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« on: May 14, 2023, 02:53:05 AM »
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
For better or worse, this is more of the same of the previous PS4 spoder game, only it's not all that much more. I don't usually like to try to quantify the value of a game by how many hours it takes to complete, as I think that's a very flawed perspective, but when you release a game that's this much shorter and smaller than the one it's a direct sequel/spin-off to, you're inviting negative comparisons. The 2018 spoder game has 44 missions in its main story and 26 in its DLC. Miles only has 17 missions in its main story, no DLC, and an open world with considerably fewer things to do in it. If the first spoder was "worth" $60, then Miles simply isn't worth the $50 it's going for. I think $30 would have been a far more reasonable starting price.
The good news is that the core gameplay, spodering about New York and beating up criminals, is still a lot of fun. Miles has a few different abilities to Peter that are fun to play around with, and I like the little touch of his animations of swinging and fighting being a bit different to Peter's, presumably to emphasize the exaggerated swagger of a black teen his inexperience at spodering. Miles is a likable character, and proof that you can have a spoder who's a believable teenager while also not being aggressively infantilized like he is in the MCU. The story itself isn't fantastic, but it's largely carried by the characters and their relationships - Miles and Peter, Miles and Ganke, Miles and his mother, Miles and his uncle, and so on. Speaking of that last one, it would have been very easy for the subplot involving Aaron to feel derivative of how it was handled by the excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which came out only a couple of years before this game, but they managed to tell the same basic story in a different but still effective way, and I really respect that.
The one element of the story that I feel just doesn't work is the main antagonist and her relationship with Miles. For a character that we're repeatedly assured is an altruistic genius, her overall plan is remarkably stupid and short-sighted, and her interactions with Miles reek of hypocrisy. She's secretly working with a terrorist group as part of her extensive plan for revenge against an evil corporation that's wronged her, but how dare Miles not trust her enough to tell her that he's spoder! She takes part in a terrorist attack that almost kills hundreds of people, among them Miles's mother, but Miles is the one who betrayed her by infiltrating her group to try and stop her insane scheme! And just like with MJ and Peter in the previous game, spoder actually seems to concede that he's to blame, and the game frames her as being right, even though she's very obviously wrong. To top it off, she has a last-minute redemption and heroic death at the very end of the story, so she never gets any meaningful comeuppance for her actions. I really wish that these franchises would stop this awful sort of unsympathetic-girlboss writing for their female characters. Whatever progressive message they think they're sending - they're not. It's bad representation as well as bad writing.
This is still a good game, though. It just can't really be called a proper sequel to the last one.
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" arguments hit a pretty major snag when you consider that Trump himself already admitted wrongdoing, so to speak, by apologizing for those comments. If he had only ever meant that he kissed his wife without asking or that he could hypothetically grope women without their consent, he would have said so. Trump almost never apologizes even when he is clearly to blame; why in the world would he apologize if he really had done nothing wrong?
That's something we already know, thanks to the candid admissions of everyone here. Yes, we are Satanists, and soon we will abort every baby, transify every young person, and rig every election. There's nothing you can do about it.