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Peter Parker and Miles Morales as the Spider-Men in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. (Photo: Supplied)
Peter Parker and Miles Morales as the Spider-Men in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureOctober 20, 2023

Review: Spider-Man 2 is close to the perfect comic book game

Peter Parker and Miles Morales as the Spider-Men in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. (Photo: Supplied)
Peter Parker and Miles Morales as the Spider-Men in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. (Photo: Supplied)

We’re inundated with visits to the various Marvel universes these days – but Spider-Man 2 is a rare example that gets its source material completely right.

Mild spoilers for Spider-Man 2 follow.

What is it?

It is, helpfully, what is says on the tin: a follow-up to the wildly successful Spider-Man game that dropped on the PS4 five years ago. Not only was the game a huge success, arguably one of the best games on the console, it managed to be a rare licensed game that completely nailed the spirit of its source material. It was fun, funny, heartbreaking and shockingly human – everything Peter Parker should be.

Spider-Man 2 picks up a few years after the first game, and ropes in one of the most adored parts of the canon: Venom. The symbiote, one of Spider-Man’s most notorious nemeses, showed up in the stinger for the first game, and the speculation about how he would come into play in the sequel was wild. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Insomniac has absolutely nailed it.

The good

The original Spider-Man (and its expansion/sequel Miles Morales) struck a winning formula. It didn’t just nail a great Spider-Man story, it managed to give people the thrill of actually being the hero of the boroughs. Traversing an open world has never been more fun than swinging across streets and buildings through Manhattan, from web to web to web.

The main additions are twofold. The first and most obvious is that there are Spider-Men, plural, in this game. Peter Parker and Miles Morales take up the mantle simultaneously, and the player can switch between them at the flick of a button. While this has obvious storytelling advantages – Insomniac pitting the wants, fears and peculiarities of these characters against each other brings some of the campaign’s best moments – it also lets the player get a greater understanding of each one by contrast.

The other is the addition of Web Wings. Now that the world is bigger, adding on the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens across the river from Manhattan, swinging down streets and avenues isn’t fast enough. The Web Wings adds another layer of complexity, and genuine fun, to traversing, allowing both spidermen to glide, at pace, to their destination. It’s a rare game that makes me want to not use fast travel to instantly get to a destination, and it’s a very wise, and crucial choice, that Insomniac gives players a chance to beeline through their expanded world.

Spider-Man (Peter Parker) in action. (Photo: Supplied)

Otherwise, the game is more of the (very good) same. Insomniac clearly has a handle on this world and how to play in it. The additions to the world, including Parker’s troubled friend Harry Osbourne, and the completely psychopathic Kraven the Hunter, gel well, as does the work to deepen the world around Miles Morales, and what it means for him to be a working class Black man who also, yes, happens to be a superhero. Obviously, the gameplay and graphics are exemplary – it doesn’t just feel good to play as Spider-Man, it looks really damn great. But it’s a triple-A game, this is no surprise. (Also, thankfully no surprise, are the world-leading accessibility options that allow any player, regardless of ability, to engage with the game.)

But where Spider-Man goes from feeling good, even great, to feeling special is in the smaller moments. My favourite moment from the game isn’t even a part of the main story, it’s a little moment just past the halfway mark, where Spider-Man follows up on a particularly frustrating collectible quest from the first game – corralling the birds that an unhoused man diligently takes care of. The mission involves no combat, and nothing more than swinging around the city. But the weight attached to it, and how it reminds Peter Parker, and therefore the player, of the importance of saving an individual, rather than a borough, or entire city, resonates through the game. It’s the kind of thing that a smaller game wouldn’t be able to include, or other massive games might ignore in favour of bombast. It shows, once again, how well Insomniac has nailed this. 

In a strange way, the games it most reminded me of were the Spyro games (fittingly, also developed by Insomniac). Full of life, full of colour, full of heart, but also, crucially, full of small moments that push the game away from being button-mashing and into, well, art.

The not-so-good

While I am a firm believer in the idiom “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, there’s a smidgen of Spider-Man 2 that is simply more, rather than pushing the game, or its world, further forward. It’s a credit to how well the developers nailed the character, and the experience of playing as that character, the first time around – but I can’t help but wonder how much further they can take this version of Spider-Man.

Spider-Man (Miles Morales) in action in Spider-Man 2. (Photo: Supplied)

The verdict

It seems churlish to complain about a game being consistently excellent, rather than surprising. And consistently excellent is what Spider-Man 2 is. It’s important to acknowledge that, especially in an age where games of this scale can feel like content to ensnare rather than art to experience. 

Spider-Man 2 does what every comic book game should do: it makes you feel like the character you’ve been a fan of since you were a kid. That’s no small feat to pull off once, let alone twice.

Spider-Man 2 is out on the PS5 now. This game was completed 100% for review.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor
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Pop CultureOctober 19, 2023

Remember when C4 rocked onto NZ screens?

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Twenty years ago this month a new channel full of music videos and edgy youth-oriented programming arrived on New Zealand screens. We look back on the glory days of C4.

Being at the wrong end of a Top 100 countdown shouldn’t be more significant than taking the top spot, but for The D4 it left them with a legacy even Nirvana couldn’t boast. Twenty years ago, at 8pm on 3 October 2003, the Auckland band’s video for ‘Exit to the City’ marked the arrival of a brand new free-to-air music TV channel called C4. 

The video, quite clearly made on a shoestring budget, features the four-piece performing to a single camera while crammed in the back of a van as it careens around the suburban streets of Auckland. It’s an apt metaphor for the station it launched – run on the smell of an oily rag by a ragtag bunch of passionate music nerds, squished into a small space and disrupting the quiet of the sensible landscape it moved in. 

At the time C4 made its grand entrance, Sky’s Juice music channel had dominated the jukebox TV space for nine years. But if you weren’t a paid subscriber to the Sky network there was very little music content on offer following the axing of TVNZ shows like Space, RTR countdown, M2 and Squeeze.

That meant there was an audience ready and waiting from the moment Mediaworks announced the launch of C4. It was a gimme for the incoming collection of plucky young producers and presenters led by ex-Channel Z programme director, Andrew Szusterman. 

The C4 production team operated out of a small, single room building in the carpark of TV3. A stone’s throw away, in the main building, the all-white studio took up a tiny corner of real estate for the business end of live broadcasts. In that studio a rolling cast of presenters would talk to the audience through a solitary wall-mounted camera. Zoom, pan and tilt functions, along with vision switching and graphics, were operated by a  technical director who sat in the adjacent control room.

New Zealand music was championed across the channel, with local clips peppered throughout the playlist and dedicated show Homegrown becoming the preferred platform for local video premieres. Other specialist shows brought us the best of hip hop, alternative, retro, top 40, electronic, rock and metal. In addition, C4 aired popular MTV series like Pimp My Ride, Jackass, Laguna Beach and Cribs. Edgy animated shows were also part of the schedule and included South Park, King of the Hill, American Dad and Family Guy, among others. 

These international shows were a great bonus, but the heart and soul of C4 was its music programming and presenters. The roster of talent was impressive at the time, and even more so in retrospect. Jaquie Brown and Clarke Gayford had both done some time in TV and radio, but becoming the lead hosts and faces of C4 cemented them in our collective consciousness. The playful rapport between the pair was infectious and set the tone for the rest of the station. 

C4’s class of 2006

Highly regarded radio hosts Nick Dwyer, Camilla Martin, Jono Pryor, James Coleman, Teuila Blakely and DJ Sir-Vere rounded out the foundation presenting team on launch. In the years that followed C4 nurtured more youth hosting talent in Joel Defries, Jane Yee, Phil Bostwick, Helena McAlpine, Shavaughn Ruakere, Dai Henwood, Jermaine Leef, Shannon Ryan, Drew Ne’emia and Laila Dookia. 

C4 burst to life at a time when we didn’t blink at paying $30 a pop for a CD that could be ruined by a single scratch from the very case that was supposed to protect it. Its arrival was a gift for record companies, providing a powerful avenue to promote their respective rosters. Getting artists featured on C4 quickly became a top priority as labels competed for airtime, interview slots and giveaway opportunities. 

C4 hosts Teuila Blakely, Jane Yee, Laila Dookia and Camilla Martin (Photo: Supplied)

Outside of the studio, C4 had a stronghold on music culture. At any given festival you’d find a throng of kids in Dickies and Chuck Taylors swarming the C4 tent to meet their favourite hosts, buy trucker caps and get their hands on free bumper stickers. Getting home from school and plonking in front of Select Live, tuning in to Special Features for a big video premiere on a Friday night or warding off the Sunday scaries with U Choose 40 were universal experiences for a whole generation of rangatahi who didn’t know how good they had it.

Within a few years of C4’s launch, that same generation became truly spoilt for choice as MTV NZ and Alt TV joined Juice and C4 in the chat. Suddenly we were swimming in music TV at a time when we relied heavily on curated content for new music discovery. It would be a good few years before YouTube and Spotify flipped the global music landscape on its head by offering us whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it. In the meantime we were quite happy to let programmers make those decisions for us. 

Dai Henwood and DJ Sir-Vere (Photo: Supplied)

Eventually ondemand streaming landed, and so began the erosion of radio and music TV as we knew it. In 2008 C4 rapidly became a watered down version of itself with a cull of music shows and presenters in favour of upping the international series roster in a move to become a more general youth entertainment platform. In 2011 Mediaworks ousted C4 from its premium channel position, launching FOUR in its place. 

C4 sort of lived on between Freeview and Sky, but the shows were gone, the presenters were gone, and – with a lifeless rotate of back to back music videos – it became a stale whiff of what it once was. The once beloved and vibrant music station was now a dusty old jukebox being shunted around channel spots, before limping from our screens completely at 1am on June 26, 2014. The last video that aired on C4 was The D4’s ‘Exit to the City’. 

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