Let’s get one thing straight – the PSP’s awesome graphical capabilities are now officially being taken for granted, which means that the novelty of playing a rehash of a PS2 game wears off real quick. If it’s a rehash of a game made obsolete and exposed as piss poor by a superior sequel, doubly so. And you don’t need to be clairvoyant to already know that this applies to Spider-Man 2

As you’ll no doubt recall, Spider-Man 2 on PS2 introduced a wonderful webswinging system, powered by Awesome Physics™ for a truly exhilarating time. Perhaps the streaming technology that facilitated this is too strenuous for the UMD format, because Spidey has de-evolved to once again spewing lame stick-to-thin-air webbing that’s totally counter intuitive, slow and unwieldy. It’s a tragedy, and thanks to Spidey’s undulating movement, something of a comedy. But not a very funny one.

Gone then is one of the most rewarding game developments of recent years. The gristle left over consisting of lame fisticuffs with knuckleheads, the throwing of enough switches to drive a man insane and the worst kind of trialand- error gameplay. Elsewhere we have rehashes of missions we’ve already played and a character too often holed up in a warehouse whose abilities have a nasty habit of spazzing out the game’s already spaz-tastic camera when in enclosed spaces. Spider sense is niggling.