video games

Growing Up With Spider-Man

/ SindrElf / 8 Comments

During the late 90s, when I was between six and nine years old, I was a giant Spider-Man fan!

I never read any of the comics, I was more into Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics when I was little, but I have enjoyed his adventures through other media.

 

I was first introduced to the character through the Norwegian dub of the Fox Kids cartoon.

I used to play with my friends, but instead of Cops & Robbers we’d play as Spider-Man and his villains.

Spider-Man villains are the best in the genre, with only Batman villains coming close, so they were a huge reason for my infatuation with the series.

 

I liked to play as Shocker, due to his cool costume and ability to shoot shock-waves out of his hands. Although I had him confused with Electro for years as a result of his powers being changed from sound based to electrical based in the cartoon for some reason.

 

Later, I fell in love with Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films from 2002 and 2004.

MovieBob’s Really That Good episode about those films thoroughly explains why they are as great as they are.

When I saw Spider-Man 3 in 2007, I was afraid that I had grown out of the franchise, so I was very happy when I later learned that the film was universally despised.

I wonder how many people have thought that they have grown out of something they loved simply because they saw a bad iteration of it.

 

‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ film from 2012 and its 2014 sequel did a lot to make me forgive Spider-Man 3.

Spider-Man 3 may have been the worst of the Raimi films, but it was still a film about Spider-Man, not a Sony marketing campaign starring a cool dude dressing up as Spidey on a lark.

 

So after three subpar Spider-movies in a row, it felt amazing to see Peter Parker show up in ‘Captain America: Civil War’ in 2016, fighting alongside Iron Man and the other Avengers, back in the nurturing arms of Marvel Studios.

 And then ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ took that ball and ran with it the very next year, and now ‘Homecoming’ is my second favorite Spider-Man film ever, my favorite being Spider-Man 2.

 

This year, Spider-Man played a pivotal role in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, next year will have sequels to both ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Homecoming’ with ‘Avengers: Endgame’ and ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ being released, and at the moment I am having a great time playing the new PlayStation 4 Spider-Man game.

It really makes me feel like I’m a friendly neighborhood spiderman, as I swing through New York with ease.

 

And today, 14th of December 2018, the new animated film ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ is released, and by all accounts I’ve heard so far, it is great.

This is truly a wonderful time to be a Spider-fan!

 

 

I don’t know what it is about Spider-Man that makes me like him so much.

I have a fear of heights (and I don’t much care for speed either), yet I often imagine myself swinging from building to building.

Perhaps, with great imagination comes a loss of anxiety.

 

Gaming Backlog Countdown: 40!

/ SindrElf / 8 Comments

In the last entry of my gaming backlog countdown I went from 50 games to 45, and checked off five games I played with my girlfriend on the SNES Classic.

This time I’m checking off five games I played by myself on PlayStation 4.

 

Prey (2017)

Prey is a first-person shooter horror game set on a space station orbiting Earth in 2035.

The game is very reminiscent of Bioshock, in that you are traversing a beautifully built structure with danger coming from within the structure in the form of enemies, and from outside the structure in the form of natural forces.

Whereas in Bioshock you have to face a gaggle of biologically altered psychopaths while the sea destroys the underwater city the game is set in, in Prey you have to face a horde of aliens with the ability to mimic everyday objects as a form of camouflage, all while the vacuum of space looms outside the walls.

 

Mooncrash DLC

This piece of downloadable content takes the action down to a hostile moon base, and has some randomly generated parts to it.

As with the base game, I absolutely loved the story in this one, maybe even more than the one in the base game.

 

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

When I wrote the backlog list I had already played the first Uncharted game years ago, and I was sure that I had a collector’s box containing the second and third game for Playstation 3.

I may have lost it, or I just never had it to begin with, but since Uncharted 2 is considered to be a classic I decided to just buy it remastered for the Playstation 4.

 

The Uncharted series was made by the video game studio Naughty Dog.

Naughty Dog has made some of my all-time favorite games, like the Crash Bandicoot series and ‘The Last of Us’.

Crash Bandicoot may in fact be the first game I ever played, and while I can’t be completely sure of that, it was an incredibly nostalgic trip to play the HD rerelease of the first three Crash games earlier this year.

 

Naughty Dog have always been great developers, and Uncharted 2 is one of their finest works.

It is an action masterpiece, and a love letter to Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and National Treasure.

 

One of the parts I enjoyed the most was an action sequence that takes place on top of a moving train in Nepal, traveling from the urban Kathmandu Valley to the high Himalayas without breaking gameplay.

It must have taken forever to design a stretch of land that huge, but it paid off.

It’s one of the coolest levels I have played whole year.

 

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

The third game in this series is not as beloved as the second and fourth, so since it turned out I didn’t actually own it, I decided to skip it.

I instead watched some recaps on YouTube to fill myself in on the plot before starting Uncharted 4.

 

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

This game builds on it’s predecessors beautifully.

It is bigger, more fun to play, and has a more emotional storyline.

 

The story takes you on a journey from Scotland, through Madagascar, and ends with a giant portion on a massive island, the lost pirate kingdom of Libertalia.

The action set-pieces is better than ever, and there are a few car chases that really gives that train sequence a run for it’s money.

 

The Lost Legacy DLC

This is a massive adition to the game which lets you discover lost cities in the ancient Hoysala Empire, in a big beautiful area of India’s Western Ghats.

 

Invisible, Inc.

This is a short game with espionage puzzle gameplay.

I had a lot of fun setting up ambushes for guards, and sneaking around in general.

Stealth can often be difficult to make fun, but this game nailed it!

 

 

I now have 40 games left on my list!

I Played Pokemon for so long that I was Reported Missing

/ SindrElf / 2 Comments

pokemon cop police officer jenny

I was recently asked if I would like to submit a gaming memory to Couch Bandits’ gaming memory project, after they read my Why You Should Play Games post.

The idea of the project is to have up to 100 people share their favorite gaming memory.

This is not my favorite gaming memory, but it may be the most interesting one:

 

It was the fall of 2000, and I had just turned 10.

My parents had been separated for a few years at that point, and while I and my sister lived with our mother, we spent every Wednesday and every other weekend at our father’s place.

This was a Wednesday, and like every Wednesday for the past few months, I was waiting for my father to pick me up outside school.

 

To kill time while waiting, I had my trusty GameBoy Color, with my favorite game at that time… Pokemon (the blue version).

For a few years there, I brought it everywhere, and you could barely get me to look up sometimes.

This was one of those times.

 

As I made my way through the Kanto region, earning gym badges and crushing Team Rocket, I barely noticed how dark it was getting out in the real world.

Evenings in Norway get very dark very quickly as the calendar reaches the later months of the year, so I figured we must have just reached that point already.

school at night

So it came as quite the surprise when my father drove up to me, looking mad and worried, told me to get in the car, and informed me that my mother had called the police and reported me missing.

Turns out, I had forgotten that we were invited to a dinner at a friend of my mom’s that evening, and so my father would be picking us up on the Thursday instead.

 

When I never got home my mother got worried that something had happened to me.

She first contacted my father, who started driving around the entire city to find me.

Then she contacted the police.

 

I had been having so much fun playing Pokemon that I had not noticed that several hours had passed by!