'Our Spider-Man Games Have Sucked for the Last Five Years,' Admits Activision CEO
"Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years," states Kotick in the February 2010 issue of print magazine Game Informer. "They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It's about web-slinging. If you don't do web-slinging right, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?"
Among Activision's Spider-Man games across the last five years: Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man & Friends, Spider-Man Print Studio, Spider-Man: Battle for New York, Spider-Man 3, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.
The admission came about as Kotick was discussing whether or not kids and movie games suffer from a critical bias, explaining that he had "one of those wake-up calls" a few years back, after Blizzard executives asked why Activision was hoping an unspecified "kids game" would get an aggregate Metacritic review score of 80.
"The producers said, 'Well, it's a kid's game, you don't get the best ratings on a kid's game because reviews aren't going to review them as favorably, so if you look at them objectively an 80 is actually a good rating for a kid's game or movie game,'" explained Kotick.
"I remember walking out of the meeting saying, 'Why would we make an 80-rated game?' Even adjusting for genre," he continued. "I was thinking that when we did the great Spider-Man PlayStation game, we got a 95 rating. You can make a great game."
Meanwhile, Activision has yet to announce its next Spider-Man game--the latest being 2008's Spider-Man: Web of Shadows--though the same rumor that accurately claimed High Moon was working on a new Transformers game (now known to be Transformers: War for Cybertron) also indicated that Radical, responsible for the 79-rated super-powered action game Prototype, is crafting a new Spider-Man.
-
dantastic
replywas web of shadows that bad? was gonna pick it up on the cheap eventually
-
no it wasnt, they skimped on the voice acting but it's a very good spiderman game.
-
i thought it was pretty good. problem was that most of the missions/quests were super-repetitive.
they weren't so bad if you did them while you were swinging around the city looking for power-up orbs (a la crackdown), but if you just wanted to get through the mission and went out looking to beat up five of a certain enemy type....-
-
sure. if you get it on xbox 360, install it to the hdd. the final portions of the game had some framerate problems, that could help if they were caused by disc seeking.
-
-
-
it really wasn't that bad. i had a ton of fun with it, but it was just a rental and i didn't complete it. i think i put a good 8 hours into it and it started to feel a bit repetitive. i bet you could pick it up pretty cheap by now... at least give it a rent and have some fun swinging around the city and bouncing around from bad guy to bad guy. the aerial combat was quite a bit of fun.
-
yeah, what Faylor said ;)
-
-
-
-
-
totally agreed here. Sev, i skipped ninja gaiden 2, was this a bad decision? Also should i play it on 360 or ps3?
-
-
I enjoyed it, I mean sure it was repetitive at times but I think they did a good job of capturing what it would be like to swing through the city.
-
