365//365: Day 246 – The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (GB)

Several months ago, I proclaimed The Crow: City of Angels to be the most broken, busted, bomb of a video game to have ever been released. How could I not? The controls were a mess of slow reactions, slow moving and slow response all around. The game looked deplorable, with no true lighting effects. There was absolutely nothing going for this game, from how it played, to the fact that it eve exists. Playing thousands of video games throughout my life, I was pretty sure I had just played the absolute worst of the worst. There’s couldn’t be anything more broken, more blasphemous than The Crow: City of Angels. Not way.

Sadly, there might just be one title that can stand toe to toe in the neck high pile of virtual sloth and trash — The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on the Nintendo Game Boy.

Oh, and guess who had a hand in it? Our friends at LJN!

But there’s a catch — this game is so bad, so busted and broken, that LJN didn’t even dare plaster their logo within the beginning credits. Only a small text piece will display their connection to this abomination. After City of Angels, how could anything be considered this painful?

Lets start with the very first scree of the game. It’s hideous. Spider-Man looks more like Iron Man with almost no color variation to him, even for a Game Boy title. The first interior section you spawn into looks absolutely dreadful. You can barely tell where to go at any point. Can you jump downward, or is that area truly blocked off? How do I get out? Once you get out, thing look even further convoluted, with unclear objectives and instant death if you go too far. The sound has no redeeming qualities to it, offering some horrendous effects and pitiful musical pieces. At least with the previous title you had a pretty stellar rendition of the Spider-Man theme song. With The Amazing Spider-Man 2, there’s absolutely nothing worth listening to.

$10 to the person that can explain what is going on in this screen cap. $20 more if you can figure out how to even do this properly.

After all of the previous shortcomings being so tremendously flawed, its hard to fathom anything worse, but there is — the controls. You once again have the delayed punch attacks that take over a second from button press to the attack landing. You have a jump kick that requires you to hold down the jump button, with the kick coming out towards your descent. It’s nearly impossible to land a jump kick on anyone. Double jumping is performed by spamming the jump button, which even that won’t work all of the time. Web swinging is imprecise and just about useless. Combine these controls with a convoluted world around you, and you’ll experience the absolute most frustrating gameplay ever in a video game.

It’s a wonder that the amount of garbage that LJN developed or published, didn’t lead to another video game crash. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on the Game Boy represents everything that LJN stood for — monopolizing a legitimate source of excellent gaming opportunities (Marvel), shoveling complete garbage out at a constant rate with absolutely no quality control in place. While it’s debatable whether The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is worse than The Crow: City of Angels, there’s no doubt that they are both the cream of the crap.

Rating: 0.0