Welcome, web-slinging console warriors and handheld hop-scotchers! Prepare your cartridges and grab your controllers, because this week on Play Comics we’re diving into the gloriously chaotic streets of New York with Spider-Man: Battle for New York, the 2005/2006 portable powerhouse that took Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man universe and somehow crammed all of Manhattan’s mayhem into a GBA and DS-sized punch-up bonanza. Because apparently, someone looked at one of the most beloved comic runs of the 2000s and thought, “You know what this needs? A brawler where Spidey spends most of his time frantically hammering the same three buttons while dodging increasingly ridiculous villain attacks.”
Released across Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, this wasn’t your typical web-slinging adventure—it was more like someone distilled all of Ultimate Spider-Man’s most explosive moments into a side-scrolling arcade experience where the city itself becomes just as much of an enemy as Green Goblin ever was. With a roster of villains pulled straight from the comics and more “beat stuff up” objectives than you can shake a web at, this game proved that sometimes the best way to honor a beloved comic series is to completely reinvent what it means to be Spider-Man.
This week, we’re absolutely thrilled to welcome the phenomenally knowledgeable Jarrett Tyree from Has To Do With Spider-Man I Think, who brings an encyclopedic understanding of all things Arachnid and animated to help us untangle whether this game managed to capture the kinetic energy of Bendis’s run or if it just left our webbing all tangled in the wrong places. Jarrett’s the kind of Spider-expert who can probably explain exactly why this game makes the choices it does, while also gently reminding us that sometimes video game adaptations are more “inspired by” than “faithful to” the source material.
So strap in your web-shooters, prepare for some serious button-mashing mayhem, and get ready for an episode that explores whether this dual-platform adaptation is a hidden gem of portable gaming or just another case of “well, we had to do SOMETHING with this license.” Let’s see if Battle for New York is worth defending!
Learn such things as:
- How connected to the actual comic storylines is this game, or does it just borrow character names and call it a day?
- Does an action-packed comic run actually translate better into a side-scrolling brawler than into an open-world adventure?
- Why do handheld games keep trying to squeeze console-sized epicness into screen sizes that make text completely illegible?
- And so much more!
You can find Jarett as part of Has to do With Spider-Man, I think on BlueSky @smitpod and of course the Has to do With Spider-Man, I Think website.
If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.
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You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky or hear Chris on his other podcast Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine.
A big thanks Talkin’ Comix and Orphaned Entertainment for the promos today.
Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who would never let us even be at the top of that bridge in the first place.
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