Whever I Go, I'm Still Me (Playing Video Games)

Alex and I are probably not great tourists. We don't spending a lot of time checking out notable landmarks. During our brief stay in Madison last weekend, we forgot to go see the plaque commemorating that time Elvis broke up a street fight by jumping out of his limo and striking a karate pose. The shame!

Besides comic stores and playing some mini-golf at a place that's apparently been in business since the '50s, we hit up 3 different arcades. One of them was just down the street from our hotel, and it was $8 for unlimited gaming, which meant we could unwind from 7+hours on the road by beating the X-Men arcade game on a screen that took up half a wall. We each only died. . .a bunch of times! 

(I did suggest Alex might want to stop spamming Colossus' special move right from the start, since it was draining his health, but he stuck with his strategy. I guess if you never run out of continues, why not?)

Even with Alex not waking up until after 11 the next morning, we still had a lot of time to kill before his gig, and the venue wasn't far from two bars with sizeable arcades, so we hit each one at different times. And the last one had a Spider-Man arcade game I'd never seen before. Part of the time, it's your standard side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game (what the game calls "Big Mode".) You kick, you punch, you jump kick. There's a special move that drains some of your health. You fight a lot of cannon fodder that are just palette-swapped versions of each other.

The rest of the time, it's a platformer, where you move between all these catwalks and rooftops, hitting enemies with your webs or avoiding them by climbing ceilings, grabbing health recovery pickups as you go along. The game refers to this as "Wide Mode" since the camera zooms out, making Spidey a much smaller figure, so you can see more of what's going on around you.

Not that I'm an expert on arcade games, but I didn't feel I'd seen that combo in one game previously. While there seem to be a lot more health recovery items in Wide Mode, the game makes you fight bosses in each, so neither one is necessarily easy (although the fact you can avoid enemies in Wide Mode does allow for a bit of a breather.) Less appealing, your character's health seems to drop a little at a time, even if you're just standing there. I assume to make you keep moving, but it's a stupid mechanic.

The game doesn't skimp on boss fights, pulling out a sizeable chunk of Spidey's enemies, though you still end up fighting Venom a lot. Three times in the opening stage, then one more time at the very end (but there are three of him.) I guess if you really want to kick the crap out of Venom, it's a great game, and the fights against him are less annoying than the part where the Green Goblin flies off the screen, then comes back through lobbing bombs. That wouldn't be so bad if your character could move faster, but he can't, so it's a pain in the butt.

Like X-Men, you have the option to play as other characters. What's odd is the ones they picked, even allowing for Spider-Man not typically being on a team in the early '90s. Black Cat? OK, sure. She'd been an ally more than a foe for a long time. But the other two characters are Hawkeye and Namor. Which is actually what made me to stop dead in my tracks. No one was playing, so the game was rolling some gameplay footage, and there was Namor, crawling up the side of a girder like Spider-Man. So I decided I had to play, even if I did stick with Spider-Man the whole way through. Supposedly the characters play differently, and the game leaned into the notion of Namor being able to absorb and redirect electricity for his special attack.

I did beat it, though I burned at least 12 quarters in the process. The game really likes making you fight the generic goons while also fighting a boss, which was really frustrating. Except when you could grab one of the goons and judo toss him into the super-villain. Anyway, I got the 2nd highest score.

But I'm just thinking about how those are the three people Spidey ends up enlisting. Even if Dr. Strange was doing the old tarot card bit from Secret Defenders, I feel like he might stop and reshuffle the deck. There's a "Sorcerer's Stone" involved, which the Kingpin appears to have swiped, but he's not the actual final boss (SPOILER: it's Dr. Doom.) I guess Black Cat could have heard about the heist through her contacts. And maybe it's Atlantean, so Namor's pissed it got stolen, though it still seems like a member of the FF would have made more sense, given Doom's presence. Hawkeye? Hawkeye was just bored, saw the other three talking, and injected himself into the mix.