Ice Man challenges cleared. The only enemy is Ice 10 is the bullet, mario style slow-moving jammies. Gotta cross all sorts of bottomless pits by freezing bullets and jumping off them. Climax comes when a full screen stack of them come at you, and you have to freeze the bottom two to slip through. It’s all tasty, but nothing superb.

No progress yet on Cut 9.

In news both grander yet somehow even less interesting, I resurrected The Great Project: recording Mega time clears of every challenge in Spider-Man 2 for the Xbox. I’d like to hope that my tone already made it clear, but the term “The Great Project” is entirely ironic. The considerably more sincere “I Lack Discipline and Therefore Interminable Project” polled poorly.

The atrophy of my skill was horrifying. I foolishly jumped right in to an Insane challenge. #102, I think. Starts from a second floor balcony on the west side of Central Park. Results were dreadful.

After a dose of futility, I wandered around the north end of the island and cleared a bunch of the Mediums and Hards laying around. That went well, and I was able to upload a pile of new Mega clears to youtube. Buoyed with unwarranted confidence, I tried another Insane. #119, a wallsprint sequence around the elevated track. That went even worse. Apparently my wallsprinting has suffered especially from the passage of time.

Spider-Man 2 at is chaos at speed. What makes the game so great is precisely that you can move far faster than the game can handle. When you’re tackling an Insane challenge, you leave behind the smooth curves and long arcs of your early swinging experiences. It’s all wild angles, sudden turns and spastic stops.

Wallsprints are maybe the worst of it. When you first learn to wallsprint, it’s straightforward. You’re just running on a wall. At normal run speeds, you have the same control you would on foot. But in challenges, you hit the wall at peak swing speed. There’s essentially no steering over short distances. You zip around in nearly random directions if you aren’t careful about your entry angle.

Thus the skill required is managing that chaos. I think the bulk of it is controlling input, eliminating variables. Use swing time to smooth everything out and try to have a nice clean entry angle to the next move. God, that sounds fluffy and meaningless.

Tell you what. I’ll go through my Insane videos and generate a walkthrough for one to demonstrate what I mean. I’ll try and illustrate how success boils down to managing the entry to moves rather than making adjustments during the moves themselves. Look for that in a future post.

Advertisement