Moments with Miles (New Teaser and Game Thoughts)

WOOOOOOOO

SPIDER-VERRSE TWOOOOOOOOO!!

I'm fuckin' jazzed, folks. Yeah, we knew it was gonna happen but seeing actual footage makes it more real, more than even just believing in it really hard would do. Wait, what am I talking about? The new Spider-Verse trailer, you nimrod. Geez, it's almost like you don't obsessively follow every Spider-Man related development with a desperate sad passion unfit for a human being of your age.

Well anyway this is that.

Not a whole lot there, but there's some! The designs for Miles and Gwen have changed somewhat, in-costume and out. They definitely look older, both with longer hair, and Gwen still has the undercut she had in most of Spider-Verse 1. I like the hair! Then there's costume design, where Gwen hasn't seen much of an overhaul, the most noticeable difference being her gloves now have the webbing pattern whereas before they were pure white. Miles has a pretty substantial change, with the red shoulders gone in lieu of a red band going down each his sides, going up the interior of his arms and outside his legs, each connecting the with little red patches on his hands and feet. The spider insignia looks a little cleaned up, but still appears to be spraypainted on, which I like.

One big hope for this movie is that they add Mayday Parker, Spider-Girl from the MC2 Universe that was running for a while. It would fit with Peter B's whole kids dilemma leading to his estrangement from Mary Jane, but seeing as how he figured out he wanted kids and ostensibly got back together with MJ in the end, he could very likely have had a daughter who inherited spider powers. It's either her or Spiderling from Renew Your Vows, the miniseries about what if MJ and Peter had a different kid and they all fought crime, which I now realize I haven't read for some reason.

And, before I forget, SPIDER-MAN 2099!! MIGUEL O'HARA IS IN THE HOOOUUUUSE!

I'm real happy they kept him in after the little cameo in the stinger of Spider-Verse 1, I love 2099 Nueva York, I love the costume, and I love the way the swear word of the future is the word "shock". I love Into the Spider-Verse with every ounce of my empty withered heart, and this being a definite two-part sequel, I have enough reason not to lose my mind eating pizza for a while.

Coincidentally, I just finished Miles Morales for the PS4 (I am biding my time for the Spider-Man PS5 to come out I know it will I just have to be patient) and, listen, sometimes I just gotta quarantine my Spider-Man thoughts into one post so the rest of them can be taken up with existential crises involving pizza.

Anyway, good game! Short, but that was pretty much the deal going in. I platinum'd it in a fraction of the time Spider-Man 1 took me, but more Spider-Man content is all I need to keep going. I'm glad I didn't purchase a PS5 to play this, considering how much effort it would take to get one and that I only really want Demon's Souls otherwise. I don't need no ray-tracing! I'll take my huffing, chugging PS4 that forgets to load textures on a cat.

Playing through really made me think about what I want from Spider-Man 2, and I can't bring myself to make a whole article for a stupid list and I want it out of my head.

1. Suit loadouts

I want to be able to assign a suite of mods to a suit, ideally 2 or 3 loadouts. I figure most people already switch out all their suit mods when they switch from stealth to combat, or if they're fighting street thugs vs. tech enemies. All this would just make it quicker and easier. I'm surprised they didn't add this in Miles Morales, but they have another chance with the next game.

2. Co-op

I don't care if it's local or network co-op, I just want to play with a friend who is also Spider-Man and we both swing and fight crime and have a dang ol' time.

3. Less Tokens

In Spider-Man 1, there was like 6 different tokens you could collect by doing stuff around the city, and remembering what upgrade needed what token and where to get them became a chore. Miles Morales had 2, which maybe was too few. I think 3 or 4 would be a good amount so you're not overburdened with either a single type of token or scrambling trying to find the one type you're missing to make webs better.

4. Less Cops

In Miles Morales, all your crime data came from the Friendly Neighborhood app, so users reported a crime which you would then fight. I like this a lot more than Spider-Man 1 where Spider-Man fixed police surveillance towers, and also sorta hacked them, and that's where you got crime reports. Spider-Man is best if he has an at-best ambivalent relationship with the police, where they pretty much think he's a criminal as well. They shouldn't be too cozy.

5. Big Wheel

I love this stupid villain. He's no frills, he rides around in a giant wheel with arms and calls himself "Big Wheel". I want a big setpiece chase through Manhattan trying to stop a ferris wheel from blowing up a bank or something. Either him or The Spot.

6. Bring back the old face

Worth a try.

7. Spider-Signal

You know the drill. Please, do it for me. You guys know it exists! I saw it! LET ME SHINE A STUPID LIGHT ON PEOPLE FROM A ROOFTOP! PLEASE I AM AT YOUR MERCY!

Some Spider-Man Trailers (2021)

I hear the calls, the pleas, for people to know what their most obscure Spider-Man obsessed weirdo thinks of these new Spider-Man properties on the horizon. Worry not, for I have come to answer the call. Let's see what this shit's about.

We're gonna start off with the thing I am less likely to hate entirely, and that's the recently announced sequel to the PS4's Marvel's Spider-Man, called Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

Seeing as how I really liked the first game, I have high hopes for this one. I haven't played Miles Morales yet because the PS4 version seems to be not-great in terms of performance, and I'm not buying a PS5 until they make a Spider-Man version that bundles with the new game. No Elden Ring for me until 2023.

For obvious impressions, looks like we'll get Kraven and Venom as villains in this game, which in most other media I would find to be too much, but the first game balanced a lot of villains at once and did a real good job, so I'm not worried. Kraven as a big bad would be cool, but he might just be a first act villain to be replaced by... Venom? Doc Ock wasn't in the trailers too much, so there's likely a lot of surprises ahead.

Now, who's gonna be Venom? The post-credits sequence of the first game hinted the symbiote was being used to cure Harry Osborn of whatever disease he had, so he might be a likely candidate. They could introduce Eddie Brock, flesh him out as a normal guy before the symbiote gets all gooey on him. It's pretty much a sure thing that Peter will get it first, because that's the kind of blatant fanservice the first game was so good at.

On a more speculative note, how's Miles Morales going to factor in here? In the middle of the trailer it looks like Peter and Miles are performing a takedown together. Could this mean co-op? It could just mean Miles is an AI-controller partner, like your Last of Us or something, but co-op is my dream. Two Spider-Mans, working together! That would be so rad. Normally I'd be a bit mad at the 4 robot legs Spider-Man sports during a couple clips in the trailer, seeing as how they're either a Superior thing or a MCU thing, but there was already a suit in the original game that gave you robot legs for a short time, so I can't be too mad.

At any rate, glad we're finally getting something about it, and hopefully we're all still alive by 2023.

On a more recent note, (And I mean really recent)

Venom 2! I had some problems with the first one, but over time I've come to appreciate it a bit more. At least they didn't make the symbiote some symbol for inner darkness, instead it's just a shitty asshole in the form of goo who calls Eddie a loser. You take what you can get.

Carnage has been a sore spot for me since they announced that Woody Harrelson would be Cletus Kasady. For reasons I do not have time to explain, I hate Woody Harrelson. For reasons I have just enough time to explain, he's not great for Carnage. Cletus is supposed to be a young, wiry guy, full of twitchy psychopath energy. Harrelson is old. I honestly think Robert Pattinson would have been a better choice, but unfortunately for all of us, he's Batman.

I was wondering how they would give Kasady a symbiote, since it's not like Cletus and Eddie would be sharing a jail cell, and it looks like they just had him fuckin' bite Eddie. It's pretty a pretty crazy thing for a crazy man to do, but... does it make any sense? I might be asking the wrong questions.

I like how even though Venom is clearly the symbiote wrapping around Eddie and making him all buff and big, Carnage looks to be made entirely of goo, so much so that he can just open a hole in his chest. Hopefully when the fight starts it's a little less confusing than two very similarly colored lumps of goo smashing into one another.

There's a couple shots of Shriek in the trailer, probably in the same prison as Carnage. In the comics they had a relationship, and it seems pretty likely here too. I'm anticipating what they'll do with that whole thing. Since the first Venom wasn't so bad in the end, I'm not dreading this. Whether or not I'll see it in a reasonable timeframe is a different matter.

Now for the bad one.

Maaaaaaan.

Listen, I am willing to admit this is just me. I'm the malcontent here. But MCU Spider-Man. I don't like him. The last two movies have been him fighting Iron Man villains, either trying to impress Iron Dad or following the orders of Grandpa Fury. Hell, in Far From Home it seemed like he didn't even want to be Spider-Man. And don't get me started on the glasses!

The point is: MCU Spider-Man and I don't get along. And I wasn't too enthused by the reveal of yet another new suit before the trailer even dropped. So, in the context of my regard for the previous two films I want to say:

This doesn't look as bad.

Sheesh, at least this is Peter doing a thing on his own that he just wants to do, even if it's not crime-fighting. It really seems like he doesn't want to fight crime. But! Dr. Strange is more like your free-wheeling uncle who takes you to the old record shop and lets you have ice cream for dinner, instead of someone telling Peter what to do yet again. That doesn't utterly offend my sensibilities.

By now everyone's heard the rumors about this film featuring the two previous Live Action Spider-Man iterations, and every day that seems more likely. Especially considering Alfred Molina's back. I know a lot of people are real hyped for this, but once again I'm the needless contrarian. I want to make this clear, I loved Spider-Verse. It was phenomenal, the best Spider-Man movie ever made. So the last thing I want is a watered-down Disney bullshit take on it, where nobody on the production gets Spider-Man the way I do. Into The Spider-Verse got it.

I don't care to speculate too much on what form this multiverse is going to take. Maybe they'll just mash up all the previous universes by the end so we get Electro and Doc Ock in the MCU. It would be fitting if Spider-Man's new villains aren't even his again, they're just the villains of alternate-universe Spider-Men. I would like to see Andrew Garfield again, since he's my favorite. But overall I'm just not that excited. In any case, I don't know what the release situation is gonna be for this, theaters? Streaming? Both? It looks like they're aiming for a theatrical release, but as I think we've all seen the deadly virus propagating through the countryside doesn't really care what movie studios want. Ah well. I'll see it eventually.