Marvel video games can be hit or miss. When I was a kid Marvel games were largely limited to the arcade. One of my all time favorite games were “X-Men: The Arcade Game (1992),” a side scrolling fighting game. The goal of the game was to basically fight through waves of Sentinels and other villains like Pyro and Juggernaut in order to stop Magneto. Up to six players could play and like many arcade games I would end up playing with random players. Ultimately, I wasn’t very good at games then so I never got very far in that game. However, it was impact on my childhood and my first memory of a Marvel game.

I haven’t played the latest Marvel Spider-Man game which I hear is great. Regardless, my favorite Marvel game is Spider-Man 2. The game was not only a Marvel game but even worst a video game based on a movie. The history of good movie games isn’t great, so my expectation for this game was low. Spider-Man 2 is a open world action adventure that was published by Activision and developed by Treyarch. It was released for basically every console at the time. What makes the game so phenomenal is how the gameplay was able to emulate Spider-Man so closely.

I spent over a hundred hours largely swinging through NYC, travelling from Manhattan to Liberty Island. You felt like you WERE Spider-Man and of course it was fun. Like most open world games I got distracted from the main story and barely finished it. However, that is the point. It didn’t matter that I followed the linear story because I didn’t care to have the game end. With the realistic NYC environment, variety of crimes to stop, variety of Spider-Man powers and the realistic swing mechanics, Spider-Man 2 is my favorite Marvel video game.