E-Mail This Article to a Friend The ultimate rental Fun, but save your Spidey cents BY AARON SOLOMON
	Ultimate Spider-Man For Xbox, PS2, Nintendo Gamecube, Nintendo DS, PC and Game Boy Advanced | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Treyarch/Published by Activision

It’s not easy creating a good comic-book adaptation, no matter which medium you work with. For every Sin City and X-Men 2 there’s a Fantastic Four or a Daredevil; for every Smallville there’s a campy Batman or Wonder Woman. This is especially true when dealing with video games based on comics; a successful marriage of the two genres can result either in brilliance, like this summer’s Incredible Hulk title, or brilliant disaster, like the waste-of-cartridge-space that was Superman 64.

Ultimate Spider-Man is neither wonderful nor woeful, but it does offer a few hours of fun, albeit frustrating, game play. Part of its success is in tapping Marvel wunderkind Brian Michael Bendis to write the story, and long-time Spider-Man illustrator Mark Bagley to provide all the pretty pictures. The result is essentially a living, interactive comic, where even the menu prompts appear to have been hand-written. It’s a nice touch for comic fanboys (like me) but for the casual gamer/reader, this probably won’t be enough to make up for the choppy camera movements and at-times too-sensitive controls.

A bit of background: the Ultimate line of Marvel comics is a parallel universe, which has nothing to do with the normal Marvel universe. This is why we get a Nick Fury that looks like Sam Jackson, and a Thor who may or may not be a mental patient. It is also why the Venom suit in Ultimate Spider-Man is not an alien (as we are likely to discover in Spider-Man 3) but rather something created by Peter Parker’s father; yes, it took me a little while to get over this fact. And to be sure, the opportunity to play as Venom is one of the best things about this game.

Unfortunately, much of the game revolves around Spider-Man involving himself with so-called City Goals in order to advance the story and access Venom. None of these goals are particularly dissimilar, and they range from completing City Events such as saving suicidal pedestrians, to Combat Tours and Race Events. It is during these races where the game’s iffy controls and camera angles really put a kibosh on the fun. There are also times when Spidey or Venom must chase some evil baddie, and these, too, suffer from the imperfect controls. Fortunately, they run the same route every time, so a few tries usually gets the job done. And while the cell-shaded graphics do look good, they were put to much better use in XIII.

The good news is that Spidey moves like he should, defying, as he says in the game, all the laws of physics. Swinging through the Manhattan cityscape, you’d be hard-pressed not to utter a few "woo-hoos" like Tobey Maguire. The fighting, especially against the bosses, consists mostly of mashing the "punch" and "kick" buttons, but there are a few cool Web-related moves that you can throw in to subdue your opponent. And when Venom gets low on health it’s time to feed on hapless pedestrians, which is certainly fun. What’s more, many familiar Spider-Man villains appear, such as the Green Goblin and Electro.

I can’t recommend spending $50 to buy this game, when it doesn’t even include a Bruce Campbell narration (as the much cheaper movie adaptation did). But if you’ve got a weekend to spare, Ultimate Spider-Man is worth the rental price.

Score: 7.0 (out of 10)