Spider-Man 2 demo web of confusion
Doesn't quite do whatever a spider can.
Last Friday, a demo purporting to be Spider-Man 2 for the PC was uncovered and mirrored all over the Internet. We reported on it and even uploaded it to Eurofiles. Since then however it's become clear that the demo was not officially released by Activision and is not representative of the Spider-Man 2 title in development at Treyarch - i.e. the one that we're actually interested in playing.
Although the impostor demo is an official piece of code and not some sort of early pirated version as a few people feared, it's actually a separate PC title aimed at younger gamers and developed by The Fizz Factor - the independent dev firm behind Vivendi's recent Tolkien tie-in The Hobbit.
As anybody who downloaded it knows by now, the controls are very simple - the player just clicks roughly in the direction of pre-ordained web-swinging points to hurtle through the air and weave a way through a web of skyscrapers, using the WSAD keys to move around in third-person and crawl over the outsides of buildings.
As for how it made it onto the net: apparently the demo was originally made available to fans of Kellogg's "Cheez-It" snacks, who had to send in a couple of cut-out coupons to receive a CD of the demo. Some bright spark presumably grabbed the disc, uploaded a zip of the demo and then emailed a few websites.
Anyway, if you're not too put off by the idea of a slightly more garish cartoony Spider-Man, the demo is still available on our files page. Just so long as you're aware that it won't give you much idea of what to expect from the real Spider-Man 2, which is due out on all known genetically engineered super-consoles from July 9th or thereabouts.
