Chrissy Snow I started playing video games, and now I play them for YOU!! Tell us what games we need guides for!! Contact author

With no Spider-Man movie on the 2007 calendar, but a highly recognizable and lucrative icon character available under its licensing deal with Marvel for game duty, Activision surely saw the opportunity to bring a Spidey game out "in an off year." The result is Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, a game that has an interesting plot twist, but little in the way of gameplay features to indicate the publisher and developer Next Level Games were looking to create a fresh, highly challenging contest.

The game's story revolves around a series of meteor strikes around the world, and a subsequent rise in criminal activity. This increase in nefarious pursuits comes not only from Spider-Man's normal cast of adversaries—such as Dr. Octopus and Green Goblin—but also from "phantoms" that are made from the same symbiote material that formed Venom. And with Spidey's foes using the meteor remnants to increase their evil powers, there's only one person that can stop them and save the world.

Okay, maybe two people.

In the single-player component, before you enter the fray, you start by choosing a sidekick. After you first start the game, that's limited to a couple of selections, but in the course of completing the levels in each city, you gradually add to your roster of potential helpers by finding other superheroes. However, the twist is that, once you defeat one, you can also recruit that bad guys to help the cause—after all, Green Goblin and his ilk won't have any place to play if Earth is taken over by phantoms.