The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire

The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire from 1996 is notable above all for when and for what it was released. This was not an ordinary Sega Mega Drive game but a title for the 32X add-on — a unit that plugged into the console and was supposed to extend its life just as a new hardware generation was arriving. The 32X failed commercially and its library stayed small; Web of Fire belongs to the last wave of games made for it and is consequently a collector's rarity.

Development fell to the American studio BlueSky Software, which handled several Sega titles based on comics. The design does what a Spider-Man platformer was expected to do: moving through the city with webbing, climbing walls, swinging between buildings and fighting opponents in the streets. Movement is always the deciding factor for this licence — the game lives or dies on how naturally the web handles.

The 32X gave the Mega Drive extra processing power, so the game shows more colours and smoother display than the base console could manage. The gap is not enormous, but it is visible in background detail.

It is also worth remembering that this appeared when comic licences were being churned out in huge numbers at wildly varying quality. Web of Fire sits at the better end of average — no revelation, but not slapdash either.

On OldGame.cz you can launch it directly in your browser, which for a game with such limited original availability is probably the simplest way to reach it at all.