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Reviews
By DAVE GUSSOW and WES PLATT Spider-Man
Spider-Man is as much fun on a computer screen as it is on the silver screen. In the PC game, your first mission is to find Uncle Ben's killer. You swing Spider-Man around New York City, crawling up and down buildings and following a compass for directions. You put the Spider-Man moves on gangster-type bad guys. Other villains include Shocker, Vulture and the Green Goblin. It has lots of kicking, punching and tying up with strands of spider web. The violence isn't graphic, there's isn't much blood and bodies just disappear once they're knocked out of the game. My teenage son thinks it's suitable for kids as young as elementary school, though using a keyboard to play the game can be challenging. Spider-Man is also available for GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. -- DAVE GUSSOW Warlords Battlecry II
The game pitches itself as a hybrid of role playing and strategy, but don't look too hard for character development in Warlords Battlecry II. Beyond the basic choice of a leader who will serve as hero of the campaigns, this is still very much a resource-gathering, beat-the-enemy-at-his-own-game exercise. Don't get me wrong. For what it is, Battlecry is a lot of fun. With its nonlinear story line and random generation of maps, the game promises to be one you won't tire of quickly and can play more than once. You can also match wits with players over the Internet in a dozen multiplayer scenarios. The single-player campaign starts you off with the usual tutorial activity, getting you used to the interface without offering too much of a challenge. It increases with difficulty as you become more comfortable with the controls. So what's new since Warlords Battlecry? The campaign itself is new. Battlecry II also features two new terrains: arctic and desert. It has some new races and hero types. The spell effects have been updated and improved since the 2000 release of Warlords Battlecry. And Battlecry II introduces two new units that didn't exist in the first game: celestial and dragon temples. The game comes to Ubisoft through Strategic Studies Group, an Australian company that has been developing popular strategy games since 1983's Reach for the Stars. -- WES PLATT, Times Staff Writer
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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