Petz Fashion: Dogz and Catz (henceforth referred to as just Petz Fashion) is a new installment in Ubisoft’s long-running series of pet sims where you adopt an animal (in this case, a puppy or kitten) and then take care of it, seeing to its needs by feeding, watering, and cleaning up after it, buying it new toys to play with, brushing its fur, and so on. The games have done incredibly well for Ubisoft, as evidenced y the ever-growing amount of shelf space they take up in stores – this is Powerhead’s third Petz title so far, and Ubisoft has an internal team devoted solely to developing even more games starring all sorts of animals, including monkeys, dolphins, and horses (oh my). Some are collections of mini-games, others let you carry pets over from one game to another and even breed them, and some are just straight-forward pet sims in the style of the super popular Nintendogs games. Petz Fashion is the latter, which for my first foray in to the world of artificial animal friends I was happy about, as it keeps things a bit simpler. None of that circle of life business going on here, thank you very much.

Of course, it’s not just a pet sim – as the title suggests, there’s also a fashion component. Petz Fashion follows in the footsteps (paw prints?) of an earlier game by another developer, Petz: Dogz Fashion, which featured (among other things) a narrative about fashion shows starring your canine companion, a bunch of clothes to dress them up in, and a collection of mini-games to play. For Petz Fashion we took a more stripped down approach, culling the narrative and mini-games in favor of having fun with your pet through more free-form play. We also added the ability to adopt a second pet without starting an all new save file, allowing players to switch between the two whenever they wanted from a toolbar on the DS’s Touch Screen. While there are still loads of fashion shows to attend and plenty of encouragement to do so in the form of invitations arriving once your wardrobe is up to snuff, special outfits and other prizes to take home, and more, the player is free to go through them at their own pace. Despite the name of the game putting the spotlight on fashion, it was important to me and the rest of the team that caring for and playing with your pet remain the most important aspect. You can’t attend fashion shows if your pet isn’t healthy and happy, for instance, and taking time during the prep phase of each show to make sure your pet is well-fed, groomed, and in good spirits is a big part of your final score. While Petz Fashion is hardly a how-to guide on how to successfully raise a pet (and was never intended to be), we wanted to enforce good pet owner habits across the board. Nobody wants a real-life version of Parker Posey’s character from Best in Show, after all.

Along with the Fashion Shows and how much fun it remains to just play fetch with your pet or get them to chase a laser pointer, I’m really please with how well performing tricks worked in to the game. It wasn’t something we originally planned for, but as production moved forward and we kept talking about it, we eventually all agreed that it would be fun if your pet could perform tricks – not just as a special animation at the end of a successful walk down the isle at a show, but on command. One of the rewards for acing the game’s fashion shows is your pet building up a collection of tricks it can perform via a menu on the Touch Screen or by speaking in to the DS’s microphone, from the basics of sitting down and rolling over to chasing its tail and break dancing (as the finer breeds of show dogs and cats are known to do on occasion). While I generally don’t like the microphone on the DS (too fickle, too embarrassing to use in crowded places, and often too gimmicky in execution), it was pretty great the first time our lead programmer got his dog to sit by telling it to. It helps that there’s a menu option for tricks as well, allowing you to show off your pet’s moves without causing a subway delay after somebody decides to see something and say something.

It’s a good game, and one I’m proud of, particularly considering the blink-and-you’ll miss it schedule the thing was on. I’m pleased with how much there is for the player to do, from buying new toys for their pet, attending fashion shows armed with a gigantic wardrobe and more clothing customization tools than have ever been in one of these things, or just taking pictures of their pet in mid-air as it leaps from the couch to attack a red dot on the floor. Whenever we came to a crossroads or impasse during production, we tried to stop and ask ourselves “What’s more fun for the player? What would a person playing this game want to do here?” As a designer, I consider one of my main jobs to be an advocate for the player, to constantly keep the wants, needs, and priorities of the people who are eventually going to be playing the game front and center over the course of development. With Petz Fashion, I think we pulled it off nicely.

The other thing that hit upon rereading them all (and, at long last, the point of this post) was how many of them I’m still happy with. Like most people who do anything creative, I hate the vast majority of what I write upon rereading, seeing only typos, overused tics, bungled attempts to be more clever than I am, and a dozen other reasons why I should pack it all in and never lay fingers to keys again. And while there’s plenty of that spread over the dozen or so columns I managed, I’m ultimately pleased with how much I managed to get right. With that in mind, and to keep them from disappearing in to the ether like so many other things I’ve written for web sites over the years, I’ve gathered all of Comics Are Expensive here on my blog-thing. Each are timestamped with the day they first went live, as the Dead Milkman did that once with a tour diary from the eighties and I thought it was clever. You can find them by clicking on the Comics Are Expensive tab in the column on the left, or by clicking on the links I’ve handily included below.

1. Teen Titans #55, Avengers: The Initiative #9, Suburban Glamour #3, Captain America #34, Northlanders #3
2. Fantastic Four #554, Tiny Titans #1, Nova Annual #1, Uncanny X-Men #495
3. Umbrella Academy #6, Immortal Iron Fist, Crossing Midnight Vol. 2
4. Rasl #1, Kick Ass #1, Action Philosophers Vol. 3
5. Atomic Robo #4-5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer #12, PS238 #29, Casanova #12
6. Comic Book Comics #1 and Maintenance #9
7. Incredible Hercules #115, Fear Agent #19, The Boy Who Made Silence #1
8. Transhuman #1 and Proof #6
9. Echo #1-2, Resurrection #1-4, Criminal Vol 2. #1-2
10. The Damned: Prodigal Sons #1, Scarlet Traces Vol. 1
11. Invincible Iron Man #1
12. Minx Special
13. Superman Beyond #1

And you will mess up. A lot. You’ll hit ramps at the wrong speed to make a jump, or be going fast enough only to realize your position on the bike was all wrong, ending your run (and the structural integrity of your neck) in a messy face plant and sharp crack that echoes through the abandoned warehouse-turned-stunt track-turned abattoir each of the tracks are set in. Or you’ll fly too high, a motocross Icarus for the X-games generation, only to land so hard the shocks in your bike collapse in on themselves and leave you eye level with the underside of your tires. Or you’ll tumble in to a clutch of exploding barrels. Or you won’t be fast enough to get across a bit of collapsing track in time. Or any of a dozen other horrible things will happen, resulting in the always fun sight of driver and bike ragdolling themselves to bits against the environment.
Which brings us around to my favorite part of Trial HD’s controls – the reset buttons. At any time, alive or dead, you can hit one to send you back to the last cleared checkpoint (helpful for avoiding frustrating bits you may have lucked through, but later hurting your final score), or you can hit the other one to start the whole level over. Thanks to the smallish size of the game and the whole thing living on the 360’s hard drive, resetting a level is an instant process, with no loading screen giving you a horrible few seconds to reconsider the merit of beating your head against a stunt track-shaped wall. With the push of a button any disaster is wiped away as though it never happened, nothing left of it by a distant, painful memory from a past life where you leaned forward a bit too much at the wrong time.

Trials HD gets a lot of things right – it’s lovely to look at, its camera, despite being fixed, is fixed just so that you rarely think about it if ever, and it’s challenges, while often utterly bastard hard, escalate in such a way that you almost don’t notice when they turn in to devious Rube Goldberg devices of death and flame. But what I love it for, what I most admire and keep coming back for, is its ability to keep me around for one more go. No matter how frustrating a level might be, no matter how sure I am that I did everything right only to die in a flurry of shouted curse words, I’m always in for one more go. The ability to instantly reload a level, the scores of my friends (and how I’m doing against them) displayed across the top of the screen, the way the track falls apart around me as I stumble towards the finish line, often on fire and seconds from death, it all adds up to one of the most addictive games I’ve played in ages. At it’s best, Trials HD manages real magic, wiping away the urge to throw my controller through my very nice television with a push of a button, replacing my pure rage with the faith that this time, this one time, I’ll do everything just right and stay on the bike and moving forward long enough to cross the checkered line.

When designing games I’m personally not a big fan of traditional binary fail states. I think in a lot of games they break up the flow of play in unnecessary and frustrating ways – being around to deal with the consequences of not doing as well as you’d hoped or needed to and having the chance to make it up is a more interesting design challenge for me than who shot first and fastest. In a game like Trials HD, though, I’m just fine with the Groundhog Day-esque cycle of death and rebirth nameless stunt guy is trapped in, as developer RedLynx have made it just so compelling. Cringing and laughing out loud as your latest botched run sends your little guy in to a physics-upped flurry of broken bones pretty much never gets old, taking the edge off even the most crushing defeats. Between a failure sequence so entertaining it becomes more of a reward for trying in the first place and the ability to instantly start the whole thing over with the push of a button, it becomes clear why it can get away with some of the mind-boggling (on first brush, at least) level designs they throw at you.

Yes, it can be an intensely hard game at times, and yes, there have definitely been moments where all I’ve wanted in the world was to see my TV explode in a shower of sparks and broken dreams as my controller flew through the screen. That I never do, instead stabbing the Back button with all the rage I can while growling “One more” at the hapless rider on his bike as he reappears at the start of the track before gassing the engine, is where it becomes clear just what sort of game Trials HD is. It’s not about getting everything exactly right the first time, it’s about learning from each and every mistake, finding the perfect degree to lean at for a jump, positioning your bike just right for landing, ad slowly discovering the correct blend of insane risk and precision needed to get from one end of the track to the other as fast as possible while remaining in one piece. It’s one of the best “just one more go” games I’ve played in ages, and looking at the ways it quickly funnels you back to the starting line, siphoning off just enough anger to keep you from quitting in a rage (or at least postponing it), it’s not hard to see why. Trials HD is a master class in balancing fun and frustration, giving players all the tools they need to become good enough at the game to perform incredible feats of dirt bike derring-do. Making the most useful tools the subtlest is something I’m very much trying to learn from.

When Jones’ post first appeared I scrawled some notes in a little notebook towards an intended response, but the me of now is having trouble working out what the me of June was going for at the time, so I’m mostly going to wing it. For a bit of context, Jones very much comes from an art background, having been involved with pretty much everything considered (or at least argued) to be art, from acting, music, writing, painting, comics, a stint in videogames, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. He also ran a small art gallery for a few years, which on top of all the rest means a few things: he drinks a lot, is prone to cynicism, and usually knows what he’s talking about. As such, I feel confident he’ll correct anything I might get wrong below, probably while demanding I buy him a drink and making fun of my shoes.

The essence of Jones’ take on the much-sought after bade of being considered proper Art (pronounced “Awt”, for those reading aloud at home) is it’s a lot of crap, a popularity contest each new medium is forced to enter in turn. He argues that as videogame creators (or television people, or comics people, or purveyors of any of the “new” media) we should take the stance of not wanting to join any club that would have us as a member, focusing instead of producing the best work we can and placing craftsmanship over the approval of old men in universities with embarrassing beards.

I agree except where I don’t, really. His points on Craft and Craftsmanship strike a chord with me, particularly as I discover more and more that as much as I love discussing design theories and practice, I’d much rather just do the job. As for not needing to be art… I don’t know. On one hand, I’m a big fan of not depending on someone else saying I’m something to consider myself that something, but on the other, I’m not on the front lines of (or even involved with) game academia like Brenda Brathwaite, Ian Schreiber, or Tracy Fullerton. I’ve never been in a position where my work and passions might be professionally marginalized because they weren’t considered a valid art form by the powers that be, never had to fight to prove that what I was doing mattered. It’d be nice if games didn’t need status to prove they were worth the sort of in-depth exploration those mentioned and others like them are committed to, but if a label is what it takes, then yeah, I think we need the label. At least for now. There’s also the part of me that doesn’t want to be told my medium and I can’t sit at the Adult’s Table, but that’s harder to back up with links to smart people, so.

At any rate, read Jones’ piece if you haven’t already. Aside from any arguments over artistic validity, his points on the importance of good craftsmanship above all else are well worth it.

*Friend James claims he chimed in as well, but as I can’t find his comments anywhere, let’s just assume he’s lying.

Unfortunately for those waiting and watching for such a game to appear, it’s not going to. There will be no Citizen Kane of videogames, no one game that suddenly vindicates gaming as an art form in the same way as Orson Wells’ masterpiece purportedly did, because that’s not the way the world works any more, assuming it ever did in the first place. Legitimacy doesn’t come from one person in a field doing one thing right; it comes from movements, from consistency, from progress across the board creating a new standard for future work to be held against. We’re spending all our time looking for one very special tree, when we should be paying attention to the overall picture of what’s going on with the forest.

As someone who works in games, I find the idea of waiting around for one wonderful game to solve the industry’s concerns with being taken seriously to be particularly grating for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it smacks of wanting someone to come along and do it for me. I’ve seen the question of when videogames’ Citizen Kane will come along put to the likes of Peter Molyneux, Ken Levine, Warren Spector, and a dozen others, and I can’t help but wonder if any of them ever felt a bit insulted at being relegated to John the Baptist status, forever doomed to be remembered best for paving someone else’s way. To ask the question implies not only that such a game or event hasn’t already happened yet, waiting for some future huddle of thoughtful types to point it out as the turning point, but that when it does appear it’ll do so with bells on and a note around its neck declaring its importance. It is, really, a stupid thing to ask of anyone, so loaded down with assumptions and deep misunderstandings on the nature of games and art as a whole that asking it should make you feel a bit ashamed of yourself. Why should games evolve the same way film did, and why should we expect them to? Why would you assume there aren’t already games deserving to be called art, with all the good and bad that carries with it? Why are we waiting for one great turning point, when games make so many small and important ones each year? And more important than any of those questions, why oh why do we as a medium need any one else to tell us how smart and pretty we are?

For all the tremendous leaps and bounds videogames have made since first appearing, our medium’s story is ultimately one of evolution, not revolution. The incredible strides made towards more and more meaningful and engrossing experiences are the results of countless iterations big and small to discover what works and cast aside what doesn’t. Videogames are a medium unlike anything the world has ever seen, with greater potential and challenges than nearly any other art form can muster. Instead of waiting to be taken seriously by the world at large like a child squirming for permission to sit at the adult’s table, we should claim the art form status that’s rightfully ours, even if we aren’t entirely convinced we deserve it yet. The first step to being a grown up is calling yourself one – sooner or later, the rest of the world will come around.

For those wanting to have a career in game design, Lamb has some suggestions. “Learning to work with others and make concessions for the good of the game is one of the best things that can happen to you,” he says. While this may sound like a no-brainer, being creatively attached to your work may leave you a bit hurt.
“There will be times when the design you’re so very sure of will have to be changed in some way due to the say-so of someone else, be it a person on your team, your producer, your boss, a publisher, the licensor, or some other involved body,” he says. “It’s a very hard lesson to learn, and can be immensely frustrating, particularly when the change they’ve asked for ends up being for the better.”

That’s me in the quote marks, sounding remarkably like I know what I’m talking about. You can find the rest of the piece here. Thanks very much to Alexandra for giving me the opportunity to ramble incessantly at her about something I love, and for bravely soldiering through in the face of my answering each of her questions with the equivalent of a final term paper.

This course provides students with a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the field of game design, along with practical exposure to the process of creating a game. Topics covered include iteration, rapid prototyping, mechanics, dynamics, flow theory, the nature of fun, game balance, and user interface design. Primary focus is on non-digital games.

The bit at the end there about non-digital games is particularly interesting, as I have almost no experience in terms of analog game design and have always considered it a huge hole in my toolset, one I’m lookingforward to filling in. Perhaps even more exciting, though, is the program’s price – The whole thing is free, other than the required text (aforementioned Challenges For Game Designers, which even outside of Amazon is half the price of your typical book on game design) and any supplies needed for the game you’ll create during the course. I picked up Challenges For Game Designers back when it first came out, and after reading through a good chunk of it, I think anybody participating will be in very good hands. All the information on the course can be found at the Game Design Concepts site, including where to to send an email if you’re interested in registering.

I think this is an absolutely great idea, and one I’d love to see more of. There are all kinds of events, conferences, festivals, and so on happening year-round with a focus on various aspects of the games industry and the academia built up around it, but many of them are just too cost prohibitive in terms of time and money to be doable for someone like, say, me. I’ve never attended the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco becaust I can’t afford the thousands of dollars involved in going an no company has ever offered to pay for me to go. Next week sees the five-day Games For Change Festival happening at Parson’s New School here in Manhattan, including the likes of Henry Jenkins, Ian Bogost, Brenda Brathwaite’s incredible game Train, and more, but with the bulk of it happening during my work week and passes running several hundred dollars, there’s no way I can make it. There are some cheap or free events concerning games that are more compatible with my work schedule – the IGDA hosts regular meet ups and demo nights, and recently NYU’s Game Center opened up lectures featuring Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc, and Eric Zimmerman to the public, which was greatly appreciated. I attend as many of these things as I can, but it doesn’t do much to take away from the feeling that I’m regularly missing out on things I could really benefit from as a designer. At my more bitter moments, it’s hard not to look at things like GDC and other big, expensive events as a private club I won’t be able to buy my way in to any time soon.

So before the course even starts, I’m already tremendously grateful to Ian Schreiber for taking the time and effort to offer this sort of thing free of charge to any and all who are interested. I didn’t go to college for game design (or anything else, actually); I kind of stumbled-ass backwards in to the thing, discovered I had an affinity for it, and almost immediately never wanted to do anything else with my life but make up things for people to play. I’ve spent a lot of time amassing a library of books, lectures, blog posts, articles, and anything else I could find on game design to temper my own experiences with, and am constantly looking out for anything that might teach me something new and make me a better designer. As such, to have someone who’s approach to design I already appreciate and admire offer a college-level that won’t plunge me in to debt and adapts to my schedule is something of a dream come true, and I can’t wait to get started.

You can also find the prettier HD version here at Valve’s website.  The video officially came out last week as part of the Sniper/Spy surprise joint update for the PC version of the game, but it leaked via some canny person finding it in Valve’s YouTube profile last weekend. (the funny story and hilarious repercussions of which are well worth going back through the last few day’s of the TF2 team’s blog to read for yourself).   And now, finally, I’m putting it up here.  Because I like to think of this site as the terminus point for the relevance of things on the internet.  You’re welcome.

Inspired by the all the wit and personality Valve have spent the last two weeks pouring in to characters, I’ve dipped back in to the 360 version of the game several times over the last few days to remind myself of why, before the arrival of Left 4 Dead it was my favorite multiplayer videogame.  The game is still the same (sometime to it’s detriment – none of the PC upgrades or new maps have found their way to the 360 yet, due apparently to a memory issue who’s fix is taking the long way around), but the players have changed – the games in progress at any given time are nearly half what they were a year ago, and those playing them (at least on the teams I ended up on) seem to have forgotten the absolute crucial value of communication and planning out your moves rather than rushing in guns blazing.

It’s not entirely surprising, seeing how the game has gone over a year without a significant update or add on, and the creators should be praised for creating something that remains so fun with only four maps to play on and just the original weapon sets to kill each other with, but it’s still a bit sad to see.  I love playing the game, and when my hands remembered what it meant to be a Pyro on my second match in it was like I’d never left, but I can’t see it beating out the siren song of Left 4 Dead that goes out when my usual group comes online and is eyeing an Expert run.  I have hopes for a resurgence in the community when Valve finally finds a way to bring all their mad new ideas to the console, but with each passing month, it’s harder to believe it’ll be anything more than a casual fling when it comes.   Team Fortress 2 will always have a part of my heart, but at this rate, I’m not sure the same can be said for my time.  Not that I’m worried about that now – the fleeting nature of love is of little concern when there are spies to set alight.

And it looks like this has turned in to a proper post after all.  Oh, and did I mention the comic introducing the most horrible weapon of all, the Sniper’s debilitating Jarate?  No?  Well shame on me, then.

I swing over the side of the boat, cutting a path to Francis just in time to help him back to his feet. They swarm me almost instantly, pummeling me from all sides, providing just enough of an opening to let me think I might make it back to the ship before knocking me down. I’m screaming for help while emptying my pistols in to them, but I already know no one is coming. Out of the corner of my eye, I can just make out the outline of Francis being drug down again. The pistols empty, my health bar slips from green to yellow to red, and the screen starts to dim around the edges…

Left 4 Dead is more than the zombie game I’ve always wanted without realizing it, it’s also pretty much the only online multiplayer experience I’ve had the patience for since Team Fortress 2 arrived a year and change ago. That both are from Valve is hardly coincidence – indeed, it’s hard to imagine the former existing without the lessons of enforcing cooperation between players first taught by the latter. But where TF2 introduced players to the ida that a team of average players working together would almost always overcome a team of more skilled lone gunman types, L4D tightens things even further by sticking hard and fast to the core rule of all zombie fiction: if you don’t work together, you will die alone. For better or worse, the three survivors accompanying you from safehouse to safe house, whether they’re human or AI bots (and, as a quick hat-tip to the lovely computer brain running things behind the scenes, I should mention that I was the only actual person in the above anecdote), are your best and only chance at making it out alive, and vice-versa. The fear of death as a motivation for sticking together is somewhat balanced out by the game constantly congratulating players on saving their friends by watching their back, healing them up, or even rescuing them from a Hunter or Smoker, but it’s never really goes away. Even in a safehouse, surrounded by friends and a pile of unlimited ammo, you can never quite shake the feeling that the walls could come down at any moment.

The results of being asked to trust the computer, complete strangers, or (sometimes worst of all) your friends with your livelihood are almost always unpredictable, and never fail to entertain no matter how many pieces you end up in. As great as it is to power through with a team of Captain Sensibles ready and will to shoot massive holes through anything that moves, it can be every bit as fun to go in with three little lost lambs who’ll snap the first time they hear a Witch sobbing in the dark. Sure, it can annoy to have your team fall to pieces within sight of a safehouse or while waiting for rescue, but it also offers a touch of realism that only you and your fellow players could have brought to the game. For all the atmosphere created by Valve’s carefully smashed levels and occasional pre-scripted flourishes, for all the looming menace that the AI Director adds by knowing just the worst possible moment to spawn of a wave of undead right behind you, it would all be for naught without the very real panic provided by the players. It’s a zombie film does as a conversation rather than a lecture, and there’s really nothing else like it.

Left 4 Dead is already one of my favorite games so far, and there’s so much I haven’t done in it. I haven’t even touched the “Blood Harvest” campaign, set in a rural farmland with little in the way of shelter and lots of wide open spaces for enemies to come at you from. I haven’t tried the Versus mode, where you take on the role of one of the Special Infected and use your knowledge of the maps to torment the other side. I haven’t seen all the hilarious scrawled messages between other survivors long since gone that line the walls of the safe houses. I haven’t managed to take down one of the monstrous Witches with a headshot, something I keep trying despite it ending in a mess of tears and blood nearly every time. I haven’t seen anything as funny as the time at the end of “No Mercy”, when my valiant stand off against a Tank was cut short by him punching me so hard I flew off the hospital roof like a rocket. For a game some have criticized as skimping on content, Left 4 Dead seems to bristle with new opportunities for amazing, completely unpredictable moments. It’s a game that I come away from each time with a new favorite bit, and while I’m sure that’ll wear off eventually given time, it’s not something I see happening any time soon.

Now here’s the thing: Spider-Man 2 came out in 2004, and there hasn’t been a good open-world game starring the wall-crawler since. Last year’s Spider-Man 3 game was roundly viewed as disappointing at best (and the less said about the Wii version, the better – in what world does two park benches and a tree constitute Union Square park?), a rush job pushed out the door by publisher Activision that couldn’t manage to live up to its two-year-old last-gen forebearer. In light of this, Web of Shadows, built by Treyarch with a bit of help from Shaba Games, feels almost like an apology. The web-swinging is better than ever, bolstered with new character animations (you wouldn’t believe how much better it is when Spider-Man runs along side a wall you run him in to rather than flopping uselessly against it) and a camera that swoops and pans around you dramatically while practically never getting confused or stuck behind a wall. New York looks beautiful, opting to look more like the Marvel comics version of the city than the real one, complete with a Daily Bugle that isn’t secretly the Flat Iron building and Stark Tower (!!!). Combat is incredibly fluid, dropping the irritating complexity of past games for simpler combos of buttons that put the weight of successful fighting on timing rather than pressing half the controller at once. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent half an hour fighting your way through Manhattan, bouncing from thug to thug without ever touching the ground.

Of course, there is that niggling “almost” up there. The voice-acting is somehow worse in some ways than the uninspired drone Toby Maguire coughed up for the Spider-Man 2 game, with the whiniest voice actor to ever whine filling the starring role’s tights. The lines being read are every bit as bad, with costars Luke Cage and Black Cat written as Generic Black Friend #3 and Skank At The Party, respectively. The combat is fun and supports many differnt styles of play, especially once you get comfortable switching between the speedy red and blue suit and the more powerful, slower black suit, but it’s all there is. The crux of each of the game’s three acts is built around fighting visually different enemies that by and large all fight one of three ways, creating a fun but incredibly repetitive experience. The game is also buggy as hell – hit a wrecked car in the third act to make it explode, and it’s just as likely to disappear on impact, popping out of sight while accompanied by a suddenly awkward explosion sound. I picked up the game on sale for $40 and with a pile of credit at Gamestop (what? It was an excuse to finally get rid of Guitar Hero III), and I’m perfectly happy with he amount I paid, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody for the full $60 price tag.

Once you get past the horrible voice acting, the bad writing, the repetitive gameplay, and the distracting bugs, however, there’s really something worth seeing. The core of Web of Shadows is strong, the results of Treyarch refining the engine from Spider-Man 2 until it’s finally able to provide the experience they were striving for all along. While the writing built on top of it doesn’t do it any favors, the plot of the game’s story is a lot of fun, slowly building up from the initial fight with Venom on the city streets at the start of the first act to the full-fledged doomsday scenario of the third, complete with smoking buildings, symbiote-consumed people turned monsters wandered the streets, and S.H.E.I.L.D. Helicarriers blowing up the bridges leading in to Manhattan in hopes of quarantining the situation. Without exaggerating too much, the best way to describe the last third of the Web of Shadows is to say it’s the New York-based zombie game you’ve always wanted where, instead of a doomed civilian stuck in a mall, you can do whatever a spider can. The first time you see a besieged car careening through the empty streets, covered in symbiotes trying to beat their way in to the non-infected civilian inside, or the first time the mob of symbiote zombies you were about to pick a fight with are vaporized under a Helicarrier bombardment…. well, it’s a lot easier to overlook the game’s blemishes and just enjoy the ride.

So it’s not perfect. And while playing it, you’ll never quite shake the feeling that, with a little more time, Web of Shadows could have been something truly extraordinary. What we get instead is a flawed by deeply fun game that, if not quite showing us completely, at least gives an idea of what the developers are capable of when not tied down to the plot and release date of a big budget sequel. While I can’t recommend it unconditionally, I can say I happily poured hours up hours in to it over Thanksgiving weekend, zipping through Manhattan in search of new fights to get in to and new sights to see while neglecting my brand new copy of Far Cry 2 and the last push needed in Fallout 3 to reach the endgame. Because while post-apocalyptic D.C. and the African savanna are great places to spend time, neither of them let me web swing through the skyscrapers of New York. And finally, after four years of waiting, I have a new way to do that.

Oh, and in this one? Spider-Man can swim. Top that, Bethsoft.