Batman: Arkham Asylum(PS3)
Batman: Arkham City(PS3)
2009/2011 Rocksteady/Eidos

The Short Version: I’M BATMAN

The Long Version: I’M BATMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

Okay, seriously.

I’ve played a lot of Batman games over the years, and by necessity, pretty much all of them take liberties. Nintendo Batman fought to avenge his parents’ senseless murder with a sworn oath to battle the criminal element while cloaked in blues and purples designed to strike fear into the superstitious and cowardly lot. And if purple isn’t enough to scare them into model citizens, Nintendo Batman wasn’t the least bit shy about using wrist mounted machine guns and exploding human beings with rapid fire Bat-Punches. So yes, liberties were taken, but what do you expect? He had to up the ante against famous rogue’s gallery entries like flying robots, hawks, and tornado flinging sorcerers.

So you can imagine my surprise when I finally got around to picking up the critically-acclaimed current-gen Batman games, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, together in a convenient buy one get one offer from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart! Always great value! Sometimes human rights! But for the first time ever, I was playing a Batman game, in a Batman related setting, against actual Batman villains. Congratulations, current hardware generation, you finally have the processing power to deliver COMPETENCY in a fucking Batman game.

With these games providing such an authentic Batman simulating experience, it can cause one to be convinced they are Batman, or experience harsh Batman withdrawal symptoms. For instance, my notes on voting methods and deducing margin of error from last quarter’s Math in the Modern World course consist of a drawing of Batman yelling “I’M BATMAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN” and also

Related symptoms include an urge to put coworkers in sleeper holds when they turn their back on you, delusions of x-ray vision, and attempting to MacGuyver devices out of electronics scraps.

Arkham Asylum takes place inside _______ (fill in the blank with the correct answer and you are allowed to continue reading this article.)

 

 

 

 

 

I wonder how many people that actually weeded out. Whatever. They won’t be missed. The game opens on Batman escorting the Joker into the asylum for presumably not the first time this week, only this time, he’s let himself get caught. Seems that Mr. J has a scheme that puts the patients literally running the asylum, and it’s up to Batman to thwart him before he can unleash an army of roided-up crazy people on Gotham City, turning every day into a Wal-Mart Black Friday.

Arkham Asylum is put together nice and tight, making it feel like more like an interactive version of a movie than most so-called interactive movies out there. It’s like they took the writing style (and some of the voice cast) of the old Animated Series and gave it the look of the Burton Batman movies, capped off with some touches from the Nolan Bat-movies for that ‘modern’ edge. Even if some characters feel a little “McFarlane’d-up,” they seem pretty much in-character, and not only do you have all your wonderful toys (Note to Mr. Nicholson, apparently they are airdropped), they are given pretty logical reasons to exist. They’re doled out, Metroid-style as needed to advance the plot, and most of them aren’t just one-trick devices you’ll use to get to one ledge then forget about.

The only things that especially bothered me were a lack of real boss battles, and no auto-run, because during the handful of real boss battles, I’d find myself leisurely strolling side to side while the boss was throwing unconscious mooks at me. The thing is, the lack of boss battles is because they aren’t forcing them in where they don’t belong, rather than laziness. Most of your major encounters are going to involve lots of sneaking rather than direct confrontations.  The only real letdown is that the Joker won’t face you himself at the end, even though he gains a massive physical advantage and it just doesn’t make sense that he WOULDN’T try to take Batman on mano-a-mano rather than blow kisses at the police from the sidelines while Dynasty Warriors-sized crowds of inmates bum rush you. Then you have the Scarecrow sequences which are janky, awful sidescrolling bits where you have to run from the ‘gaze’ of a giant Scarecrow hallucination and sometimes fight skeletons, because ooooh scary. Those had me about ready to twist the controller in half because I kept hitting some snag where Batman refused to let go of a ledge in time.

So, after the awesomeness of Arkham Asylum, is City as good? Well, once you swallow the premise. The warden who did a bang-up job of running the place last time is now mayor of Gotham, and has allowed Dr. Strange to wall off a chunk of the city and allowed the inmates of Arkham Asylum as well as nearby prisons and a handful of villains who weren’t even in custody before to basically run themselves. Needless to say, Batman is not pleased and has his close friend Bruce Wayne protest it, only to be arrested and thrown inside. Oh no! Play as Bruce Wayne and survive on your wits and upper-class playboy wit.

Arkham City is quite a bit like the first one, except you’re taken off the rails of the first game and allowed to take on side missions whenever you please. In other words, it’s embraced the open-world/sandbox setup, and in liking this game, I must grudgingly concede to enjoying the sidetracking, fetch-questing, and general bullshit that comes with the setup. Join me next week while I drag myself to Gamestop to buy Call of Modern Brothers: Black Warfare and become obsessed with trophies and achievements. Seriously though, it can be nice to take a break between story setpieces to hunt for Riddler trophies or stop a few muggings.

Oh, yeah, I’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the Riddler’s role in these games. Basically, he is a living trophy/achievement list, and he calls you a retard over the radio for the duration of both games. He’s basically a noisy, intrusive easter egg throughout the first game, which fits nicely with his M.O. of all but leaving his business card at a heist and waiting for the police at home with his pants down and rear pointed at the door.

“HEY BATMAN! I LEFT SOME SECRET THINGS LYING AROUND! BET YOU’RE TOO STUPID TO FIND THEM ALL!!”

In Arkham City, he returns to his schtick of planting ? shaped trophies all over town, though now he has them hooked up to elaborate switch puzzles and crap like that. He’s also gotten into the habit of tying people up in elaborate puzzle themed death traps that you have to solve, though the trap rooms aren’t even unlocked until you’ve collected so many of his stupid trinkets and challenges. Still, can’t bring myself to hate him completely, since whoever did his voice really nailed it. In City, you do finally get to confront him directly.

Overall, Arkham Asylum is a solid if somewhat rigid game, and Arkham City is a close but far more freeing successor that just about makes you feel like you’re playing your way through one of the comic’s ‘big arcs’ or one of the movies. The 2-pack out there’s an awesome deal if you missed the first since it packs in all the DLC for Asylum, along with a voucher for City to get Catwoman for free. Though that last bit kind of blows since she was a heavily promoted character, then seemingly at the last moment, they decided she would be something you have to pay for if you buy the game used. Her story intertwines with the main one, and she even has her own set of trophies and challenges. At least the other download characters are for challenge maps and such, Catwoman’s segments smack of something intended to be in there from the start that they removed just for the sake of milking the cheap and late to the party, a demographic that I often fall into! But that doesn’t make the overall package any less awesome, and Arkham City is easily one of the best things on the PS3 now. It made me embrace current gen bullshit trends that I was quite firmly ‘meh’ on up to this point. That is no small feat.

So… remember what Batman’s Uncle Ben used to say, “With great power, comes brightest day. Heroes on the half-shell, SHA-ZAM!”