Spider-man has had many video games over the years, with some being good and others not so great. One game that isn’t well remembered is Spider-man The Video Game from Sega. The game was a beat em up that starred Spider-man, the Black Cat, and surprisingly Hawkeye and Namor as playable characters. The latter two were rather odd choices for a Spider-man game, since they are not really part of his extended cast. Hawkeye has teamed with Spider-man but is not really connected to Spidey and Namor seems out of left field.
The game itself is rather unusual to be honest. When it starts out, it is a somewhat generic beat em up with nothing special to it, but then the game screen zooms out and switches to a format similar to the Bandai Namco title Rolling Thunder. When this happens, the game switches to being more of a classic arcade side scrolling shooter than a beat em up. It was a very different type of game to say the least.
I do not think the game is bad, like many others do, but it is definitely not one of the best Spider-man games. For one thing, tt had a unique idea of inserting quarters to extend your life meter instead of getting extra lives. However this hurt the game in the end, since because your life was always depleting, you had no choice but to keep paying constantly. Cnsidering the game itself was not especially great, this added change only served to further push people away.
Playing the game now, I see it as more of an interesting curiosity than anything else. It was released the same year that Sega put out Streets of Rage 1 on the Genesis, which ended up helping to change how beat em ups would play going forward. In some ways, this game can be seen as one of the last of the old generation for Sega in the arcades. It had interesting visuals, although Spider-man looked strange as he walked, but that was not enough to save it.
I don’t think this is one worth tracking down, as it has not aged well and plays rather awkwardly. As a part of Sega’s gaming legacy however, this game should be remembered more, since even if it was not good, it was part of Sega’s experimental phase in the arcades and that should not be forgotten.