After a hiatus of entirelytoolong, I have returned to the Great Cause: recording successful mega-time runs of all 150 challenges in Spider-Man 2.  This is not an effort that should have required years, so we can file this as evidence against my productivity and dedication.  With my capture rig alive once again, perhaps we may summit before another year passes.

Had I wanted to organize the challenges by difficulty, I could have passed all the Easy, Medium and Hard within a night or two.  The Insanes are all.  As it is, I’ve tackled them geographically.  The tokens that activate each time trial challenge are spread throughout the city, and I’ve worked from south to north.  This gives me a varied diet as I progress instead of gnawing only on the very hardest.  I’ve cleared two new Insanes in my latest surge.

Challenge 80 was the more interesting of those.  Two rough sections made this … rough.  The first was the jump off the gargoyle at around 0:42.  Doesn’t look like much in the video, on account of I made the jump.  What would be clear if you were among the victims suffering through my streamed attempts was that Spidey2′s clipping is a little shaky.  Lining up my sprint to hit that goal marker and also get the full-power dive towards the next marker without triggering a weird hover and blowing 5-10 seconds was a more precise operation than you’d guess.

The second crotchkick was the climb up the Empire State Building, starting about 1:10 in the video.  The quickest way to scale skyscrapers in Spidey2 is to sprinkle charged jumps into your wallrun as dashes.   This is what I’m doing at the start of the video with those half-charges on the jump meter.  But the ESB is tiered.  The top of each tier interrupts my wallrun.  The slow, useless float after each can really kill my time.  My success in the recorded run is middling. I had some time to spare as I reached the building and didn’t blow it too badly.

Finally the obligatory evangelism.  Spider-Man 2 contains the best game ever made.  150 time-trial challenges, the Mary Jane missions, the pizza delivery missions and the Daily Bugle missions.  In a sinister turn, this content is hidden behind a mediocre beat-em-up, so well disguised with a facade of dopey combat unlocks and shitty voice acting that few have discovered the precious treasure.  Mercifully, the game offers a code to skip all that nonsense that reviewers think is the game.  This is not a cheat code.  It is a machete to hack through the jungle of mediocrity and reach the Lost City of Gold.