Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of LJN's 1992 license-based platformer for the NES, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six.

Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six is a game that was given every opportunity to be absolutely terrible. It's based on a Marvel property, it was developed by Bits, and it was published by LJN. In the NES era, that seemed like a perfect recipe for disaster, but seemingly as if to prove that miracles do exist, this action-platformer turned out to be not half-bad. (Too bad the same can't be said for the Master System port!)

For an NES game, it looks fairly good. The character sprites are all tiny, but everything is clear and has solid detail. The animations are fairly smooth, and some of the backgrounds look nice. The music isn't annoying, and though it would've been nice to have unique songs play for each stage, the ones that are here drone on pleasantly without drawing too much attention to themselves.

The controls are easily the weakest part of the game. The hit detection feels off when trying to hit an enemy, since unless you place Spidey a couple of pixels off to the side of the enemy, your attacks will generally go right through them. Climbing things, especially while jumping, is a hit-or-miss affair - sometimes you'll grab onto a ladder or a pole, but more times than not you just end up plummeting to the ground, but everything works well enough that you can get around these issues with practice.

The cinematic scenes look pretty nice, though, and I did like the overall look of the game. It also tries to change things up a bit from the standard platformer-style with occasional item-based objectives, switching between left-to-right and multi-directional scrolling stages, and by giving each boss a unique lair that's been catered to their attack style.

I do seem to recall that it was one of the nominations for Nintendo Power's Game of the Year awards back in 1992, and I remember being really surprised to see it there. Of course, thinking back on it now, NES releases were pretty slim from 1992 onward. I can't help but think it was only chosen for a lack of better options.

Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six is not a game without problems, but for the short time that it lasts, it's fun. It's not something you'll play constantly for weeks on end - if you're reasonably good at this style of game, it can be finished easily within a half-dozen plays or so - but in short bursts, it's fine.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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