The third universe for Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions is... Spiderman 2099? Fan-freaking-tastic. About 16 years ago Marvel ran a line of comic books called the 2099 universe and featured futuristic versions of Spiderman, the Punisher, Doom and the X-men to name a few. Some of these books kinda sucked, such as the Punisher having a prison he puts all his criminals in due to some fallacious logic on the part of the writers that in the future prison would be considered cruel.

But Spiderman 2099 was the bomb.

Due to some industrial sabotage genius geneticist Miguel O'Hara has his DNA fused with a spider's while trying to purge his body of a drug addiction that was deliberately administered to him by his boss, Tyler Stone, who wanted him to keep working for the ruthless organisation Alchemax. See, isn't this sounding better than, 'nerd gets bitten by radioactive spider' all ready? The great things about Miguel's character are first, he was a complete asshole, but still managed to be likeable and sympathetic and second, he really hated being Spiderman and spent much of the first few story arcs just trying to undo the damage so he could go back to his corporate golden boy life. Mainly due to the tight writing of Peter David I was a huge fan of Spiderman 2099, as where many other 90's comic fans, but I never in a million years thought I'd see the character brought to life in game form.

Just trust me, Spiderman 2099 is cool

Spiderman Shattered Dimensions covers four alternative world versions of the Spiderman character. The first is the original Spiderman you're familiar with (what us Marvel comic geeks might call universe 616 Spiderman), the second is Spiderman from the Noir universe set in the 1930's during the great depression. The other interesting twist for Noir Spiderman is that none of the Noir universe characters have super powers and use gadgets to compensate and acrobatics to compensate, for instance, Spiderman's rogues gallery, made up of familiar staples like the Goblin and the Vulture, in Noir universe are all circus performers.

The non-movie Spiderman games have always been a bit above average but Shattered Dimensions looks like the first game to follow Batman: Arkham Asylum's formula of looking at the comic books, researching what bits work the best and producing a game that's going to pull in the fans by the droves. Hopefully we'll see a lot more comic book games following this format in the coming years.

Not that the original Spiderman isn't cool too, here he is finishing of the guys Wolverine missed in his game

Giant web hammer = Epic Awesomeness

Spiderman getting is prohibition era on

Drop that Hip Flask rummy, and lead me to your evil speak easy lair