The Amazing Spider-Man is an action / puzzle platform video game developed by Oxford Digital Enterprises Ltd and published by Paragon Software Corporation in 1990 for the Amiga and later for the MS DOS, Commodore 64 and Atari ST.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Mary Jane, Spider-Man's love interest is kidnapped by a guy called Mysterio. Your mission is to rescue her by navigating through hostile environments and solve puzzles divided into separate acts. The game takes place inside the Rockwell Film Studios consisted of walls, platforms, traps, switches and adversaries. Significant progress can be made only if you can locate those switches that are necessary to proceed and you also have to avoid traps. Your goal is to reach Mysterio's lair at the executives' offices. To get there you will walk your way through many rooms, most of which are part of film studio sets specially laid out by Mysterio to make your task of locating Mary Jane even harder. At the beginning, the puzzles involve flipping switches and levers to free more switches and levers which will ultimately reveal a final exit, letting you into another themed section. Note that there are plenty of bad guys and mounted weapons (like complex laser matrix etc) too. Spider-Man can jump on platforms, swing, leap and stick to all the walls with the help of the strands of web that are released from his gloves. Having the ability to walk on walls and ceilings gives to this game a pleasant change compared to typical / traditional action puzzle games. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The game's graphics aren't exactly the best thing you've ever seen, but they do the job well. The details look cool (either in VGA, EGA or in CGA) but the colors are limited to 16! (Note: VGA & EGA modes are identical). Below you can see VGA, EGA and CGA screens. The backgrounds are nicely detailed and the sprites, although very small, are well animated but they move quite slow, making gameplay a bit boring at times, especially when you try several times to solve a puzzle (i.e. activate / re-activate certain buttons in order to proceed to the next screen). The sound is good, with some nice in-game tunes along with a bunch of sound effects.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
PC (ms-dos based)
CPU: Various processors from Intel,AMD, Cyrix, varying from 4.77Mhz (Intel 8088) to 200Mhz (Pentium MMX) and up to 1995 (available on this site) MEMORY: 640Kb to 32MB RAM (typical up to 1996) GRAPHICS: VGA standard palette has 256 colors and supports: 640x480 (16 colors or monochrome), 640x350 in 16 colors (EGA compatability mode), 320x200 (16 or 256 colors). Later models (SVGA) featured 18bit color palette (262,144-color) or 24bit (16Milion colors), various graphics chips supporting hardware acceleration mainly for 3D-based graphics routines. SOUND: 8 to 16 bit sound cards: Ad-Lib featuring Yamaha YMF262 supporting FM synthesis and (OPL3) and 12-bit digital PCM stereo, Sound Blaster and compatibles supporting Dynamic Wavetable Synthesis, 16-bit CD-quality digital audio sampling, internal memory up to 4MB audio channels varying from 8 to 64! etc. Other notable sound hardware is the release of Gravis Ultrasound with outstanding features!