Dear Friend. I am an AVID gamer and achievement hunter when it comes to play games. I’ve 100% the last two entries by Sony with combined 100 hours. Regardless, I’m a nerd.

Today I want to talk about three song features in the opening two hours of the game and why I think they are good… atmosphere and tone settings. HA. I linked it back around to atmospheres. But really the tone of nostalgia is what is trying to be set here in these scenes and I want to highlight their importance.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SPIDER-MAN 2 (THE GAME)

Let’s start with Harry grabbing Peter and going biking. We get an instrumental version of Cigarette Daydreams. I consider myself a lucky person and things generally just seem to work out. This being one of those instances. This is my favorite Cage The Elephant song and its used so perfectly. Not distracting us with lyrics just straight ooos and woos.

Next not even ten minutes later we get New Slang by The Shins. This is also my favorite The Shins song. This time we get lyrics and its a hit after hit of nostalgia and feels for me and the whole purpose of playing these songs and getting them involved in the beginning was to promote a tone of nostalgia. It works.

Then shortly after we get hit with Never Gonna Give You Up by Mr. The Astley. This is just used as a ten second joke, it’s sung by one of the characters. But it still invokes nostalgia. it gets the player in the characters headspace

This game so far, three hours in, is so so fucking good. Please play these games, they’re available on PC now, so they’re even more accessible now (trusting you have the hardware.) Thank you for joining me today Dear Friend. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some goons to punch.

I hope you are alright.