into the action.

Lee, John. (June 2002). Spider-Man. MacAddict. (pg. 49).

languages: English, French and German.

Download Spider-Man for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• PowerPC G3 @ 400 MHz
• 96 MB RAM
• ATI Rage Pro with 6 MB VRAM
• Mac OS 8.6
• CarbonLib 1.0.4
• QuickTime 4.1.2
• OpenGL 1.2.1

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver