My First Month in New York

Since the move to New York City is still very much top of mind, I think this week's post will be a short bit about how the first month of living here has been.

So far I've been at my new job for four weeks. The first week I was just staying in a hotel while I got the keys to the new apartment and some basic necessities I would need to start staying there the next week. Namely a bed and some toiletries. Therefore only three of the weeks have been spent at our new place. The exact number isn't really relevant, it's just to give some context.

I have had several positives since work started. First, I can already tell that I made the right choice in terms of relocating. I've fallen into the routine of going to work and going home, and I already like it a lot. Just being in Manhattan during the day makes me feel good, even despite the cold weather. I'm a bit of a weirdo in that I'm quite introverted, but I love being around a lot of people at the same time. As long as I don't have to interact with anybody, being surrounded by others is strangely comforting, and NYC has no shortage of that. Being crowded on the subway during rush hour isn't exactly the same feeling, but it still makes me feel like I belong.

Second, I've really missed the ability to walk around the neighborhood and try different things out. With our last place in Seattle, there wasn't much in easy walking distance so everything was either a long walk or we would have to drive. With the new place there's a ton of options nearby and if we want other things, the bus and subway are super close to take us to other neighborhoods. It's one of those things that my wife and I have missed constantly since we moved away from Capitol Hill in Seattle, so it's great to be getting back to that again. It also helps that most of the places I've been too so far have been good so I don't see us getting into the same rut of rotating between only five different restaurants like we have the last year or so.

Third, I've been able to hang out with some of our friends in the area a couple times and that's also been really comforting. It would've been a much harder move if we had to start from zero again when it came to having friends. Again, the whole introverted thing makes that difficult, so having a few friends already helps significantly.

Fourth, it feels so good to be working again. I admit that what I got is certainly not a dream job, but it's a good foot in the door since it's a good paying job, it's in the city I wanted to move to, and it's in a new industry that I could come to really enjoy in time. The people I'm working with are very friendly and are already looking to me for advice on how to do things, especially coming from a company known for scaling. I know that I wanted to have some time off between jobs this time around, but turns out it was a little too much. Should I decide to move on from my current place, I will definitely go the route of having the next thing lined up and just take a few weeks off instead of months.

There are definitely a few negatives about this first month though. Namely, it has been very lonely outside of the times I've been with my friends or back home with my wife. It's not something either of us is used to, so it has been hard on both of us. Granted, we both know couples who have been split apart for much longer and seem to do okay, but that just isn't for us in general. Week long trips is one thing, but multiple weeks in a row is something else. It doesn't help that the apartment in NY is practically empty and the apartment in Seattle has been slowly put into boxes. So neither place really feels like home. At the time of writing this though, the Seattle apartment is now completely empty and our stuff is on the way to NY, so only a couple more weeks until we have a real home again.

Some other negatives, eating out for every meal for over a month has been taking its toll on me too. It's going to be great getting back to actually cooking again. Can’t really get back to that yet with our stuff a few weeks away, but I can at least try to have some fresh food at home in the interim. Getting back into some sort of exercise routine would also be great, and hopefully that will be a little easier without the flying every weekend I have been doing.

Not having my normal stuff is a drag too. I get urges to play a specific game but then I don't have it. Or just have a couch to sit on. Or chat with the cat. It all feels like I'm on a constant business trip and I can't wait to finally get home.

Anyway, I don't want to leave this on a downer, so I will just end by saying that I have no regrets about the move I have made. It will end up being a rough couple of months where nothing is truly routine or normal, but in the end we will come out the other side in a great place.

How I Navigate (and Learn in General)

Given the craziness of moving to New York, which is going to end up being a two month process, this post is going to be more throw-away than usual because I just don’t have much else to talk about right now. In essence, this post is just some musings about how my brain works, specifically when it comes to retaining memory and how inconsistent it is. And to help explain it, I will use the example of how I navigate while driving or walking. The main reason being that people I know have often marveled at how good I am at it, yet I can be extremely forgetful about other things.

When I was young, I used to be fascinated by maps. I would get a map or an atlas out and just spend a long time looking over it and enjoying all the details. I especially enjoyed looking at the street maps of the areas I was currently in, I liked to know exactly where I was in the universe.

Eventually this lead to some inevitable questions. How do buildings get their numbers? How do streets get numbered or named? How do interstates get their numbers? What’s the difference between streets, avenues, drives, boulevards, roads, etc.? Luckily, I asked these questions during a time where looking up directions online didn’t exist so my parents actually knew the answers, and I managed to remember them despite not really needing to know them for years.

What I was doing there was learning some fundamentals about street navigation that I keep to this day, and I can use them to make bigger observations about the area I’m in. Computer programming is similar and probably why I’m good at that too. You learn some fundamentals about how most languages work and you use that knowledge to understand the details that make each language different. So while some people may get to a place and flounder about trying to find the right building, I know that, if I know what the address number is, I can find it pretty easily because numbers follow two basic rules: numbers always increment away from the origin (as street numbers also do), and numbers are always split where evens are on one side of the street and odds are on the other. Granted I don’t know if these rules are true everywhere in the US, but it has been in all the places I’ve been thus far.

I think it’s largely because of the way I studied maps that I always get directions using streets rather than landmarks like many other people prefer. I remember in high school when I first started driving, my friends would try to give me directions to their places using landmarks and it was a real struggle. But if I looked up where their house was earlier, I could remember a minimal number of streets I needed to turn on, and it would be a breeze. I still do this today if the route is easy enough, I don’t need to worry about using turn-by-turn navigation, I just remember the turns. This is one of the things that impresses other people the most, that I can look at a route for a minute or two and just know it. I try to carry this into other areas of my life as well, finding the easiest path that I’m more likely to remember, even if it may not be the most efficient or quickest.

So I use some basic rules to figure out how to do things without knowing the full details and I use reference points to memorize minimal paths that I need in the short term. When it comes to long term memorization, it always comes down to doing versus seeing. If I drive to a place for the first time, I can usually get there again a second time if it’s within a few months without looking it up again. If I go somewhere between 3-5 times, I will likely remember how to get there for the rest of my life. Everyone has the ability to remember things like this, if something is a routine, eventually you build a habit and you just know how to do it. But I seem to build this habit much faster than most. It’s one of the things that makes me so good at adapting. If I’m forced into using something new, I am good at remembering how it works within a few uses.

This comes with many advantages. It makes me very effective at certain tasks, including my job. I work a lot quicker than others because I can remember where things are, I don’t have to do searches all the time, and I can find problems easier. I feel that it also makes me a good teacher because when I know something and I’m conveying the knowledge to someone else, I can arrange it and frame it in my mind without needing to look up references or jump all over the place as things come to mind. On the other hand, sometimes I do get into situations where I think I know how to do something, or it’s been so long that I have forgotten how, and I never have any notes on how to do it, so I often need to relearn things that have slipped from scratch.

Having this ability also means that I have terrible memory when it comes to facts and trivia. When I just read something, I forget pretty much all of it an hour later. Same with things I hear or watch. It takes much more investment in something for it to stick with me, unless it’s something like a game where I’m directly involved in it. This definitely has more disadvantages since I constantly forget things, including things that I should be remembering to do. So for things like that, I have to put them on a to-do list or I never get around to it.

Anyway, this one is pretty short and sweet, I could give more examples but I think I got the general idea across. I also have a lot to do so no need to spend more time on this than necessary.

My Problem with the Foundation Trilogy

This will probably come across as sacrilege to some, but I need something to write about this week, and this is recent enough to be relevant.

I read the original Foundation book many years ago and I loved it at the time. I immediately went out and bought the whole trilogy so that I could continue it, but for whatever reason I got drawn away to something else. I finally got around to picking it back up late last year, and I finished all three books a couple weeks ago. I have since donated the books as I feel no need to read them again.

So what happened exactly? The Foundation trilogy is generally regarded as a science fiction classic and was liked enough to spawn several more books after the trilogy was completed. And I will agree that the original book, Foundation, is a classic. Reading it again years later, it didn't amaze me the same way it did the first time around, but it still stands as a collection of engaging short stories in an intriguing world. To some degree, I will even agree that Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation have the right to be considered classics, but I couldn't get into them at all. Trying to finish them ending up being a slog.

Thinking on it, I can point to two main reasons why it didn't work for me.

The first one is that the second and third books went away from the short story format that made the first one so interesting. What I loved about the original book was that each short story acted as a brief look into a different period of time, focusing on a different problem that had to be solved by, usually, a different person. The stories were good about dripping information to you, giving you enough things to build the universe in your head but never getting bogged down in details. The characters were all interesting too because they were just normal folks who were each faced with a crisis that needed to be handled, and they used their brains to address it. And with all the short stories, the driving point was that technology was powerful when used creatively and for the right reasons.

The other two books completely move away from this format in favor of more traditional novels that cover fewer plotlines in a bigger way. With this transition, it removes all the good points I just mentioned. There are too many details such that you can see everything so there’s no mystery left. There are too many characters and very few of them are interesting. The whole story just grinds. And when you finally get to the twist at the end of each book, it's not satisfying enough to justify the build up.

This leads me to the second thing I didn't like about these books. As I said, the message of the first book was that technology is powerful when used creatively. The message of the second and third books is that technology can indeed do amazing things, but superpowers are more powerful. The big twist of each book is essentially that psychopathic powers exist, and anyone who has them is basically a god. I'm not against this idea in general, I've enjoyed many stories where superpowers were involved. But coming from the original story of science doing cool things, it is super lame and unsatisfying.

I will say that I did like Second Foundation more than Foundation and Empire, mostly because the characters were a little more fun to be with. The way they go about finding the agents of the second foundation is clever and brings the story back into the realm of science being cool. But at the same time, there are so many twists near the end that essentially everything you are being told is wrong, so why bother believing any of it? I don't plan on reading any more of the books, but I can't help feeling that the “truth” at the end of Second Foundation will probably also end up being a lie in order to keep the series going.

Finishing this trilogy left me with the same feeling that Wool did when I read it long ago. Another case where the original short story was fantastic. It built up the world enough that you knew what the stakes were, then it gave you a twist to make you believe things are not what they seem, only to then twist back and you come to realize just how sinister that world actually is. Then the author wrote four more stories, each longer than the last, and just pulverized everything I liked about it into the ground. The more you learned about the world of Wool, the lamer and more stereotypical it got.

I suppose this is a fairly common affair in book series though, particularly in science fiction. There are so many classic books in sci-fi that receive a bunch of sequels, but none of them come close to the original, and they just keep pulling the whole franchise down. I suppose there's something we should all learn from that.

Idle Champions and My Relationship with D&D (So Far)

This is not necessarily going to be a review, though I will be talking about a couple of games I've been playing. Since the idea this year is to just write about whatever comes to mind, it stands to reason that I should devote some time to explaining how Dungeons and Dragons has been invading my life.

The primary thing to know before I start is that I have played exactly one game of D&D. Ever. It was just an introductory game where we created some characters and tiptoed into a dungeon. Through a combination of not knowing everyone in the group, the inexperience of the DM, and the stilted enforcement of role playing, it wasn't fun for me at all. I can’t say I’ve ever been intrigued by the actual act of role playing. I've played my fair share of video game RPGs, it was my favorite genre when I was a teenager and had all the time in the world. But I've never been drawn to creating my own character and pretending to be that character.

So, I bounced off it for a decade or so. I still haven't actually played another game, though I've done a couple one-shots of other systems. But thanks to the emergence of D&D-based shows, like Penny Arcade's Acquisitions Incorporated, I have slowly gained respect for the system. And somewhere along the way, it clicked for me that it really is the system that I care about, the mechanics of battle and interaction with the world. The lore that has been built around D&D is pretty cool too, you have a lot of elements that get shared between different groups so you can have those common experiences.

It’s through these shows and the lore that I ended up jumping into some recent D&D video games, namely Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and the Neverwinter MMO. I enjoy the lore, I like the systems (though these games only loosely use them), and it was easy to give them both a shot since they are free to play.

Idle Champions was my first dip into this world of D&D games, and part of me feels like it was great but also a mistake. For those who don't know, Idle Champions is a clicker game where you play a scenario over and over again, earning money to buy upgrades, which allow you to get more money for more upgrades, and you just keep going until you hit the wall of the exponential curve. Idle Champions uses that formula but adds enough to it to make it stand out. For one, most of the characters you can use and unlock are known into the D&D world or come from well known D&D shows (like the aforementioned Acquisitions Incorporated), which lends it some fun fan service. Another aspect is that even though you are starting from zero each time, you’re not really because various achievements and unlocks give you permanent boosts across campaigns and the whole game.

What surprised me most about this game though is that it actually has strategy in it. Sure there's not a lot of strategy to: kill enemies, get money, go as far as you can before you get overwhelmed. But with each scenario you get a formation that you have to put your characters into, and you can only have 10 characters max (out of 40 or so, so far). So, the real fun of the game for me is figuring out the best formation to use in a scenario, which can take many times to optimize. The game is also good about offering challenges that put twists on the scenarios, and having events where certain characters are buffed for a period of time, which force and encourage different ways to approach it. There are some tactical decisions you can make too, though they only provide temporary advantages. It really comes down to the formation, and also how much money you've earned from previous scenarios. Yeah, it's kind of cheap that way, but that is the whole point, you are trading time played for progress, it’s not inherently a skill-based game.

My computer has put an obscene amount of hours into running this game, and the time I've spent interacting with it is probably higher than I'd care to admit, hence why it might have been a mistake. It's not much of a game since it largely plays itself, but I have fun with it. As far as free to play time wasters go, I've certainly played worse.

Now what surprised me even more than liking that game, is that I also ended up really liking Neverwinter when I gave it a go. I've been traveling a lot lately getting ready for my new job so haven't had a lot of time to play it, but I do think about it often. I don't have a lot of MMO experience to compare it to, maybe 10 or so hours in World of Warcraft is about it, but they have certainly done a good job of making quests quick and easy enough that I find it hard to step away. Much like Spider-Man from last week, Neverwinter is good at the "just one more" loop.

As far as gameplay goes, Neverwinter is pretty standard stuff. Run around and attack baddies, pick up items to complete quests, get gold and other currency that you use to buy equipment. As you level up you get access to different abilities you can pick and choose from. You also get various perks that permanently boost your stats, including points you can add to the standard 6 D&D attributes. And as you go along, more and more systems get introduced to you to expand what you can waste your time on.

The nice thing that Neverwinter has going for it is that right from the start it was fun to play the main game of running around and attacking. Since I chose a sword fighter, running is particularly important as it's how I escape from getting hit by attacks. I did a lot more dodging in the early game, but I'm usually powerful enough now that I can just tank in order to finish enemies off faster. At this point, some 30 hours in, the main game loop isn't quite as fun on its own as it was starting out, but there are other systems that I enjoy to keep me engaged.

Two systems in particular that I like are the workshop and the campaigns. The workshop is sort of the crafting system for the game, where you hire workers to make weapons, armor, materials, and other tools. You get a worker, you select what you want them to make, you get the right materials, and then you pay them to make as many you want. After a certain amount of time, the items are crafted and ready for pickup. There is also a job for fetching materials from the wild that other workers use. In the grand scheme of the game, the workshop isn't that useful, but it really scratches that itch I have for management sims.

The other system I like is how they do campaigns. Campaigns are essentially chains of side quests that go for an extended period of time and provide unique loot. I've only been able to dig into two campaigns at this point, but I think it's a great way of incentivizing side quests that you can otherwise skip. One of the reasons I even took a look at this game is because one of the campaigns is for Acquisitions Incorporated, and I have to say it's quite enjoyable. Yeah, I may be a bit of a fanboy when it comes to that kind of stuff, but what do I care? I'm having fun.

There's plenty about the game I don't care for though. Like other MMOs, it has the problem of throwing too much at you from the start. It does a better job than most (from what I hear) since many systems are gated by level or story progression, but I feel like more can be done to make it less overwhelming. Just the sheer number of currencies in the game is insane. No one can keep track of all that. And speaking of currency, the other major thing I dislike is how much is locked behind the money gate. Sure, it's free to play, and that is how they fund development. But it just feels like too much is behind that gate, and they bother you about it a lot. Again, it could be done better.

Anyway, there isn't much of a point to this post, just wanted to give some thoughts on the D&D stuff I've been doing lately. One day I'd like to try getting into the real game again and play some of the older D&D games (like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment). But for the time being, these will keep me going for a while.

Marvel's Spider-Man

Total Time to Complete: About 45 hours

This is only the second non-Final Fantasy game that has been reviewed on here, the first one being Uncharted 4. There have been plenty of other games since Uncharted 4 to deserve a full review, Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War come to mind, but for now I’m going to stick to making sure I get a full review up for Spider-Man because it is still fresh in my mind. The others may still find their way here since I’m not really done with them yet as far as DLC goes.

I wanted to wait to write a review for Spider-Man until I finished the DLC, the three parts of The City That Never Sleeps storyline. Now that I have done that, as well as got 100% on everything including trophies/achievements, I have some thoughts.

And just as a note going forward, though the Uncharted 4 review and the Final Fantasy reviews (so far) used different formats, all reviews from this point will use this new format to make it easier to encompass more aspects of each game, regardless of genre.

With that, let’s dig in.

World Building

When you are playing an RPG like a Final Fantasy, it is appropriate to say that exploration is a key part because the whole world is foreign to you as a new player. You are often discovering each area as the character(s) does. But when it comes to a world that already exists, like Manhattan, it isn’t as appropriate since you aren’t really exploring it in the same way (it certainly can be if you’ve never been there, but the characters all know where everything is). So I think the term “world building” speaks more to not just the exploration aspect, but also to whether the world you are playing in feels like it should.

Having visited New York City multiple times now (and soon to be living there), I can say with confidence that this game nails how Manhattan feels. It’s obviously not completely to scale with the real thing, the streets are detailed enough that you can look for familiar haunts only to find that many whole sections have been either cut out or morphed into something that the game needs. But the verticality of the city and the traffic below you as you swing through the air feel perfect. The way you interact with the world at large is also great since a lot of time can be spent finding the hidden nooks and crannies, or giving high-fives to pedestrians. And nothing is more perfect than using the subway to fast travel, always with a scene that fully embraces what taking the subway can be like at times (the rando sleeping on Spider-Man’s shoulder is my favorite).

I don’t know if I can really say that exploration is rewarded that much since everything is put on the map for you to explicitly find. Sometimes getting to the object in question is a little tricky, but nothing is ever truly secret. You do get rewarded to some degree as many of the landmarks you seek out are real places so you can get satisfaction from that the same way you might from an Assassin’s Creed game. But at the same time, I prefer this approach in my open world games because I don’t have the time to search every block for secrets like I did when I played all of Rockstar’s PS2-era games. I don’t mind running around and fetching each trinket, as long as I have a general idea of where they are.

Character Development

This section is going to take over for what used to be characters and story. If you think about it, the whole point of a story is to challenge the characters and see how they grow from that. Hence, character development is a nice way of covering both sides.

What Spider-Man (the game) has going for it is that it has a wide cast of characters, on both the good side and evil side, but it doesn’t try to stretch itself out too much. It keeps the number of villains down to about a half-dozen, and another dozen of side characters that Spider-Man (the dude) interacts with on his journey. The DLC also adds a couple more characters into the mix, but the essential core is around 20, which is a good amount considering the overall scope of that universe. They were careful to pick enough characters such that you can have multiple plot threads weaving together, but no one gets short-changed (well, almost no one).

The thing I really like about the Peter Parker in this game, outside of being the wise-cracking goof he’s meant to be, is that he’s many years into his role as Spider-Man. This means that not only is he established, but so are the villains and his relationships with the other good characters. With only a couple exceptions, like Miles Morales, he already knows everyone he interacts with, which allows the pace of the story to stay quick without getting bogged down by exposition. When a “new” character pops up, you know after a minute of dialogue between Peter and the character exactly what the deal is with them.

The only real downside to this approach is that, even though Peter Parker goes through a lot of hardship in the game, you never really get the impression that he changed all that much. Learned some new things, yes. Life-altering events, yes. But does any of that change the way he interacts or approaches situations? No, he just continues to do his normal thing. Granted, his way of dealing with challenges is fairly idealistic and maybe he doesn’t need to change that. I think that he did the right thing in pretty much every situation. It’s just kind of weird that you don’t really get much reflection from him on the bad things that happened. He just continues being him.

I find that to be a pretty minor nitpick though since all of the characters are enjoyable to be around, including the villains. The DLC doesn’t do this as well as the main story, but I still want to see more story content in this world so that I can see how the characters handle it.

Mechanics

The mechanics section is going to be the catch-all for everything gameplay related, which can include the battle system, the leveling system, the different classes and abilities each character has, even aspects of exploration can be covered here too. As such, it might get a bit long.

For the most part, the mechanics of Spider-Man fall into four categories: combat, progression, locomotion, and missions.

Combat

The combat in Spider-Man is very similar to the Batman: Arkham games but themed just so. You have attacks that can be chained and are context sensitive depending on your position and the position of the targeted enemy. You have a dodge move that works well with the spidey-sense indicator that you’re about to be hit. You have abilities that come in the form of gadgets and suit powers. And you have all the locomotion movement you have the rest of the game.

I found the basic attacking and dodging to be very fun and satisfying. I would use some of the more interesting moves if necessary, launching enemies into the air was common because some enemies required it. But most of the other ones I would only do if an optional objective called for it. The same goes with the gadgets. Most of the time I would forget they were even there, so I only used them against certain enemies or when objectives required it. I did use the suit power as much as I could, though I only used a couple before I got the invulnerability and just used that the rest of the game.

My only real frustration with the combat (aside from the difficulty at times, but we’ll get to that) was that the dodge didn’t work as often as I felt it should. I did eventually understand that mashing buttons was not as effective as deliberate presses to combo and dodge, so that wasn’t as much of a problem when the game started getting hard. But even with that I think the game isn’t quite as tight as I would like. It is really close, but it makes those times all the more frustrating when it doesn’t click. Like some other problems with the game, it seemed to get worse in the DLC, even though in theory it should be the same.

Progression

Though it wasn’t used much in older, open world games, leveling has since become more common. In this case, it honestly doesn’t make that much of a noticeable difference, it’s mostly just a gate to unlocking combat and locomotion abilities. The only other thing it does is increase your health, which is good since there’s no concept of equipment in this game, so levels basically replace the need to have to get new weapons or armor.

Since abilities are tied to levels, it was easy to get them, and having the freedom to choose when you got them via tech trees was great. The passive suit powers are also tied to levels, though you have to have resources to unlock them. Active suit powers only come with unlocking a suit, which requires resources and advancing the story or doing side missions. Gadgets also require resources and advancing the story to unlock. Having multiple things tied to resources provides more options since you have to allocate them between suit powers and gadgets. Having that freedom to choose to suit your play style is a staple of good design.

There was only one problem I had with the progression system, and it wasn’t really even the fault of the system. Having unlocks that require resources is difficult to work with when you can’t get the right resources. In this case, I constantly never had enough challenge tokens, and I didn’t even finish unlocking everything until the first DLC pack where more challenges became available. It is certainly possible to get the tokens needed in the main campaign, but it ended up being too hard for me. So it was a bit frustrating to not have access to everything when I finished the main game. Based on the number of resources I had left at the very end of the game, I don’t think the unlocks were properly balanced since I was lacking in some tokens but had dozens of others.

Locomotion

This is really the part of the game that got most people excited, and it hit me immediately as well. Swinging and moving through the city is delightful. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say it is sublime since it stumbles at times to follow what your intentions are, but I can’t think of another open world game that does it better. Even at 40 hours in, when the rest of the game has gotten a bit stale, the locomotion continues to be fun, especially when you can accurately predict obstacles and speed through them.

I already said this in the year-end review, but swinging around Manhattan was a legitimate factor in my decision to pursue moving there.

Missions

I feel that as far as mechanics go, this comes across as the weak link. What the game does do well is provide a lot of different types of missions. However, many of these different types end up becoming their own type of side missions and those tended to get old fast. The base story missions are where the game really shines, which is novel because what you actually do in them is pretty similar as well. What makes them all so good is that the studio spent a lot of time creating different environments and you are encouraged to approach them like they’re puzzles.

Most of my complaints are similar to those of other critics. As I already said, the side missions that spawn off the main quest line get old before the end, some more quickly than others. I didn’t mind the stealth missions as Spider-Man or the Spider-Bot missions, but when it came to stealthing as Mary Jane or Miles, those often became frustrating and I don’t think they added anything. I also found the mini-games fun, though I know many didn’t like them either. Basically anything involving Peter Parker was great, other characters not so much, and a lot of mission types overstayed their welcome.

Engagement

When I think of engagement, I think of “how good is the game at making me want to keep playing?” I know there are other definitions out there, but that’s the one I’m trying to go with now with my focusing goals. This feels like a better category to have than just difficulty curve because it is just a subset of the overall impact a game makes on your desire to continue.

But with that in mind, the difficulty curve of this game is not the best. It spikes a lot during the main game, and then just shoots through the roof as you get through the DLC. I had to drop the difficulty down from normal to easy in the final DLC to get past a couple parts that I was getting I’m-about-to-quit-frustrated with. I also gave up on trying to max out the challenges because they were hard in the wrong ways. It’s certainly not the worst game at this, the overall curve of the main story was actually quite good, there were just a few too many BS parts for me to say it was great.

Other than the difficulty problem though, the game was incredibly good at keeping me engaged for hours at a time. It perfectly fits that “I can do just one more mission” structure. Knowing exactly where to go and what to do plays a big factor in that because I don’t have to think about it and I like to see numbers tick upwards. And in most cases there wasn’t much punishment for failure (though there were a few that were very frustrating because of how far you went back). The game rides well on its fun mechanics, having plenty of things to do, and having relatively short objectives to keep you going.

Presentation

Prior to this review, this would just be listed as the story integration section, which is certainly an important aspect, but it’s really just a component of a presentation layer that also includes interface, aesthetic, and sound. Note that I did not say graphics anywhere in there, since graphics are largely standardized across games now, it’s much more about what is done artistically that interests me.

Let’s go ahead and start with that aesthetic portion. Overall the game looks good, it definitely focuses on being more realistic than comic-y, though some of Spider-Man’s costumes can bring more of that out. From a distance, Manhattan looks like it does in real life, you only see the limitations when up close. It also has that great blend of what we know today with near-future technology (and seemingly unlimited budget) that the Marvel movies also do extremely well.

The game chooses to use cutscenes almost exclusively for showing events and story beats rather than while the player has control, which keeps things looking clean, though out of sequence at times. All of the rest of the story integration comes from phone calls that do happen while the player is moving Spider-Man around the city. One cool aspect of this is that how Peter speaks is based on whether he is stationary or in motion. It’s one of those neat attentions to detail you probably wouldn’t notice since you only hear lines once, but takes a lot of effort to pull off.

The interface while in the world is pretty good, and the menu is clean enough, though it could be snappier. Most open world games have this problem with the menu though, so it’s not a big surprise. It does at least keep with a high tech style that goes with Peter Parker, who is a well known inventor among his peers, so it doesn’t feel out of place.

I will say that on the sound front, it doesn’t come across as particularly impressive, it gets the job done. My only real complaint is that there isn’t much variance in the music, you basically get the same theme every single time you start swinging through the city. Cool for the first 20 hours, but then you start wondering if they couldn’t have had more tracks or variants.

Conclusion

I don’t know if it came across very well in what I wrote above, but overall I loved playing through the main game of Spider-Man. I did find the DLC more of a challenge to enjoy though, it just got too difficult for the combat to stay fun and the story that came with it didn’t pay off even close to as well as the main story.

I honestly doubt I will ever go back to this game simply because I did everything I could and there’s so much more to play, but I highly recommend it for those who haven’t. If I do return for a new game, I will just stick to the main campaign and ignore the DLC. In lieu of that, I really hope they are able to put out a full-fledged sequel in a few years. I will jump on that day one.