If there was one kind of game that SegaCD owners hated, it was the quick and lazy Genesis port.  Far too often, companies would take an existing Sega Genesis game and port it to the SegaCD with little to no enhancement, beyond maybe some extra obligatory FMV and a CD audio soundtrack.  After that, just add in some minor hardware scaling and rotation effects, and all of a sudden it's a new game, ready to ship to stores!
 

Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin for the SegaCD is almost one of these games, but it's just barely not half-assed enough to qualify as a rushed port.  Though it shared many elements and ideas with its Genesis cousin, the fact that it didn't play like shit and was actually kind of fun was mainly what helped differentiate the two versions.  Despite the game's drastically altered gameplay, though, Sega still felt the need to add in some awful FMV and CD audio anyway.

And oh, it was good.  You'll know you're in for something special even before the first animation is finished.
 

But we're not here to talk about the laughably amateurish, "holy crap, didn't they even realize how terrible this was?" animation.  We're here to make your ears cry.  So let's get to the aural pain already.

"Swingtime," the theme song for the SegaCD version of Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin, is a collaboration between Sega's resident DJ, Mixmaster Spencer "whut up, G" Nilsen, and - I'm totally not fucking with you here - Eric Martin, the lead singer from reportedly-popular cockrock band Mr. Big.  Yes, THAT guy.

Nilsen is most commonly known as "that dickhead who made a new soundtrack for the US release of Sonic CD, for no good reason."  I'll cover this more in depth later on, but rest assured, he's on my list.  Now let's talk about Eric Martin.
 

Martin may be better known among SegaCD collectors from his appearance in the game "The Colors of Modern Rock," a mail-in promotional demo disc for Digital Pictures' immediately abandoned and monumentally stupid "Virtual VCR" technology.  Virtual VCR was to be the worst use of FMV yet - $30 "games" that contained nothing more than a bunch of grainy, 64-color music videos with noticeably bad sound quality.

Where does the "game" part come in?  Well, you can capture blurry screenshots of the videos and store up to nine of them in the SegaCD's internal memory!  What a great idea!
 

Aaaaaaanyway, "Swingtime" is really, really lame.  It seems to go on for fucking ever, for one thing, even though it's only about four minutes in length.  That's just enough time for you to start thinking about better things you could be wasting your time on than making snippy comments about shitty SegaCD music.  Or, you know, whatever.  But the music itself is pretty good, I guess, and there's some competent guitar work going on at parts.

The lyrics, however, are no less than inspired.  Take the oft-repeated chorus for example.  "Bring home the bacon" is perhaps the worst phrase that could be put into a song about Spider-Man, if not for its massive inappropriateness, then for the fact that it's an expression that hasn't been in common use for a good fifty years or so.  It's a shame that the rest of the song isn't filled with similar catchphrases from 19th-century gold prospectors.
 

You really have to wonder about that line.  Maybe the chorus is Spider-Man's mental list of things to do for the day, and after he flies for justice and takes no prisoners, Mary Jane wants him to go to the store to get some bacon.  That's why the line sounds totally random and doesn't rhyme with anything - it's meant to be modified depending on his errands for the day.  Note how easily it can be changed to "Pick up some tacos!" or "Gotta do laundry!"

You have to dig the special fruity emphasis Martin puts on that line in the last repeat of the chorus, too.  "Briiiing hometheba-con!"  Swing it, man.  Swing it.

Anyway, baconey goodness aside, Spider-Man's theme is just another typically bad, half-assed track in a sea of crappy SegaCD vocal songs.  Let's move on to something a little more intolerable.
 

(Update: Since posting this article, I've been informed that the line "bring home the bacon" may actually be "bring on the big guns", which is only slightly less ridiculous, and not nearly as funny. In my heart, though, Spider-Man will always be a bacon-bringer, and nothing anyone says can ever change that.)

-> Next - Get yourself some justice!