Title: Spiderman: Web of Fire Released: 1995 Genre: Platformer Developer: Blue Sky Publisher: Sega  Regions: USA Availability: Extremely Rare

A 32x exclusive. One of the few advantages of being a Sega 32X player/collector is that most of the games are easy to locate and the acquisition of a "complete" collection is a reasonably obtainable goal. Sega saturated the market with games and systems, making it fairly easy for even the laziest collector to assemble an impressive collection of often shrink-wrapped games with minimal effort. Even most of the rarer games (Blackthorne, T-Mek, BC Racers) can be located at a variety of online retailers. The one exception is Sega’s The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire.

By mid 1995, the 32X had already gone belly-up. Most of the retailers who had return policies with Sega had begun to ship back their remaining inventories. Everyone else began to try to unload remaining stock at deep discounts, with systems often going for less than twenty dollars (original suggested retail $159.99) and games going for less than five dollars each (many 32X games had a suggested retail value of $69.99). The market certainly didn’t want any more new 32X games, but Sega had one last finished game ready for production, and for some reason decided to release it. Very few retailers opted to stock the game at all, leaving Sega to promote and sell the game by itself. It is rumored that Sega limited the production run to less than 1500 copies (this figure has yet to be confirmed) and ended all 32X development when the run was complete, making Spider-Man the last game ever released in the United States for the infant system (the last-ever 32x game is DarXide, a game only released in the U.K. and equally difficult to find.) Such a limited number of available games guarantees that Spider-Man will continue to be sought after by both 32X collectors and Spider-Man enthusiasts alike. It is ironic that the most coveted game in the 32X library is also one of the least impressive.

Spiderman (the comic-book character) has a long and fairly distinguished career in video games. His first title appeared way back in 1983 on the Atari 2600. Later appearances, either in a starring or supporting role, include the NES, Sega Master System, Genesis, Super NES, Sega CD, Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Game Boy, and Game Gear. He even had his own arcade game back in 1991, running off of Sega’s System 32 Board. He is perhaps best known for his many appearances in Capcom fighting games like Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel vs. Capcom.  Two of his best-selling games to date are the Genesis and SNES versions of Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage, carts easily recognized by their bright red plastic casing. Spider-Man: Web of Fire was produced by BlueSky Software, a long-time and allegedly accomplished Genesis developer. It is unfortunate that the development team chose not to utilize the capabilities of the 32X when they made the final domestic 32x game.

Spider-Man for the 32X is yet another side-scrolling brawler in the tradition of Streets of Rage and Double Dragon, just one of the seemingly thousands of similar titles that were released with reckless enthusiasm during the 8 and 16-bit eras. The plot involves a vicious supervillan named Hydra who has shrouded the city of New York with a massive electrical plasma grid that is cooking the citizens and crumbling the buildings. Your job as gamer (should you choose to accept it) is to guide our hero through the various locales of the city, defeating a horde or hostile enemies along the way. Spider-Man himself ends up being pretty maneuverable once you have mastered the art of shooting your web fluid and swinging. (A word of advice for the beginner, since the instructions aren’t really clear: To swing with the web, press the jump(C) button and then immediately PRESS and HOLD the C button again. Release the C button at the point you wish to release the web.) You have the standard array of controller commands standard for the genre- jump, punch, and shoot (in this case, web fluid). You also have the ability to duck, crawl, and scale buildings and walls. The controls are fairly simple and effective, providing the responsiveness inherent of the better side-scrollers from the 16-bit era.

Unfortunately, the graphics in Spider-Man are decidedly 16-bit, and not even good 16-bit at that... more like first-generation Genesis or TurboGrafx-16, really. The character graphics for Spider-Man himself are not very impressive, with jerky movements and missing frames of animation. The backgrounds and level design are for the most part bland and uninteresting. The enemy assortment is a bit better, but they too suffer from the same missing frames of animation that plague Spider-Man. There really is no sign of 32-bit technology anywhere in the game, aside from the increased color palette of reds, oranges, and yellows. Indeed, Spider-Man appears to be little more than a mediocre Genesis game that was prettied up with brighter colors.

The music and sound effects are no more innovative than the graphics. Music consists of dull keyboard tunes and irritating guitar riffs, while the sound effects are your standard assortment or grunts, punches, and explosions. The additional sound channels and capabilities of the 32X appear to have been ignored.

The bottom line is that Spider-Man is essentially boring and doesn’t belong on a 32-bit system that is capable of far more than the game demands. It isn’t really BAD, mind you, it’s just not much different from any other of the countless character-licensed games that came before it. Spider-Man: Web of Fire is certainly a rare game, and we recommend that you snap it up should you ever run across one. If the game has been opened, go ahead and fire it up just to see what all the fuss is about. You probably won’t play for long. If you are lucky enough to stumble across a shrink-wrapped copy, DON’T OPEN IT. By keeping the game intact, you insure its value and collectability... you certainly won’t be missing much by not playing it.