The Stack

Since Ultimate Spider-Man showed a very similar reluctance to run under Windows 10 as Galaga: Destination Earth, it seemed plausible that the cause might be the same: DRM. Specifically, USM uses SafeDisc, which Windows 10 considers to be a security violation. I still don’t know if that’s the case or not. I haven’t found a nocd crack for Galaga online. I did find some general instructions for circumventing SafeDisc on Windows 10 by downloading and signing a driver in administrator mode, but it didn’t seem to help. Maybe Galaga instead uses SecuROM, another DRM system that Windows 10 doesn’t like, with a bigger reputation as a security risk, widely accused of flat-out being a rootkit. Or maybe the problem was never really DRM at all.

Regardless, it seems like my best bet is still to set up a Windows 98 machine, which is something I kind of want to do anyway for the sake of other games. But in the course of searching for nocd cracks, I discovered another option: archive.org has the Playstation version of Galaga: Destination Earth available to play online. And I did play that for long enough to get through the first level, but I won’t be continuing there. The sound is unbearably choppy in my browser, just constantly cutting in and out, and the resolution is significantly below what I’m willing to accept for this game. That is, it’s probably 256×224, designed for a standard definition television with a certain amount of blur. I’m not really very demanding about resolution. 800×600 is plenty for me in a game designed around 3D graphics, like this one. I might even get used to 256×224. But the sound is a real deal-breaker.

At least I did legitimately play it for a little while, though!

I guess I’m done. The rooftop fight with Venom and the helicopter was, in fact, the final mission, and a little extra health from the combat tours was enough to get me through it. The game clearly wants me to keep playing, though, doing races and hunting for tokens and so forth. It even unlocked Venom for use outside of the missions. But I’m done.

Venom gets his own races, designed around his abilities, and also a special rampage mode where you try to cause as much damage as possible to people and cars before soldiers take you down with escalating firepower. It’s highly reminiscent of playing GTA and committing crimes until your Wanted level hits five stars. I tried this out for one full session, getting to the point where they were sending helicopters after me. I don’t see a need to do it again. I do like how it started, though. Unlike the races and combat tours, there’s no in-world token you use to start a rampage. You just pick up a car and throw it, and that starts your rampage. The game seamlessly adds some rampage-specific UI to the screen in response, displaying your current Wanted level and how many points of senseless damage you’ve scored. It makes perfect sense: if a player is throwing cars around, of course they want to be in rampage mode. I’d like to see more special modes and mini-games activated naturally and automatically like this.

Overall, this game is a weird mixture of highly polished and not quite satisfying. The art is stylishly toon-shaded, but not quite toon-shaded enough to remain visually interesting. Swinging around the city is viscerally fun (especially in comparison to earlier Spider-Man games), but kind of empty, especially when you wind up mostly visiting the same two or three locations. Races try to address that, but they’re too disconnected from the fiction to be really satisfying. The combat tours have a bit of tactical depth, as you try to decide whether it’s more urgent to knock another thug down or to web up his already-fallen droogs to keep them from getting up, but there’s no application of this depth to the story missions, which are nearly all one-on-one fights. As Venom, you can throw cars around, but you can’t damage buildings. There are a lot of Ultimate Marvel cameos, but a couple of really noticeable absences: even though the game keeps telling you to go to Aunt May’s house and the Daily Bugle to trigger story missions, you never see Aunt May or J. Jonah Jameson. I think I have to regard this game mainly as transitional, an experiment in open-world Spider-manning that would eventually lead to better-developed works like the recent PS4 game. But even there, I’m seeing some reports of similar sentiments.

I wasn’t having much luck in what I believe to be the final mission, a rooftop battle against Venom where he’s suddenly more powerful and also you have to stop him from destroying a helicopter. It’s possible that there’s some trick I’m missing that would make it easy. It wouldn’t be the first time I was stuck on something like that: a mid-game Venom vs Electro battle in Times Square hinges on the realization that you can destroy the electrified signs that Electro is using to recharge his powers. But I’ve gotten close enough to beating him that I don’t think this is the case for Venom. Maybe he has a second form that’s more puzzle-like. In fact, I’ll be a little disappointed if he doesn’t.

Due to my lack of progress, I did what I always seem to do at the end of GTA-like open-world games: I took a break from the missions to go grinding. Ultimate Spider-Man doesn’t exactly have an XP system, but it does provide character improvements based on optional side stuff. Do enough combat tours, and your maximum health increases. Get enough race medals, and you can throw more punches in a row. (There doesn’t seem to be a mechanical benefit corresponding to city events. Doing good is its own reward, I guess.) Both of these rewards seemed like they might help against Venom, although perhaps not much — it’s usually the helicopter that makes me lose. But perhaps if I had more health I could be a little more reckless in its defense.

I mostly pursued the combat tours, because they seemed easier than the races, although I may be wrong about that by now — new combat tours appear as you complete the old ones, and some of the new ones took multiple tries. The more I played them, the more I thought about what I was doing, and the less I liked it. The whole idea behind combat tours is that they send you seeking out members of one of the four fictional gangs roaming different parts of New York. Queens has the Yancy Street Gang, a bunch of low-level chumps from England; midtown Manhattan has the High Rollers, a bunch of rich kids with expensive weapons; uptown has the Die-Caste, military enthusiasts with cybernetic enhancements; and downtown has the Mei Hua Bang, a bunch of Chinese martial artists. That’s all comfortably remote from any real New York street gangs, although the fourth feeds into stereotypes, and it’s not like the game has any Chinese characters, or British characters for that matter, who aren’t in a street gang. Moreover, the combat tours cast Spider-Man as the aggressor. The people you’re seeking out to beat up aren’t committing any crimes before you approach them. If they were, it would be a city event, not a combat tour. You’re essentially profiling them, pummeling them to unconsciousness and tying them up with webbing on the sole basis of how they dress.

If the game were a little more abstract, I wouldn’t mind. But this is set in a fairly detailed (if artistically stylized) replica of New York City, and that’s enough for me to take the place of these game pieces in that city just a little seriously. GTA3 has similar issues, but at least it has the decency to acknowledge that it’s being a jerk.

I’m pretty sure I’m in the endgame at this point, a longish sequence of set-pieces with no free exploration separating them. Before this point, you’re pretty much playing two separate stories that intersect occasionally: the story of Spider-Man battling various bad guys wreaking havoc in New York City (including Venom), and the story of Venom battling the mercenaries sent by Bolivar Trask to capture him and retrieve the symbiote. These stories merge when Trask figures out that Peter Parker is connected to Venom and sends forces to collect him as well.

There’s a narratively peculiar thing that happens in games sometimes, where the interactive portions make you expend effort towards an end that is then contradicted by a cutscene. Here, Silver Sable attacks Peter with a tranquilizer gun to capture him for Trask — yielding some good comedy as the only immediate visible effect of the darts is his increasing annoyance — and you have to defeat her in combat. But after the fight is over (and after a chase sequence and fight against Venom), Spider-Man winds up falling unconscious and getting captured anyway, because the story needs the action to move to Trask’s laboratory and that’s the easiest way to get all relevant parties there. So why bother fighting, if you’re going to get captured anyway? Because getting captured before the cutscene is failure, and failure ends the game. But there is no real in-story reason for Spider-Man to prefer one outcome over the other.

But then, this isn’t exactly a game about playing a role and advancing a character’s goals. The player’s goal is to advance the plot, whatever that means at any given moment, even if it means acting in contradiction to previous goals. Sometimes you’re Venom, sometimes you’re Spider-Man fighting Venom. At one point, you’re Venom defending Spider-Man from another villain, in a Joker-like “No one is allowed to kill him but me” kind of way. Later, in the endgame sequence in the lab, you’re Venom fighting Spider-Man, although the game hides this from you: you’re attacked by a smaller red symbiote that you might assume to be Carnage, but when you defeat it, it turns out to have Peter Parker inside. Presumably it was considered necessary to trick the player into attacking him. It might have felt weird otherwise.

The point is that the player’s goals vary from scene to scene, even if the means of achieving those goals are generally the same: chasing, fighting, going to checkpoints, a little light puzzle-boss solving. I feel like the interstitial cutscenes often go by too fast and don’t take enough time to make the character motivations comprehensible. Perhaps someone more familiar with the comics wouldn’t have this problem. But it hardly matters, because the game is usually pretty clear about what you’re trying to do, even if you don’t always know why you’re doing it.

I have to admit at this point that I’ve never actually read any comics featuring Venom. He was invented in the middle of the indie comics boom of the 1980s, when I was turning up my nose at Marvel as a matter of principle. Most of what I know about him is what I’ve picked up through geek-cultural osmosis and secondary sources like movies and videogames. So I didn’t really get him as a character until I played the Neversoft Spider-Man game from 2000.

His depiction there isn’t much like in Ultimate Spider-Man, because The 2000 Spider-Man doesn’t take itself at all seriously. It wallows in the comics’ goofy, silly, childish side, where supervillains are just schoolyard bullies writ large. In this context, Venom isn’t just Spider-man as a monster, as I put it in the last post. He’s a bigger kid who you’re jealous of because he’s better at being you than you are. He’s Spider-Man’s Spider-Man, casually outdoing him in the same way that Spidey outdoes ordinary people. And he teases Spidey relentlessly about it, in a deep, gravelly voice — which stings all the more because teasing your enemies is just another thing that he stole from Spidey. The encounter with Venom in this game isn’t even a fight. It’s a race, one web-swinger against another. Because apparently at this point in the continuity, Venom has made his peace with Spider-Man and no longer wants to kill him, but still wants to prove he’s better at being Spider-Man.

That race was one of the most memorable things about the game, partly because it was so hard. Getting from place to place via web-swinging using the controls in these games is difficult enough to do at all, let alone to do fast. And Ultimate Spider-Man keeps reminding me of this sequence, because so many of the supervillains you’re fighting have to be chased down first. The chief difference is that these aren’t races you can win by going faster. Your goal is to keep close enough to the enemy to keep them from escaping, sometimes with the additional constraint of not getting so close to them that they hurt you.

But the one chase that I had the hardest time with, it was because it was the first time I chased someone using Venom, and I hadn’t really learned his controls. Unlike in that first Spider-Man game, Venom doesn’t swing. His chief means of getting places fast is by jumping high in the air, like the Hulk. It’s not quite leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, but he can easily use one bound to get on the roof of a medium-sized building and leap a tall building from there. The problem is, I had forgotten how to do this, or even that it could be done. By this point in the game, I had Spider-Man’s controls down completely, because I had spent so much time just exploring the city as Spider-Man. But Venom only comes out for the Venom missions, and my explorations meant that it had been a long time since the tutorial. Thank goodness I still have the printed manual.

For the last couple of days, my Twitter feed has been all agog over the new Spider-Man game for the PS4. I don’t have a PS4, but I do have an open-world Spider-Man game I haven’t finished: Ultimate Spider-Man (Treyarch, 2005). I recall playing just the start of it back in 2006, in the last days before this blog. I’m not sure why I didn’t play more. Possibly I found the open world intimidating. Or maybe the framerate was slow and I wanted to wait to play it on a faster machine — it had to have been pretty demanding at the time.

Running it on Windows 10 was a little difficult. It installs without apparent problems, but the game itself simply exits immediately, much like Galaga: Destination Earth did. But USM is apparently a better-loved game than G:DE, because I was easily able to find an explanation online, if not a solution, via pcgamingwiki.com. It’s all down to the DRM. USM uses SafeDisc DRM, which apparently doesn’t work on Windows 10 for security reasons, just like SecuROM. Fortunately, I was able to find a reputable-looking no-CD crack on the web. Windows 10 doesn’t much like the security implications of running random programs downloaded from the internet either, but at least it’s willing to ask me about it instead of just shutting the thing down automatically. When I’m through with this, I’ll have to give G:DE another look and see if it’s using SafeDisc or SecuROM too. If it is, it’s conceivable that I could hack around it.

One other problem: some of the cutscenes glitch up the screen badly. Only a few of them, though, and it hasn’t been an impediment to understanding what’s going on, so I’m putting up with it.

I’ve played for a few hours, and it’s already feeling repetitive. To some extent, that’s my fault. I could propel the plot forward faster than I’ve been doing. It’s just that it’s fun to just swoop around exploring, and there’s a lot of stuff clamoring for Spidey’s attention in New York: tokens to collect, timed web-swinging races, “combat tours” where you follow an arrow and beat up gang members. Those all have GTA3 equivalents, but there’s one more type of collectible: “events”, which is what the game calls it when a citizen needs your help. A red spot appears on the mini-map, and when you reach it, you find a woman menaced by hoodlums, or a getaway car fleeing a robbery, or a man dangling precariously from a ledge. You can hardly refuse those, can you? But the game seems to have only so many event types, so they get repeated a lot.

The game doesn’t entirely give a choice, either. Before you can go to the next plot-advancing checkpoint, you have to meet a quota of “city goals”, which is to say, a minimum count of tokens, races, combat tours, and events. Your totals carry over, however, and I’m currently well ahead of the requirements on all points except combat tours. I suspect that it’s calibrated so that you don’t really have to grind the goals, that you’ll meet the minimal requirements just by doing the things you happen to come across on your way to the Daily Bugle or whatever.

Between spider-missions, there are bits where you play as Venom. I’ll talk about him in my next post.