>>149376971Licensing fees and rushed development cycles will do that.
I'm in the same boat. I may have adored this stuff as a kid, but I liked a lot of terrible shit as a kid.
Spider-Man 2 had the swinging and nothing else. The world was fairly dead. The swinging was genuinely amazing, but that's a tech demo stapled onto an otherwise poor title.
The Spider-Man titles on PS1 (made by Neversoft and whoever did the second) were probably the best cape titles out there relative to their generation. Functional gameplay because the edges were smoothed off aggressively (what's the difference between a punch and a kick, and the different combos? None, they all do the same damage), but bursting with character from the cutscenes and strong visual/vocal performances.