11/5/2008 - Spider-Man Web of Shadows-Launch Trailer

Have you ever watched an awesome movie trailer, only to be disappointed with the actual movie? I'm sure we all have. Apparently, the same phenomenon applies to videogame trailers as well. Check out this trailer for Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, for example:



It is really one of the best videogame trailers I have ever seen, and would definitely be my pick for Trailer of the Year. The Beethoven music really fits and gives it a whole new level of epicness. The premise of a Venom symbiote infected city seems really interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that as a future storyline in the comic book.

From all the reviews, however, it sounds like the game is on the mediocre side. Which is really a disappointment to me because I was looking forward to at least renting it.

7/5/2008 - Spider-Man 3 How It Should Have Ended

I don't know at what point Spider-Man 3 got all of the hate that its getting now. It seems to be pretty popular to hate Spider-Man 3, even though there are a lot of other movies that deserve more. I thought it was fine even though it clearly is the least enjoyable of the three Spider-Man movies. My major criticism of it is that because director Sam Raimi wanted to wrap everything up as a trilogy, he threw too many things into it for one movie to handle.

I thought the origin of Venom was pretty spot on, but his inclusion as a last-minute villain left much to be desired. I would have really preferred Eddie Brock getting possessed by the black suit and then fade to credits as a major cliffhanger for the next movie. I mean it would have been pretty epic to have Spider-Man and Venom battling it out during the course of an entire film.

And they should have saved the Gwen Stacy storyline for that movie instead of shoehorning it into this one. I mean if Gwen Stacy were to serve just one purpose in a Spider-Man movie, that would be for Peter to fall in love with her and then be killed off by a major villain so that Peter could be the victim of even more angst. At the very least, Gwen should have been the "damsel in distress" at the end of Spider-Man 3. If you think about it, the last girl Eddie saw Peter with was Gwen. So why kidnap Mary Jane?

I guess the reason for Raimi's decisions was that he wanted the Sandman to be a sympathetic villain and he wanted Harry Osborn to eventually to forgive Peter. With that in mind, I guess I can overlook some of the plot contrivances (the alien suit just happening to land near Peter, for example), and the usual Sam Raimi weirdness (the Peter song and dance routine). A lot of people are less forgiving, however. The folks at "How It Should Have Ended" eschewed their regular format of critiquing a movie's ending and went on to provide a parody of the entire movie for Spider-Man 3:

3/5/2008 - Iron Man's Adventure

As I've said before, it has taken until this decade to translate Stan Lee's visions of superheroes and super powers to the big and small screen, and that's because the special effects have finally caught up because of computer graphics. The computer effects are mostly an aid to the real-life backdrops and actors on film, but sometimes you get purely digital presentation like the Pixar movies. While The Incredibles was cool, the superheroes weren't the well-established characters we know and love from the Marvel Universe. So what would a computer animated version of the Marvel heroes look like? This promotional video from Marvel gives us a good indication:



It's funny, I actually prefer the look of this Hulk to the ones from the 2003 movie and the upcoming movie. It really looks like a three-dimensional translation of what I see in the comic book!

1/28/2008 - Spider-Man : One More Day Review

If you have an ongoing comicbook series that has run for over 40 years, eventually you are going to run out of stories to tell or the storylines will tend to repeat themselves or they will just become mediocre. You may ask how that can be with only one issue coming out a month and a whole army of writers over a period of years. Well, in the case of Spider-Man comic, its popularity led to various spin-off series such as Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, etcetera, etcetera. In the course of one month, there can be as many as 4 Spider-Man issues coming out each with a different writer, but each having to maintain continuity with each other!

Over the years Peter Parker has been through it all and matured through real-life trials and crises. He's made it through high school, college, fallen in love with different women, and eventually married Mary Jane Watson. There have been many "ground-breaking" changes and revelations involving Spider-Man, such as the "true nature" of his powers, the possibility that he was just a clone, and his unmasking before the world. Each of these plot twists were met with great resistance from the readers, with much criticism that the changes to Peter were out of character. I can't blame the writers to much, because as I've stated above, it's hard to be original when writing stories that fit within a 40 year history.

I do have to side with the detractors of the current storyline, though. Most comic book fans know about Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada's distaste for the marriage between Peter and Mary Jane. He claims it limits the kind of stories that can be told about Spider-Man. So with one fell swoop, he dissolves the marriage. But how does he do it? Do they get divorced? Does Mary Jane die? No. Instead, the marriage is erased from existence because Peter makes a deal with the devil. Okay, so Peter does it to save Aunt May from death, but still... a superhero making a deal with the devil? What kind of example does that make for kids? When does a deal with the devil ever go well? Didn't they watch the Ghost Rider movie?

This development has made a lot of fans angry. And you wouldn't like it when comic book readers are angry. :) The Angry Video Game Nerd has made a living out of geeky rants about bad video games, but we all know it's just an act. If you want to see a real angry nerd, there is no better example than this review of the Spider-Man: One More Day storyline.

9/24/2007 - Ode To A Superhero

This Weird Al song is not as great as his Star Wars Episode I song, The Saga Begins, but it's still good enough to feature here. It's a song about the first Spider-Man movie and the YouTuber here made it into a music video which serves as the introduction to Spider-Man 2 (note the credits interspersed in the video). It's a good edit job with the Weird Al lyrics, footage of Spider-Man 1, and the actual credit sequence of Spider-Man 2 combined all together seamlessly.