I will happily greet the day where the PlayStation Portable has dozens of great, original games, with plenty of high-quality choices in any genre. Until then, we're stuck with third-rate ports of second-rate games that weren't very impressive in the first place. For example, see Spider-Man 2. Of course, the title might lead you to believe it's a port of the surprisingly good (if somewhat shallow) Spider-Man 2 on the consoles. In thinking this, you would be wrong. Instead, it's a third-rate port of the original Spider-Man: the Movie.

Granted, it's based, loosely, on the second movie. Doc Octopus makes his gradual transformation from well-meaning scientist to crazed mad scientist, and Spiderman has to stop his nefarious schemes. To try and wring a few extra boss fights out of the less-than-ten hours of gameplay, Mysterio, Rhino, and (sigh) Shocker all make some somewhat tenuously-explained appearances, but the main show here is chasing down Doc Ock and putting an end to his plot.

Along the way, you'll run into three basic stages. The most common are the beat-up-some-goons-in-a-cramped-envionment-say-a-warehouse-or-something stages. Anyone who has played Neversoft's or Treyarch's PSX or PS2 Spider-Man games will be familiar with these, but Spider-Man 2 fails to reach the admittedly low standards set by these previous games. There's all the button-mashy pugilism you can stomach, yes, and some of the unlockable moves are fairly interesting the first couple of times you see them.

The poor camera conspires to ruin even these unambitious stages. The lazy camera is bad enough when there's enough room to lock onto a single enemy, but when you need to fight more than one enemy at once or fight an enemy that isn't immediately in front of you, you'll have to take your thumb off of the control stick and adjust the camera manually with the D-pad. Unless you've got two thumbs on your left hand, good luck adjusting the camera at the same time as moving.

The camera problem sours the second kind of stage, the boss fights. It's completely impossible to dodge an attack at the same time as adjusting the camera to actually try and see that attack. For example, one of the first fights is a recreation of Doctor Octopus's disasterous first experiment. (Sorry for the spoiler, but, hey, you've already watched the movie.) You'll have to rescue hapless scientists, while staying away from the pulses of electrical energy coming from the reactor. Good luck finding the scientists at the same time as dodging the pulses of energy, even in the relatively tiny laboratory.

Speaking of which, unlike its modern console counterpart, Spider-Man 2 can't help but feel small. Every area feel small, even if it isn't, through the poor use of lighting and the muddy, repetitive textures. One stage, clearly set in a multifloor warehouse, couldn't help but feel small, between the badly-cluttered open areas and the cramped, lengthy halls and air vents. It's simply a failure to have any sort of sense of scale, outside of the webswinging stages.

Vicarious Visions, the developers, did manage to give a sense of scale and action to the last kind of stage, the aerial web-swinging stages. Swinging down city streets in pursuit of a helicopter or fleeing villain is quite exciting. Too bad it isn't any fun, because of mushy, poorly-design controls, and unclear objectives. These stages ultimately boil down to fighting the controls to get close enough to attack, while dodging wildly inaccurate counter-attacks. Certainly these stages aren't enough to save the whole exercise.

The greatest offense Spider-Man 2 commits is that accomplishing this won't take you five hours. The entire game is a blur of clumsily-executed boss fights, ugly warehouses full of generic goons, bad voice acting, and cheaply-made cut-scenes. It's just another bad launch game, of little interest to anyone but completist collectors and the most devoted Spider-Man fans.