Attention, galaxy defenders and neuralyzer-dodging citizens! This week on Play Comics, we’re suiting up to tackle Men in Black II: Alien Escape, a title that hit the PS2 and GameCube with all the grace of a cockroach climbing out of a dumpster. We are looking at a game that saw the plot of the second movie, shrugged, and decided that what the franchise really needed was a run-and-gun shooter where Agent K looks less like a grizzled veteran and more like an Elvis impersonator midway through a bad Vegas residency.

Joining us to figure out why the Class 7 Ozone Demogrifier sounds like a vacuum cleaner you’d buy from a 3 AM infomercial is the omnipresent Doug Fink. You know him, you love him, and you can hear him on Walloping Websnappers, Novel Gaming, Falling with Style, and Skreeonk, all of which are on the Glitterjaw Podcast Collective. Together, we’re diving deep into a game that proves you don’t actually need the likeness rights to your main characters to ship a product, provided you have enough aliens to splatter across a corridor that looks exactly like the last five corridors you just ran through.

So put on your Ray-Bans, check your memories at the door, and prepare for an episode that makes about as much sense as putting a Ballchinian in a post office.Continue Reading

Welcome web-slinging warriors and joystick jockeys to another thrilling episode of Play Comics where we untangle the sticky situation of comic-to-game adaptations with the precision of Peter Parker trying to explain away his sudden photography skills! This week we’re diving headfirst into the cel-shaded spectacular that is Ultimate Spider-Man, the 2005 game that took Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s comic masterpiece and somehow convinced every gaming platform from here to the Daily Bugle that they needed a piece of this web-slinging action.

Released across more systems than Spider-Man has quips in his arsenal—PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS—this Treyarch-developed adventure let players experience both sides of the symbiote coin. Whether you were swinging through Manhattan as everyone’s favorite wise-cracking wall-crawler or stomping around as the terrifyingly toothy Venom, this game promised to deliver more comic book authenticity than J. Jonah Jameson has anti-Spider-Man editorials.

Joining us for this ultimate discussion are two absolute legends from the podcasting multiverse: Derek B Gayle and Doug Fink, the dynamic duo behind Walloping Websnappers and a whole constellation of other fantastic shows on the Glitterjaw Queer Podcast Collective that may not be directly relevant to our web-slinging shenanigans today, but are undeniably brilliant nonetheless. When they’re not busy dissecting every Spider-Man cartoon ever created or exploring the depths of various other pop culture phenomena, these two bring their encyclopedic knowledge of all things Spider to help us determine whether this game truly captured the essence of the Ultimate universe or if it just left us feeling like we’d been caught in one of Green Goblin’s elaborate schemes.

So dust off those early 2000s gaming controllers, practice your best Venom growl, and prepare for an episode that’s guaranteed to be more entertaining than watching Eddie Brock try to explain his sudden career change from journalism to alien symbiote hosting!Continue Reading