Obscusion B-Side: Spider: The Video Game: Night of the Cybernetic Crawler

Arachnophobia is the fear of spiders, and while only so many people actually have a downright phobia of those eight-legged arachnids (it's apparently only somewhere between 3.5% to 6.1% of the global population), it wouldn't be unfair to say that most people would still react unpleasantly to the sight of one, in general, especially from out of nowhere. Even the word "spider" itself has a bit of an allure to it, which is why there are numerous characters, films, songs, groups, & even a French video game developer named after it. In fact, a commonly held belief in conquering a fear like arachnophobia would be to engage with it directly in a controlled fashion (i.e. exposure therapy)... like maybe through a video game? While some might then think of 2009's Deadly Creatures for the Wii, where you play as both a tarantula & a scorpion, considering that it's Halloween I'm thinking of something a little more "science gone wrong", with a dash of "subtext is for cowards".

Boss Film Studios was a visual effects company founded in 1983 by Industrial Light & Magic alumnus (& VFX legend) Richard Edlund. Boss would go on to become a legendary rival to ILM, having done the VFX for the likes of Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Big Trouble in Little China, Ghost, The Hunt for Red October, Batman Returns, Last Action Hero, & Starship Troopers, to list only a few; to call Boss Film's output "impressive" would be putting it very lightly. In 1994 the company founded an offshoot, Boss Game Studios, that would develop video games, though it wouldn't actually make its public debut until February of 1997 with the focus of this review: Spider: The Video Game. Released exclusively for the PS1 by BMG Interactive, the video game division of the now-defunct Bertelsmann Music Group, Spider would actually wind up being the only title from Boss Game Studios to ever see release while Boss Film Studios was still around, as Boss Film would close up shop on August 26, 1997, citing difficulties in being an independently run studio in such a competitive market. Boss Game would then switch over to exclusively developing Nintendo 64 games (plus one Windows PC port), mostly of the racing variety (even renaming to Boss Racing), before disbanding on June 14, 2002, outliving its parent company by close to five years; Boss' final game, 2000's Stunt Racer 64, is now highly coveted & uber-expensive, due to rarity. Meanwhile, BMG Interactive would eventually be sold to Take-Two Interactive in 1998, just months after publishing a little game called Grand Theft Auto in Europe for the PC & PS1... Ouch; BMG itself would also eventually get purchased by Sony in 2008.

So, for a title originally handled by a bunch of companies that no longer exist in any form, is Spider: The Video Game more like 1990's Arachnophobia, or it is more akin to 2002's Eight Legged Freaks?

It's March 8, 2018 (you know, the future) & Dr. Michael Kelly, "Nanotechnology's most brilliant and innovative research scientist", is on the verge of completing something he's been working on for a long time. For the past 600+ days, he's been researching & experimenting to create a "cyber-arachnid", one that allows for not only the equipping of various leg insertions, including "scaled-down weapon accessories", but also the ability to control it directly via a neural transmitter. However, he's also being watched by MicroTech, the conglomerate that's been paying for his research, and after a seemingly innocuous visit by a rep resulted in a secret camera being installed, MicroTech can't wait any longer. During a neural transmission at "optimum settings", MicroTech breaks into Dr. Kelly's lab & steals both his research & the man himself, especially after he was shot. However, unbeknownst to everyone, Dr. Kelly's transmission has succeeded 100%, so his mind is currently in the cyber-arachnid that he's perfected.

Time for Dr. Michael Kelly to chase after MicroTech, get his body back, and put a stop to whatever machinations his benefactors have planned.

With such a generic & rather unassuming name, & considering the era it was released in, it's easy for one to think of Spider: The Video Game as potentially being some sort of third-person action/adventure game, where you use a spider's abilities to help maneuver through environments that would see "small" to a human, but would be much larger to a small arachnid. In that regard, you'd actually only be half right, as while this game is more or less exactly in that vein, it comes with one main difference: It's a 2.5D platformer. Yes, during a time when most people in gaming (developers, journalists, & players) were very much obsessed with exploring fully 3D environments, despite the hardware itself only being so powerful to truly handle it, Boss Game Studios stuck to a tried & true format with Spider, with creative director Seth Mendelsohn even telling EGM back in the day that "full-form 3D" wasn't a good fit for a "traditional platform game", due to "issues about jumping and judging distance". With that in mind, let's take a look at the controls, which are understandably simple. You use the d-pad to move left & right through a level, with the fixed camera following in true 2D platformer fashion, even rotating when a level has something like a curve in the path. The  button makes you jump, and in true spider fashion you can also cling to walls & ceilings, both while walking & jumping. If you wind up upside-down, though, you can then press  to spin a web strand & slowly descend, retract, & even swing back & forth using the d-pad; this is good for getting pick-ups that are isolated by gaps & environmental hazards. Meanwhile, the  &  buttons are used to attack with whatever weapons are currently equipped onto your rear & front legs, respectively, while L1 & R1 swap between which rear & front weapons you wish to currently use; after all, spiders have eight legs, so four of them can be reserved for weaponry. Finally, Start pauses the game (where you can rotate your spider self for closer inspection), Select brings up the map from the Pause screen, and holding both for 3 seconds resets the game. The , L2, & R2 buttons aren't used for this game, and since Spider predates both the Dual Analog & Dual Shock controllers, there's no analog stick support or vibration; same with the Analog Joystick, which was out by this point.

So... yeah... I said "weapons", because this spider can pack various forms of heat!

Starting off you have nothing but a close-range front "Slash" attack, but while traversing levels you come across leg pickups, which give you various weapons. Front weapons include a Flamethrower, "Poisoner" (i.e. a poison gas thrower), "Electro-Beam", a trio of lock-on Homing Missiles, and even a Boomerang that can hit on both throw & return, and is the only one that does NOT have limited ammo, which is nice. Meanwhile, rear weapons include a stationary Mine, a roaming "Mech Mine", & finally a one-shot "Smart Bomb" that kills everything on screen; admittedly, you won't be using rear weapons anywhere near as often as front. While you carry over whatever weapons you have on you when you finish a stage & start the next, you lose everything upon death & restart with just the Slash; should you be fully decked out, though, the spider has an awesome metallic sheen to it. This is patently absurd & ridiculous in every way possible, but it's also utterly awesome & amazing, instantly giving Spider a ton of cheesy charm to it; Boss Game Studios absolutely went B-movie with this concept, and I love it. Your foes aren't too much different, as while you primarily fight various insects & small animals (spiders, grasshoppers, scorpions, slugs, mice, etc.), some of them have their own forms of weaponry, like wasps shooting blue energy shots at you, horseflies kamikaze bombing you, metallic mice that spit at you... or a literal T-1000 praying mantis that forms from a liquid & throws boomerangs at you!!!!! This is legitimately one the greatest games ever from that fact alone, and I'm annoyed that I've never really played it until this point; all these animal & insect enemies even blow up when defeated, with is glorious. There are also stage hazards to deal with, as well, like water pits, fire shooting out of gas vents or gasoline cans (...okay), spinning fans, & the like.

Scorpions are seriously one of
the most annoying enemies to fight.

In terms of overall progress, Spider is made up of 22 main stages split across 6 "levels" (Laboratory, Factory, City, Museum, Sewer, & Evil Labs), split roughly 3-4 stages each, alongside three bosses at the end of every second level, which was done on purpose so that the development team could put more focus on each one in terms of animations & behaviors. However, while these stages happen one after another in a linear path, there's also a little bit of a Super Mario World influence seen here, as some stages feature multiple exits. Namely, you finish each stage by locating a microchip held within a green orb, and while many stages only feature one, some do feature between two & four, and each level has a microchip quota to fulfill before you can advance to the next level; for example, you can't get past the Factory without revisiting a stage in the Laboratory, which has three exits. Also housed within most stages is a CD shard, and by finding three in an overall level you unlock up to seven bonus stages, which are good for arming yourself with weaponry, gathering DNA strands (as getting 100 gives you an extra life), finding blue spider icons that act as 1-Ups, & just adding to your microchip count. While the idea of revisiting stages multiple times might sound annoying, most stages go by pretty fast once you know what to do, taking no longer than a minute or two; levels that don't have bosses do feature a final stage that is decently longer than most, though. Also, stages in general tend to have alternate paths to them, even if there's only one exit, which helps encourage replaying them, especially if you're looking to get all of the CD shards. That being said, some of the microchip exits can be tricky to find, with at least one even requiring a literal leap of faith.

So, taking all of that into consideration, how does Spider: The Video Game actually feel when playing? In all honesty, it feels pretty good and the decision to go with 2.5D really was for the better. Controlling the spider is easy & responsive, with the ability to switch directions on a dime, and jumps are both very easy to control & give you a decent amount of height, and there's no worry about fall damage. Crawling from a flat surface to a wall or ceiling does take a second to get used to, as your d-pad press has to match the direction the spider is switching to, and the only real restriction when jumping to another surface is that you can't cling to a ceiling directly above you via a jump. Movement is also rather brisk, so while the camera is generally far enough away to allow you to see oncoming enemies & obstacles, there is the occasional moment where a first time through a stage will cost you a life if you try blazing through instantly. Had this been a 3D platformer, I feel that it would have changed to something a bit slower & more needlessly complex, so Boss Game Studios really did choose well by sticking to what was tried & true. However, this is still a 90s era platformer, so don't go thinking that this is a cakewalk, as while the first two full levels aren't too bad, the stages slowly ramp up in complexity & difficulty over time, with the final stage before the last boss being an especially notable trial, as you have to do most of it upside down on the ceiling over an endless pit of instant death, and getting hit while upside-down makes you fall. Luckily, getting a Game Over isn't much different than losing a life, other than allowing you to save progress to a memory card or jot down a password, and there are some stages where you can just absolutely farm 1-Ups. As for the three bosses, they're neat in their own ways, with their own patterns to learn, & go from reasonable (a robotic claw arm) to bizarre (a mummified, fire-breathing... thing) to the downright B-movie goofy (a literal bare brain, complete with isolated eyes that shoot laser beams at you!). My only nitpicks would be that Bosses 1 & 3 rely a bit too much on random chance, as in hoping that the right attack is done for you to counter against (only to then get the "wrong" attack 3 or 4 times in a row...), while Boss 2 is ridiculously easy to beat once you figure out its extremely simple pattern.

Tell me that this isn't utterly amazing...
Yeah, you can't.

Visually, Spider honestly looks good for the console, and actually holds up rather well to this day. "Character" models are simple but straightforward & easy to recognize as to what creature they all are, while the environments that make up the stages have enough detail to give them some character, as simple as some of them are conceptually; I mean, some stages are literally just called "Boxes", "Conveyors, "Hard Drives" or "Lab Top". At the very least, Boss Game Studios managed to mitigate the PS1's "iconic" aphine texture warping to a minimum, likely by going 2.5D (i.e. a 100% game-controlled camera), so things like textures showing visible warping isn't quite as notable as it generally is with 3D games on the console, which is nice to see. As for performance, I'm pretty sure this game maxes out at 30 FPS, and while there are some dips they are rather rare in the grand scheme of things, resulting is a generally solid & consistent game to play, performance-wise. Sure, this game won't go giving any of the PS1's visual showcases a run for their money, but overall it still looks good due to keeping things modest & controlled; even the CG cutscenes are honestly more than decent for their time (which should be a given, considering the parent studio). As for audio, our main focus is on the musical score by Barry Leitch, who by this point had been making game music for close a decade & is still in the business today with games like Horizon Chase Turbo. When it comes to Spider, Leitch decided to go with a mix of rock, industrial, some synth (which seriously sounds like something you'd hear from an 80s action movie), & even surf-style music for one stage (amusingly the last Sewer stage). The end result is definitely a direction that you likely wouldn't have expected considering the subject matter, and it really feels like a case of Boss just giving Leitch a little bit of free reign to interpret things how he wanted, but it honestly is a great little soundtrack that's worth listening to on its own. Meanwhile, sound effects & the like are nothing more than decent, but they get the job done; at least things like explosions & the like are effective.

Take 2 Interactive did do its own re-release of Spider,
but it looks to be very uncommon & is considered more valuable today.

Overall, Spider: The Video Game has such an unassuming & generic name, yet hidden within is honestly a rather fun & later challenging little 2.5D platformer that utterly embraces the ridiculous B-movie concept it had. Again, this is a game where you play as a scientist who get his mind trapped in the body of a cybernetic spider capable of wielding micro weaponry as he chases after what must be the slowest kidnappers in the history of ever (seriously, this spider cannot move at supersonic speeds, so what gives?) in order to retrieve his body from the blatantly evil corporation that paid him to do the work that even got him into this situation in the first place. You battle various animals & insects who seem to also have been cybernetically upgraded (& explode upon defeat), and the final boss is literally a giant brain that shoots lasers from its eyes. If that doesn't sound like a fun time to you, then OK, but this is absolutely the kind of madness that I am always up for, and I'm really glad this game exists; Boss should have seriously teamed up with Roger Corman to make "Spider: The Motion Picture". Spider: The Video Game may not be one of the PS1's finest platformers, it's certainly no Klonoa, but it is absolutely a fun time to be had in its own right with a respectable difficulty curve, and well worth playing for anyone who still plays PS1 games today. Luckily, it still looks to be decently priced to get a hold of today, if you want to experience it legally (at least, the original BMG release is easy to get), so if you've got some arachnophobia I say challenge your fear head on & become the spider for yourself.

Happy Halloween!

Game © 1996 Boss Game Studios