Activision CEO Admits Spider-Man Video Games Suck

23 Comments

1. @AbdulAziz

   Great… wonderful… you’re more forgiving than the usual gamer. Happy for you…
   But before Web of Shadows, which still has problems, the only one worth wasting time with was Spider-man 2… and in my opinion, that was only because of the web swinging. Any game that practically FORCES me to sit out a fight while BLACK CAT does the majority of the fighting has serious issues.

2. “this one’s for JJ” snaps picture of himself”

   Yeah ironspiderman1983, SO FUNNY! “Do your job!” ^_^

3. I liked Spidey 3, even though it was more of the same, but with a black suit thrown in. Friend or Foe was meh at best. Web of Shadows is a NO GOOD HORRIBLE excuse for a game-at least on the ps2. a sidescroller? really????? Ult Spidey is my fave, I just wish unlocking the black suit wasn’t near impossible!!!!

4. I never found any of these spidey games half-assed, except for these:
   *PC Spider-Man 2 is Fugly
   *Friend or Foe isn’t as much fun as the rest, but the combat style is fun and the story is really good
   *Spider-Man 3 for the Wii & PS2 has a very redundant combat system, story is OK, buildings are a mess, especially roof texture being mostly all flat
   Which none of them is horrible

   But “Spider-Man The Movie” for the “GameBoy Advance”………HORROR

5. … now imagine just how USELESS this confession will be if they don’t lift a finger to do anything about it.

   Batman: AA has risen the bar… you can’t get away with half a**ing it anymore.

6. Sano totally agree with you on the capcom fighting games spidey is one of the best characters to use he has great speed and agility and the best Victory pose!

   “this one’s for JJ” snaps picture of himself

7. ok this is not exactly true!
   Spider-Man for the ps1 and N64 was a damn fine game a game i STILL play! its for the PS1!!!
   the sequel enter electro sucked
   the 1st spidey movie game was decent
   Spidey 2 movie game was EXCELLENT!
   ultimate spider-man was amazing BUT lost some of the perfect swinging mechanics of spidey 2
   Spidey 3 was ok but was still flawed
   and WEB OF SHADOWS is as good as any game can be
   friend or foe blows

   i think activision has really hit some great beats with spidey games i think that they just need to stick to the things that worked from the previous games.and they will be fine

8. For Activision I only played the first game they made for the Playstation 1 way back. Loved it. Carnage and Ock combined man that ruled! Loved the reggae-sounding part of the Spidey song at the end too. “HIM A MAN HIM A MAN HIM A SPIDER-MAN HIM A DO WHATEVER A SPIDER-MAN!” HA HA go fake Shaba Ranks! ^_^

   Okay I have played Spider-Man and the X-Men prior to that but it seriously is one of the worst games of all time. So bad it’s hysterical ROFL!

   Skipped the rest and played Web of Shadows. Except for making Spider-Man sound like McLovin’ from Superbad the game was really awesome IMHO.

   Love Spider-Man in the Capcom fighting games MSH, MSH vs. SF, MVC1 and MVC2. That Spider-Man owns all. Everyone else, all you can say is “SO CLOSE!” 😛

9. George, Stella, I’d be more impressed with this admission of guilt if it wasn’t coming from the same guy who has made it his mission to bleed the Guitar Hero brand dry and famously (and publicly) stated that one of the reasons for Activision’s eleventh hour decision not to publish Brutal Legend was that it didn’t seem like something to which they could pump out a sequel every year or two, a la Call of Duty.

10. I disagree with him on Web of Shadows — I love that game. Otherwise, yes, it has been a downward spiral since Spider-Man 2.

    By the way, a report on their filings for this fiscal year show that there is another Spider-Man currently in the works for 2010. Let’s see how that one turns out …

11. The next game will be “Spider-Man the Movie”
    That is in case they never release the Wii exclusive game, in case their truly was one in planning, not just a rumor

12. Wouldn’t it be great if Marvel followed suite and said “Hey guys, we f’d up, were sorry.” It won’t happen, but it would be nice.

13. Yea, I definitely think that there are exceptions to this. However, if the CEO thinks this, then perhaps the next Spidey game will be awesome and (hopefully) better than MUA2.

14. The new ad strategies are a breath of fresh AIR. On their Kindle snafu Amazon said “Yeah, we f’d up bigtime.” Domino’s Pizza follows suit a year later and says “Yeah… our pizza has always sucked. Sorry about that.” This level of honesty is both refreshing and scary!

15. The new ad strategies are a breath of fresh are. On their Kindle snafu Amazon said “Yeah, we f’d up bigtime.” Domino’s Pizza follows suit a year later and says “Yeah… our pizza has always sucked. Sorry about that.” This level of honesty is both refreshing and scary!

16. I actually thought Ultimate Spider-Man was the best of the Spidey games.

17. Yeah, I loved Web Of Shadows, Spidey1 & 2 were absolutley great, Ultimate Spidey was great. And the comic versions of Spidey 1 &2 (before the movies existed) were great.
    Yeah, I didn’t like Spidey 3, it felt incomplete and kinda empty, and I never played heros &villians but it looked like a neat kids title.
    But all those great spidey games are games that still sit with my current video games. They’re great. You can swing everywhere. It’s awwesome.
    You know, I think I just hate big company CEOs. They’re always trying to say something shocking to get your attention and try to act like they’re gonna change the world. If the next Spidey game comes out, and it’s totally re-worked and all new, it’ll probably stink, cause the past games kinda nailed it.

18. I liked web of shadows, but the web slinging mechanics still can’t beat spider-man 2. I can pop that game in and aimlessly swing around new york for a while. can’t do that with any of the other ones. I will give WoS props not being an original game, not tied to the films.

19. Spider-Man 3 & USM are on the top of my shelf
    Spider-Man 2 is before the past 5 years
    Critics suck, GTA is always the same and every time gets 9/10 in average, but Spidey games change to some fun stuff and is rated little cause it has NOTHING NEW? CUT THE CRAP

20. While Kotick is correct in noting that many of Activision’s Spidey games have left something to be desired, I think he’s a bit off the mark as to what that is. The problem, as I see it, is not that the games have lost sight of the fun of web-slinging, its that one aspect or another of the games tend to feel half-assed in some sense. For example, combat usually feels a bit underdone to me. In Spider-Man 3 it tends to boil down to button mashing and in Web of Shadows I often find myself relying on a handful of repetitive combos simply because the game’s AI decides to block everything else. In fact, if anything, I would say that the Spider-Man games have been using open-world web-slinging as something of a crutch ever since the mechanic was introduced in Spider-Man 2. Now, while it was extraordinarily well-implemented in that game, and this has more or less carried over to subsequent releases, the fact remains that it was introduced in a game that is now six years old and has changed very little since then. Now, granted, there’s only so much you can do to modify the swinging outside of improving the physics, but the fact remains that that element of the Spider-Man experience (or “fantasy”, to use Kotick’s language), that’s only one element and they’ve been coasting on it for six years when they could have been using that time to improve other aspects of gameplay. And I now feel I’ve written enough for 1:00am.

21. Spider-Man 2 was f**king fantastic. Ultimate Spider-Man was good. Spider-Man 3 and everything else absolutely horrible….all though i never did play Web of Shadows..

22. I have to disagree here. Spider-man 2 and WOS were great. Ultimate Spider-man was good. Spider-man 3, while not great, was ok.

23. LOL nice title.