Virtually Overlooked: Spider-Man: Lethal Foes
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.
I am aware of how terrible licensed games are. This has always been true, from E.T. on. Just about every time a Spider-Man game has come out, I've been suckered into at least renting it (until around Spider-Man 3 this generation -- I'm not stupid.) I'm not like a huge Spidey fan or anything. What keeps me coming back?
In my estimation, there is only one important aspect in a Spider-Man game. It's not a variety of missions and objectives. It's not an accurately-modeled city. It's not the number of classic Spidey villains that make their appearance. And it's not the fighting mechanics. The only thing that matters at all can be summed up in this question:
Can he swing from a web?
Developer Epoch nailed web-swinging in Spider-Man: Lethal Foes, more than anyone else did until Neversoft's PlayStation Spider-Man game, and then ... they didn't release it outside of Japan. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the best Spider-Man game would come out of Japan: Japan-exclusive Spidey stuff has always been magical. For example, there was the tokusatsu TV show about a motorcycle-riding Spider-Man who fights aliens with the help of a transforming spaceship called the Marveller.
Other webhead games on the SNES missed the mark variously: Spider-Man: The Animated Series used web shots as an attack and limited their use severely, both in terms of number and what you could swing from (also it was made by LJN, which is a failure of its own). Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage and its sequel Separation Anxiety were pretty good Final Fight clones with the ability to swing on webs, but there was nowhere to go with your webs. You could swing from one end of the screen to the other, but that would just get you punched by a guy in a green trench coat.
While not an exceptional platform game, Lethal Foes is wonderfully fun to play because it lacks these restrictions. Pressing L or R will shoot a web into the air in the direction of the button, grabbing on to some unspecified structure in the sky. You can basically fly over the whole level in such a way if you'd like, swinging from web to web like some kind of, you know, web-shooting superhero.
The game is actually pretty standard otherwise: Spider-Man can punch, run, and shoulder-charge; he has an overpowered jump kick and a projectile attack; the enemies are generic robots and aliens. None of that matters. This is Web-Slinging Simulator.
