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One day on vacation, I walked into a video rental place called Blockbuster, which had a Sega CD on display with games you could also rent. The game on display was Spider-Man vs The Kingpin. The Sega CD was set up to reboot itself automatically, to keep kids like myself from standing there and playing the game for hours. That did not stop me. I stood there and restarted the game every ten minutes from probably two hours.
Eventually when the Sega Genesis (aka Megadrive) became obsolete, my poor parents finally bought me a Sega CD and many of its games at deep discount. One of those games was Spider-Man VS The Kingpin, which was damn near impossible to beat, not to mention frustrating.
Spider-Man VS The Kingpin was timed, and you had to beat many villains and take their keys, which disarm a nuclear bomb. If the pressure of a timer was not enough, how about constant cops shooting at you, people swatting you as you climb past buildings, kids on skateboards attacking you, and old men trying to stab you? Yes, seriously, old men walk around and try to stab you with a knife. There are scuba divers, rats, bats…. basically everything in the whole city decides to attack you all at once.
Because Spider-man VS The Kingpin is a Sega CD game, it also has cartoon cut-scenes with sound, and of course CD music. I wish though it did not. There are only maybe 4 tracks and the repetition is extremely annoying, to the point where you just turn down the sound to keep yourself from getting pissed off constantly.
As with every Sega CD game, the loading times in Spider-man VS Kingpin are bad, but could be worse. Rather than looping music, the developers just let the next track play when the previous has finished, thus keeping the disk from jumping around and having to load again.
Of course the biggest draw to Spider-man VS Kingpin and the Sega CD is nostalgia. It is pretty easy to buy (affiliate link) because it is so cheap and easily available. The cool thing is that you do not even need an actual Sega CD to play it; a Sega emulator can boot games directly from your CD ROM drive. Pretty cool, eh?
Any cool memories to share? Leave a comment.