I had been planning to go to Spiderman 2 last night at 12:01 am… but I decided to skip it instead… so I went out during the day and spent my Father’s Day gift (a gift certificate for Best Buy… my wife made a great choice) on a wireless xbox controller from Logitech and the new Spiderman 2 game.

Now, I loved the first game… so my opinion should be considered in that light, but I really enjoyed playing this game. The ‘manual’ style of swinging is more difficult but seems so much more realistic and leads to more realistic movement patterns as you need to use buildings on either side of the street to lock your webline to… and when you swing out over a park you have that sudden realization that there is nothing out there for you to swing from … and then you fall into the trees 🙂

I think the best part of the game is the idea of random crimes… super heroes are always supposed to be stopping crime all night/day, with the cool stories happening outside of their normal ‘job’… but this game starts to give you a sense of the pressure of being a hero. You can’t help everyone, and just when you are a deadline, rushing across town to stop a bad guy or you are chasing a getaway car after a bank heist, you’ll hear/see a mugging going on down a side street… and you have to decide what to do… who do you help? Of course, some missions/goals are required for the plot, so if you decide not to do those you ’lose’. I don’t know if I like that, but I understand the limitation and the need to keep the plot moving forward, so I’ll keep my vision of a totally open-ended game in the closet for now.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun… the new controller worked perfectly and felt great to use (people have commented that it is bigger than the S controller and it might be, but I didn’t notice which is all that matters to me).

Update: While I don’t mind the discussion in the comments at all, people might find the XBox forums at http://forums.xbox.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=28 to be a more enjoyable place to talk about this game… I’m afraid I don’t know enough about it to help with very many of the questions, but I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be able to help over on those forums. Thanks!