My Spidey sense is tingling! It is telling me that there is another game based on a movie that is actually good…Spider-Man 2 from Activision. It’s a well-put-together game that will have gamers experiencing the joy of web swinging and thug thumping like no game before it has. Without a doubt the best Spider-Man game ever.

Spider-Man is one of those super heroes who have been around on video games almost as long as Superman … and with much more success. He first showed up on the Atari 2600 (Blessed be its name.) battling the Green Goblin in a fun Parker Brothers game from 1982. Since then almost every console, computer and even the arcades have had Spider-Man games. The success of these games varied, but with the current generation of consoles, and their greater horsepower, we’re finally seeing Spider-Man games that adequately represent the powers of Spidey.

If you don’t know who Spider-Man is – go to a graphic novel Web site and read up. I’ll wait. … Back? Okay, in this game Spider-Man’s main nemesis is Doc Ock, but he’ll also run into other traditional Spider-Man villains like Shocker and Mysterio. At the heart of Spider-Man’s abilities is his power to shoot web strands and use those strands to swing quickly through New York City to reach the point of trouble and deal with it. Spider-Man 2’s developer, Treyarch, was very thoughtful and gave players two modes of web-swinging to choose from. Look at the “Easy Swinging” option for a few minutes and then select the “Normal Swinging” mode and master it for the game. The normal mode feels wonderfully natural after only a little while and really conveys what it must feel like to travel like Spidey.

And while you travel like Spidey you’ll be visiting – beautiful Manhattan! Spider-Man 2 has a wonderfully well-rendered city to go almost anywhere in. The city is also alive with average citizens and cars that just go about their business and create passive obstacles. To help players find their way around, there is a map of the city at the press of a button. The city is quite large. You will need the map, though the objective-directional pointer does work very well to get you to the center of where the trouble is.

Hand-to-hand fighting is also Spidey’s stock in trade. He doesn’t use any sissy guns or edged weapons. For Spider-Man it is fists and his trusty web-spinning abilities that carry the day. The fighting system is adequate with a couple dozen combos possible when fully upgraded. The combos use punches, kicks and Spidey’s web to bring the criminals down. Spidey also has the ability to climb walls, make long leaps, use spider sense to anticipate and evade attacks, and a bullet-time-like “Spider Reflex” mode that slows time down and allows the player to put some serious hurt on the bad guys.

The game is divided into chapters that will take the player through the game and to the final confrontation with Doctor Octopus. (No, that is not a spoiler. The movie was about Spider-Man’s battle with and defeat of Doc Ock. Where did you expect the game to go?) One of the few complaints I have with the game is the way it is structured. There is a main story quest that has the player on track for his ultimate meeting with Doc Ock. There are also side missions to go on: helping citizens, stopping crimes, delivering pizzas and getting pictures for the Daily Bugle. All of these activities earn the player “Hero Points” that can be used to upgrade skills like swinging and fighting. In order to get the all the fight combos and best Spidey powers that take the big baddies down, many hero points must be earned. It kind of encourages the player to go on a lot of these side missions to earn many hero points and thus artificially lengthens the duration of a game that would otherwise be relatively short. Fortunately taking on the smaller bad guys is pretty fun too. It does feel as though you’ve done it all before after a while though.

Graphically the game is good but not great. The character animations are okay until they get used for the cut scenes, and then they just don’t hold up real well. As stated before, the city environment is really big, well-rendered and has a nice, lived-in feel to it.

Audio is good. I especially liked that music was kept to a minimum during a lot of the game so the player can just go around being Spidey without feeling like he’s being tailed by the entire New York Philharmonic. Voice acting was also good. Considering Activision shelled out the green for Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Alfred Molina, the stars of the film, it should sound good. But the best of the voice work was done by Bruce Campbell. His dry, wise-cracking delivery as the player’s tour guide/trainer was great. Of course I’m a Bruce Campbell fan.

Only one thing has me worried about Spider-Man 2 being such a good game: I’m almost sure the number of good to great games based on movies we’ve seen recently is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse. I think I saw it in Revelations. It was something like, “… and there shall be a plethora of games based upon the licenses of the flickering pictures made in the west of the land of the eagle and these games shall not sucketh.” Considering the quality of movie-based games until recently, I thought we’d be safe forever. Oh well. Until the darkness comes, play Spider-Man 2 and enjoy. I can think of worst ways to spend the end.