Topic: Insomniac's Spiderman

I just started this game finally and I’m having a good time. It feels very familiar. Very safe. I can hardly tell the difference between Batman Arkham City and this, other than more agility and options with movement and daytime vs night time setting in the Batman game That’s alright since I loved Arkham City.
Also feels a little bit like Infamous in the animation and traversal department.
Supposedly the story is good but I’m just getting started and it’s nothing special yet.

@Bliquid I love JJJ role in Spiderman. I think he's the perfect foil for Spidey.

I’m about 30% through the game now and I am enjoying it. I took a long break from it to play a couple other games, so it took a while to get the controls down again. I’m still not very good at it, but it’s coming along.
The traversal does feel almost like a rhythm game in how you need to keep the swinging in a rhythm to maximize speed and height. Probably the most frustrating aspect of the game for me is the frequent target chases you have to do. I just can’t seem to get my speed and my ability to turn corners in sync as I try to keep up with a car swerving at high speed through the streets of New York. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of these types of missions and I need to be better at high speed chases.

@Th3solution The web zipline move (I forget what it's actually called) is really helpful for more accurate and quick movement, especially if you time it to launch off what you're zipping onto using X.

The latter may be a move you need to unlock though. It's been a while since I played so can't remember.

[I have some random updates on my impressions, now that I’m a little further along. Forgive my tangential thoughts, but here goes] —
Just finished the helicopter sequence that was shown in some of the trailers. That was fantastic. I suppose I’m about 40-50% through the main story. I’m taking my time with slurping up the side content and collectibles and mixing in the main story intermittently. I’m reaching a good cadence with the game and am pretty hooked on it now.
I’m having a similar vibe to this game as I did with Horizon Zero Dawn — and what I mean by that is I similarly had an initial interest, then got easily distracted from the game for a while, and then got back into it and really started enjoying it more after a break. Now it’s really hitting its stride and I am liking the combat, exploration, and story much more than I initially did.

Playing this game has me pondering the recent acquisition of Insomniac by Sony and the similarity of some of the gameplay to the Sucker Punch outings, namely the InFAMOUS series. It just seems ironic that Insomniac created an open world, superhero, climb tall buildings in a big city, shoot baddies and melee them, collect random debris around town - type of game and now Sucker Punch has gone away from that and trying what looks to be possibly some version of a more tactical and realistic/historical samurai game. One observation when contrasting the two studios is that I do see that Insomniac is a little more comfortable with the humor, comedy, and one-liners which are quite well done in Spider-Man (coupled with the excellent delivery of Yuri Lowenthal). It’s part of the Ratchet & Clank DNA left over that I see in this game, which was brilliant in its levity.

That, and the fluid and cartoonish feel to Spidey’s movement does remind me a little of Ratchet when I think about it. That is one thing Insomniac seems to have over other developers is that wonderful smooth traversal and acrobatic animations they weave into their games. I think it adds so much to an action game to have that great feeling of movement. It’s part of why I loved Hellblade, NieR Automata, and Horizon Zero Dawn.
On a side note (as if this post isn’t one huge side-note...), come to think of it, it seems female protagonists are always animated better and look more graceful. Male characters tend to lumber about in a more brutish fashion (looking at you - Arthur Morgan, Kazuma Kiryu, Kratos, Talion, and Nathan Drake) I’m glad they made Spider-Man jump and fight with such beautiful grace. It makes the game more fun to control a character who moves in such cool ways. I feel more superhero-ey that way.

Nice impressions @Th3solution !

Admittedly I kinda rushed through Spider-Man over a single weekend (enjoyed the heck out of it though) so I don't fully remember what part you're on about :')

This game was my first encounter with the newer villain Mister Negative and I really quite like him... He's pretty darn cool.

Plus the webslinging is pretty fun way to traverse, I pretty much never fast travelled cus of it!

And Spidey is animated very well for sure!

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy @Th3solution I only fast-traveled for the trophy.

Even spent the odd hour just swinging and jumping about the city and taking screenshots. Was nice and chilled.

So I own the base Spider-man game (never bought any of the DLC) and I was wondering does anyone know that if I buy the GOTY edition where my save transfer over or do I need to start all over?

@Tasuki If you already own the base game, isn't it cheaper just to buy the Season Pass? I recalled it was either $20 or $25.

@Tasuki you know @LN78 is probably right, it's how it's normally done now a days, you would be better off just buying the season pass

@LN78 @WanderingBullet @FullbringIchigo I didn't think about that lol. Especially if it's a downlaod voucher.

@Tasuki yeah i learnt that lesson when i brought the Royal Edition of FFXV on XB1, i was hoping that it was all included on the disc but it was literally the vanilla release with a DLC code

it didn't even have any of the updates on it either so as my XB1 wi-fi adapter was broke at that point i couldn't use any of the DLC and it was the day one vanilla version of the game too

it's just plain lazy

@FullbringIchigo Yeah I remember us talking about that about a week ago, and my theory is that they just take left over stock from the initial print and just add codes and call it a day.

@Tasuki i wouldn't be surprised in the slightest

Got all the backpacks, pigeons, and lab research stations. I’m only about 60% through the story, but I’m mopping up the icons first.
Most annoying thing so far was the research station where you have to swing all over town in a lightning storm and adjust the antennas. Absolutely awful side activity. Thankfully it was my last one. The frame rate dropped horribly with all the lightning striking, and getting caught in the lightning was so unavoidable and frustrating. I could live with the difficulty of the task, but the technical hiccups of frame rate and lag made the section nigh unplayable. Somehow I powered through and got the trophy for all the stations. Most of the other research stations were pretty decent little side activities.
Catching the pigeons was the 2nd most annoying thing in the game so far. Those stupid critters. The car chases are bad enough, but trying to chase the pigeon darting through the skyscrapers is also pretty maddening at times.

So I think I read on here that there are not enough tokens of everything to be able to purchase all the suits, all the powers, and upgrade all the gadgets? That’s disappointing. I’m hoarding my tokens for upgrades until I level up high enough to get all the suits because I don’t want to miss any of those.

@Th3solution Yeah, the pigeons was really annoying!
I didn't have much of an issue with with 'lightning' level - but pretty much all of the side quest stuff just felt like recycled and familiar Infamous/other Spider-Man game stuff anyway.

I think post-game you can get everything upgraded - but if you're playing for the plat and then stopping, make sure you spend your tokens on skills and suits. You don't need all upgrades.

GOTY editions are always tempting for me since I rarely buy games at their launch, but this is lazy as hell: vanilla game on disc, a voucher for the DLC and 18 GB of patches to be downloaded.
If they'll ever open a restaurant, I'm sure they'll ask us to enter the kitchen and cook for ourselves.

@andreoni79 it's not just lazy but it's also really cheap too but i DO kind of understand from a business stand point why it would be done this way, it save having to go through the hassle and cost of getting the game re-certified and re done by the ESRB (or other relevant government bodies), it also saves on the time and cost of authorising new Discs to print plus it also means they don't have to scrap any unused discs of the original release which lets be honest they would have a LOT of

like i said, it's lazy but i understand why they do it

@FullbringIchigo In that case, just lower the list price of the game. Calling it "GOTY Edition" is not fair to all the other devs and publishers that sell real GOTY Edition of their games. Techland, for example, did a great job with Dying Light, and the same did CDPR with The Witcher 3.
They can sell me a frozen disc of dough with a splash of tomatoes and some slices of a strange cheese on it, calling that a pizza, and I understand why they do that. Still, they are cheating me and it doesn't taste good.

Trophy question:

So I hadn’t planned to get the platinum for this game, but as I am progressing through naturally I have realized that the platinum is pretty automatic for those of us whose playstyle is to mop up all the side quests and icons on the map. There appears to be very few trophies that require much special planning except for the one for unlocking all the suits. I’m hoarding my tokens so I think I might be able to squeeze by for that trophy with just enough tokens — However, when I looked over the trophy list I discovered I haven’t obtained the “Overdrive” trophy. This is the one for completing 10 vehicle take downs. Apparently the neighborhood crimes are randomly generated and some of them are those vehicle chase ones with the take down of the vehicle at the end. I might have died once or twice while doing one of those. Well, if you do, I think the mission resets and you don’t get credit for completing a crime activity, but then the next crime in that district is randomized and may or may not be a vehicle chase. In my exuberance and compulsiveness to complete all the crimes as they pop up during my exploration, I wasn’t keeping track and I have now cleared all 5/5 of the thug crimes and demon crimes in all the districts, so there aren’t anymore that randomly pop up ... yet I apparently didn’t get at least 10 of the vehicle take down type. This wouldn’t bother me, except it’s such a simple thing to do if I would have known to wait and be sure to do enough vehicle chases before locking myself out of any more crimes. Now that stupid simple bronze might be the only trophy to keep me from the platinum. I’m sure I did somewhere around 8 or 9 of those vehicle ones.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do more vehicle take downs after having completed all the crimes? A quick google search on trophy guides suggests the trophy is not a “missable” type, so maybe after the end game the crimes reset?

The only reason I want to know is that if it is impossible to get that trophy now, then I won’t be as inclined to do the optional tasks on the bases and try to get higher rankings on the Taskmaster challenges in order to get excess tokens for suits. I’ll probably still clear the districts for the 100% trophy just because it’s fun to do so, but mastering the challenges is not particularly fun for me.

Anyway, sorry about the long post for such a simple question. I’m surprised I’m even considering platinuming the game, honestly.