u/Solo4114

So, I finally finished Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC, after having done a New Game+ playthru of the first game and the Miles Morales "1.5th" game. Having just finished it about 30 min ago, I am...of two minds about it. There are some really terrific aspects about this game, and...some really irritating aspects about it. I gather it also had somewhat of a troubled development cycle, but because I didn't follow it at all (since I don't have a PS5 and don't plan on getting one), so I didn't track the ups and downs. And it looks like, thanks to Sony's current maneuver to discontinue "prestige" PC game ports, I'll have to be a "patient gamer" again unless and until they release games like Wolverine and the inevitable sequel on PC...if that ever happens.

Still, we've gotten 3(ish) games in this franchise out of them, and I'm happy with them...mostly.

The Good

To begin with, I loved Marvel's Spider-Man, and very much liked the Miles Morales game. Spider-Man felt truly epic with an enjoyable "Arkham-Lite" combat and stealth system, decent boss fights, and a truly (ahem) amazing story. The acting quality was top-notch, the visuals were excellent (there must've been a ton of mocap), and Insomniac's takes on Peter and his rogues gallery was fresh and interesting. The combat system was especially enjoyable to me, a late-40s gamer who has never been worth a damn at fighting games (except Soul Caliber. I was pretty damn good at that.).

With Spider-Man 2, much of what made the first 2(ish) games enjoyable is repeated here. The story and acting are, again, start-to-finish top notch. Truly, this is a fantastic cast, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of the returning characters, as well as the addition of new ones. They totally sell their characters, and it sucked me into the narrative every time.

The story itself is also mostly good. I enjoy the twist of Harry as Venom (and "Agent Venom" kinda). Kraven poses a genuine, pervasive threat for the first half of the game, and Venom and the symbiote army pose a threat in the latter half. The narrative is probably at its best in navigating the relationships between the main characters, and is most grounded in Pete's joy at reconnecting with his long-lost best friend, and the impact that has on his life and the other characters around him.

I thought I wouldn't like splitting time between Pete and Miles, but I actually found myself enjoying the mix of the two and then seeing them come back together again. My only wish is that there was more team-up work, and I think there is (was?) the most possibility for innovation in actual teamwork both in terms of narrative design and gameplay loop...but Insomniac focused on building on what it had, which makes sense from a business perspective, but which I think falls short. More on that in a bit.

I'll also say that the visuals continue to be excellent, but that's not a huge surprise. I also liked expanding the scope of the city to include newly accessible boroughs not featured in the prior game, while also being smart enough to include effective fast travel and fast traversal options. The addition of the web wings was awesome and a fun callback to the old school roots of the comic and the costume designs, but it also had a terrific impact on the game, allowing you another way to zip around the city, only a bit faster than web-slinging.

The Middling

Combat was, for me, a strength of Spider-Man 1 and of Miles Morales, although I kinda prefer the slower pace of combat in Spidey 1 than MM. MM added the venom abilities, which was a nice touch that introduced a bit of additional complexity, but which came at the cost of Pete's array of gadgetry. In that sense, it felt like it was just "alt gadgets." In Spidey 2, though, that is no longer the case. Gadgets are still streamlined, but both Pete and Miles get multiple additional powers, which can be further expanded upon and swapped around, albeit in ways that I thought didn't quite make narrative sense and created a bit of ludonarrative dissonance.

This mostly comes in when you get the "antivenom" suit, which I thought felt more like gameplay leading the narrative than gameplay supporting the narrative. Like, "Hey these are cool new powers, and we need to maintain them, so find a reason they come back." Pete's Anti-Venom suit looks cool...but is it a new symbiote on him? Except it has a mask he can pull off like his normal suit? What the hell is going on here? It wasn't clear, and as a result, felt like the powers were there because the powers were cool, and the narrative was thrown together to justify it.

The pacing of the story was also off. The build-up to Kraven, which occupies something like 2/3 of the game, felt pretty great, and scaled well. After that point, when Venom kicks in felt waaaaaay to abrupt. The side quests ended up feeling...off as well, especially when the symbiote nests show up. To help make it make sense, I took down the symbiote nests before the final battle, both to get some of the in-game meta-currency needed to upgrade my abilities, and because to me, it'd make sense that doing so would "weaken" the symbiote system...which is why it sort of surprised me that the game didn't bother with that. Ultimately, the thing that really ended up selling the last act of the game was the quality of the acting and, to a lesser extent, the writing. Even though it felt like things were moving too quickly, the actors' delivery sold the urgency and emotion. I just wish the whole narrative had a bit more time to breathe, because I think it would've also allowed for greater gameplay variety.

The Bad

This brings me to what sucked about Spider-Man 2. For all the good stuff -- and there is a lot that I love about it -- the bad stuff is...really not great, in my opinion.

For one thing, the combat was not my favorite, which is a shame because I love the combat in the first two games. This is primarily due to three basic factors.

1. The increased complexity of combat. The Miles Morales game added a bit of complexity, but it was manageable, in part because your venom powers kind of "took the place of" Pete's gadgets from the first game. You still had gadgets, just fewer of them. Numerically, it may actually be that you end up with the same amount of abilities, but the mapping of them on the controller, coupled with the new "parry" mechanic really threw me.

Much of the time, I found myself trying to parry, only to accidentally activate a special ability that I didn't want to use. I ended up downloading a mod for the final few fights that simply made the undodgeable/you-must-parry-these attacks and turned them into dodgeable OR parryable attacks, which actually made that aspect of the game a hell of a lot more fun. The "button mashing" issue also showed up in minor ways in the doubling of the button for the web wings mapping on the same button that let you do web-strike takedowns. I am sure some of this is just because I'm an old gamer who cut his teeth on a joystick with one button playing GORF on a VIC-20 (look it up, kids), but my recollection is that both MM and the Spidey 1 games handled this better. This made the controller mapping feel more cumbersome, and I think a bunch of that is due to embiggening the power sets.

2. Encounter design simply got harder in this game, and harder in a way that I think the actual game engine struggled to deal with. I mean, I recognize my own limits as a gamer. My reflexes ain't what they used to be. But a lot of the time, it felt like I was fighting the system itself, as it would inadvertently lock on to an enemy I wasn't trying to target (and may not have even been looking at), or where the camera would end up pointing in some direction I didn't want to be because it had reoriented somehow mid-fight. The jump ability also felt nerfed from the last game, and felt more like a "hop" without doing a powered jump.

Mostly, the big issue with the encounter design is the overlapping threats. The quality of the threats you face was interesting, but the implementation of it was just frustrating much of the time, I think due to the combination of the number of enemies and the fact that the game would throw multiple enemies executing "dodge" or "parry" attacks at the same time. I'm fighting a sword hunter right as a fist hunter throws a punch at me, and one of those perched-shooting hunters is taking a shot, and there is just literally no way to get out of the way of all of them.

This gets worse when the symbiotes show up. Symbiote enemy design was interesting in that each type of symbiote presented a different threat, but they all just kind of show up at once and all of a sudden, so you have to kind of learn how to beat them on the fly, and by the time you do, the game's already over. Not great. Normally as they introduce new threats like these, you'd expect the game to highlight it and give you a sense of effective counters, but instead you have to figure it out yourself. The symbiotes were also more resilient than the other enemies you fight, able to better shrug off a lot of my go-to moves or at least shake off whatever debuffs I hit them with faster. That's not a bad thing, because it keeps the game fresh, but when coupled with what felt like encounters designed to simply overwhelm you, it got frustrating. Again, some of this may be me, needing to learn the game, but some of it felt like gameplay pacing issues as well to an extent.

By gameplay pacing, I mean introducing new enemies to counter, new abilities to use, etc. This stuff all felt very rushed and as a result, more complex than it probably is. It was really only by the end of the game that it started to gel for me how the gadgets could recharge your focus and your special abilities, and vice versa. I don't recall that being explained in the game prompts at any point (though I may be forgetting).

The absolute worst element of the game, though, has got to be the absolute dogshit boss fights. Pretty much every single boss fight seemed to play out the same way, and once I saw the pattern, I couldn't unsee it and it came across as incredibly one-note. Dodge, dodge, parry, do a bunch of punches, then do this for 3-4 sequences with big emotional speeches laid overtop the whole thing. Ugh. This was especially true after Kraven is defeated. The Kraven fight was mostly good. An arena fight that made sense because, duh, of course Kraven would want to fight you one on one in an arena. That fits the game. But then every boss fight after that played out the same way, only with the boss having 3-4 "health bars" that you had to deplete in the same boring-ass way.

The environment played far less of a role than I'd have liked, the variety of moves and such was limited, in that the enemy would often just shrug off stuff that'd work on other enemies, etc. Plus, half the time when you went to go use some environmental thing, you couldn't because the enemy would just hit you with multiple "MUST DODGE/PARRY" attacks that you had to deal with. Even your special abilities could get interrupted all too easily.

By the end of the game, I'd had enough, and actually found myself just wishing (and even saying out loud) that I wanted the whole sequence to just be done already. Literally, "Oh come ON!! Don't tell me I have to do ANOTHER fucking arena battle..." Truly, it was just no fun, and actually makes me think that, before I bother to do a New Game+/Ultimate run, I'm gonna download the hell out of some mods to alter gameplay and make it more fun. I gather there's one that makes the Focus system work more like it did in the first two games, which would help a bunch.

Oh, and for the love of Stan Lee, NO MORE GAMEPLAY SEGMENTS WITH NON-POWERED CHARACTERS. Nobody liked these in the first two games. I did not like them in this game, either with the sole exception of the one with Hailey, and that was more just a cool exploration of Hailey's world in a low pressure setting. The MJ stealth segments? Fuck that. I get that we want her to be an integral part of the Spidey-gang. But playing as her, even in this somewhat more powered up version, sucks and I hope they finally drop it in any potential sequels.

Overall:

The thing is, overall, I really, really like this game.

But I don't love it like I did with the first one or even with Miles Morales (which has grown on me over time).

And that is almost entirely due to the game's shortcomings, chief among them (for me) the boss fights. They just fucking suck, man. They really, really suck. The most interesting one other than Kraven was the Lizard, and even that was mediocre. After that, I guess the fight against flying Venom, but only because it offered some fucking variety, and barely at that.

There's so much good in this game, but it's held back by a few really glaring issues that, while I would rate Spider-Man 1 a 10/10, and Miles Morales a 9.5/10, I'd give this one more like a 7.5/10 overall, with 12/10 elements (again, the acting). But those elements aren't enough for me to be excited about another playthru. Not yet, anyway.

Hi folks. I'm looking to pick up a copy of the Infinity War omnibus. I already have the Inifinity Gauntlet and Infinity Crusade omnis, and am looking to round out the set.

Depending on the price, I'd be willing to pay, but I also have some stuff I can trade. Available trade omnis include:

- X-Factor: The Original X-Men Vol.1

- What If? The Original Series Vol. 2 (Wolverine/Hulk cover, sealed)

- The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2 (sealed, Ramos variant cover)

Epics and other TPBs available include:

- Miller/Jansen Daredevil vols. 1-3 (basically encompasses the Miller/Jansen omni, just in softcover form)

- Uncanny X-Men: Second Genesis, and Proteus (which include issues not present in the omnis)

- A bunch of smaller Johns Green Lantern TPBs.

Also happy to consider a trade + paypal exchange, if we can agree on value.

I'm planning on picking up a Eufy setup in the next few days, probably a package with 2 S340s, a floodlight camera, and the home base. What I'm trying to figure out is whether I need a third camera.

My property has front and rear accessible portions that will be covered by one S340 and the floodlight, respectively. We also have a narrow alley that runs the length of my house, for which we also will need coverage. My initial thought was to put one S340 in the alley, on the assumption that the camera would automatically pan to pick up movement coming from the front or the back, but I'm not sure if they actually work that way.

If they don't, I assume I need another camera, and to have them point essentially back to back at either end of the alley.

Part of the difficulty is that our house has multiple bay windows that bump into the alley, so simply mounting high at one end or the other will end up missing motion (potentially) when it disappears behind one of the bays. So, my thought was to mount to the most protruding bay itself, which is towards the middle of the house.

Can one camera cover an entire alley via smart panning (or something), or would I need a second alley camera?

On an unrelated note, how reliable are the batteries/solar on the S340s in general? I could switch to S4s, I suppose, but at almost 2x the price, I'm wondering if it's really worth it. If the S340s are reliable, I figure I'm good to go with them. If they tend to crap out and I'll just end up having to replace them, I might as well "future proof" and get the S4s.