T w e n t y S i d e d

Like I said at the start, you can’t really divide this story into a tidy three-act structure. It has a beginning and an ending, but between those points it’s built less like a movie and more like an open-run comic book where you chain stories together. That makes a lot of sense, not just because this is a comic book story, but because mapping three-act movie structures to games has always been difficult due to the radically different pacing and runtime of these two mediums.

In terms of structure, it’s a bit like a soap opera. You have your A plot, and then you introduce a B plot, then A sort of wraps up and transforms into a C plot, and so on. You’ve always got at least one plot open because the story can’t end.

Even though I can’t really divide this story into tidy acts, I will say that I think we’re done with the introduction. The writer now has their major pieces on the board. The Kingpin is in jail, leaving behind a power vacuum. The Demons have stepped into that power vacuum and are grabbing Kingpin’s property and armaments. The story has hinted at something called “Devil’s Breath” without telling us what it is or what it does. Peter and MJ are both involved, but they’re not working together yet.

Now it’s time to up the stakes.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man Part 11: The Osborn Rally”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Next up we get to play through the E3 demo from last year. This scene hasn’t changed very much since that demo. I mean, aside from the silly puddle controversy.

The only notable difference between the E3 demo and the final game is that the E3 demo had Mr. Negative participating in this sequence. In the release version, Mr. Negative doesn’t show up and you just fight his mooks.

I can see why this mission was chosen for the E3 Demo. The entire sequence serves as a vertical slice of the game. We sample a little bit of all the gameplay features in a short time, in a situation where the viewer doesn’t really need to know the story to follow the scene. There are a lot of spectacle-heavy cutscenes, yet the plot doesn’t really progress here and the whole thing could be removed from the game without the player missing out on any exposition or story beats.

The Vertical Slice

Spider-Man arrives at a Fisk Construction building to find Demons wandering around the half-built skyscraper, systematically murdering Fisk’s men.

We get a stealth section where we can pick off the Demon goons. Then we get some straight combat with the Demons. Then we get a few cutscenes to show off how the game can seamlessly transition from cinematics to gameplay. Then we do a bunch of quicktime events to stop several tons of flaming wreckage from landing on helpless civilians below. Then we show off the city and the swinging gameplay in a helicopter chase, which ends with a big action climax that’s about 90% cutscene and 10% gameplay.

This mission is so superfluous to the story and yet so perfect as a trade show demo that it makes me think this section was designed specifically for this purpose and wasn’t part of the story as written. I really dislike showy sequences that show off the cinematography at the expense of gameplay, but I’ll be the first to admit this is an excellent example of the form.

It’s a fun sequence full of slick moments, and I really enjoy playing through it aside from the…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man Part 10: The Vertical Slice”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.