Spidey

Does that title speak at all to you ? What does it say ?

Me hey sends me a link to those spidey blogposts
Her http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

She's new.

Spidey aka spidey.exe was what you typed into the command promptⁱ in order to start...

That's right! I wasn't a fan of the franchise, heck in the early 90s I hadn't even any ideea exactly what this Spider Man business is, nor exactly what superheroes would be - other than the vague notion that it's some laughable-if-it-weren't-pitiful crap the poor of the Western world amuse themselves with. You know, the people who can't afford books nor do their parents have libraries with thousands of tomes, many of which rare stuff like the complete Landau & Lifshitz collection or the 18 lbs and now largely irrelevant Istoria literaturii romane de la origini pana in prezent.

And so to me this game was pretty cool. For one thing, the health meter was covering the rightmost 1/5th of the screen : a lifesize picture of some guy in a weirdo costume (or maybe he actually looked like that ?!) slowly draining of color and paste filling to expose the bones. Pre-puberty skeletons are kinda cool per se, and this one was pretty well done, too. For the other, it was something you've never seen before!

The guy threw no punches. This alone constituted a breath of fresh air, I had never to that day seen a game which wasn't about fucking up the environment but instead was about exploring it. Seriously, your score varied with how many game screens you had seen! This was a revolutionary concept for me at the timeⁱⁱ. Furthermore, they had titles! And the titles seemed so very mysterious, exotic and cool... "Bad Moon Rising", what's that ?

Spidey was this slowly perambulating guy that did crouching and standing walks with equal ease, could shoot a white beam from the hip which he could then climb on (I didn't at the time realise this was supposed to be spider web) bent on exploring the bizzaro environments. And explore them I did. There's a place called Take I (or II) where your skeletized figure slowly regenerates : I had no idea it's supposed to look like one of those wooden plates they click in front of the camera before scenes to make work a little easier for the cutter team. There's a bunch of other places which are supposed to look like movie environments I hear ? I had no idea.

Fact of the matter is, I was having a nice siesta when suddenly the fascination and mystery this game imposed upon me when I was a child struck with full force in the shape of that one sentence, "Bad Moon Rising". What the hell does it mean, why bad, why moon, who's rising! I recalled this game suddenly, ran off to the Interwebs and found it massacred by that famously evil Wes character : here and here.

To be honest, I did find the heli ride activated by you standing on top of its rotator, and I did jump off it to go to the top of the building in question (all in the quest for MORE SCREENS) but it never occured to me that it's significant, or that the moron in between the two beams would be A WOMAN (or why exactly anyone'd care that she's a woman), or that the little cape-clad thing to the left is in any way different from the little perambulatory tin can also to the left in the early screen where the heli ride began. Thus I never bothered to jump right so and kill it, tho I did notice that if you jump you can end up stuck in the pole. And so I've never seen the closing image, and good glory, thanks Trompi I didn't! It's awful.

In the end, I guess I should point out the rather obvious caveat : games are for kids. The notion that adults can comment on games is much alike in ridiculousness to the notion that kids have anything to say about quantum mechanics or literary theory. Obviously this stops no kids, and so the continued efforts of adults in areas that are structurally and unavoidably closed to them will likely continue. Still, I enjoyed Spidey.

1. Or otherwise, if you used a File Manager (like for instance XTG, because Norton Commander was new and retarded bullshit at the time) what you selected out of the three column directory view. [↩]
2. I wasn't yet much privy to the Larry series, nor to the rest of walkaround Sierra series. I had that stupid one were you're a janitor in some spaceship invaded by eviliens, but didn't much care for it. [↩]