If you don’t play video games or read comic books, you should probably stop reading now. If you do play video games and read comic books, or at least one of the two, then you’ve probably at least heard of, if not played, Batman: Arkham City and/or read a Batman comic book or two. I’m solidly in the “both” category. I play me some damn video games and I’ve read me some damn Batman comic books. I’m currently in the midst of my second play-through of Arkham City (partly because the game is, legitimately awesome and partly because I’m broke at the moment and can’t afford to by new games right now if I want to eat and have a place to live and stuff and things) and I’m noticing a couple things on this second time through the story that I really didn’t notice the first time around because I’m taking more time with it.First off, Batman is kind of a dick in this game. This, I don’t think, is really a detractor from the whole thing, I like my Batman to kind of be a cold, calculating man who doesn’t let anything or anyone get in his way, but he’s kind of really a gigantic dick in this game. While it doesn’t bother me, (I mean, I like Frank Miller Batman comics. All of them, not just the ones that are popular, and most comic book fans don’t really share that opinion) it has been known to bother some people. I think this, among other things, is born out of a simple desire to have as much fan service in this game as possible.

Let me explain, in DC Comics, the Batman is kind of this preternatural badass. I realize that can be said of a lot of superheroes, but Batman is different. Marvel Comics, DC Comics’ main competitor in the superhero comic space, has made it’s name on all of its characters being distinctly human. Peter Parker is a regular ass dude with regular ass dude problems like barely making rent, having an awful boss, and problems with girls. The only difference between him and anyone else is the fact that he happens to be a superhero. Marvel found success by having characters feel like real people, whereas DC Comics characters are much more mythic. DC Comics characters are, more or less, each gods in their own right and within that pantheon of costumed do-gooders you have someone like Batman who doesn’t have any superpowers, except for the fact that he’s insanely rich, and he sits among men that can run at the speed of light, conjure anything they need with a thought, or split mountains in two with a fist. He’s a man among gods and he holds his own while around them. This has had the result of making him out of be this man who has a plan and a strategy for anything and everything you could ever think of and a couple of things you probably can’t. He always has the answer and he always wins; he’s the ultimate badass in most modern comics.

Given that the crowd Rocksteady is catering to with Arkham City, namely the comic book reading crowd, it makes sense that they’d want their Batman to be just as much of a badass in their game as he is in the comics. The problem with this take on Batman is that is makes it very very hard to him to have a character arc. The Batman they have presented never makes mistakes and never thinks he will makes mistakes. You would define him as overconfident, except that he never is, he always wins. Because he’s the Batman. This might seem like kind of a dumb thing to complain about given that, of course he’s going to win. You’re playing him as the main character and he has to win. While this is true, you spend a large majority of the game looking for a cure for something that the Joker infects you with fairly early on in the game, and the suspense they try to build throughout the game as Batman gets more and more sick fall mostly flat.

The other problems come from making references to comic book continuity. The fan servicey things in Arkham Asylum were great because you mostly just got references to things that exist in the world of Batman without having to set anything in a timeline. You got an Iceberg Lounge grand opening poster in an office, you got to look into Harvey Dent’s cell, and you got a glimpse of Thomas Eliot’s name on a white board in the medical building, all references that comic book fans will get an think are cool without it treading on the comic book continuity that many fans obsess over (I tend not to as much, just going story by story, but many other fans are very invested in the characters and how all of the stories fit together). In Arkham City, however, they tried to bring some of the comic book continuity into the game while at the same time diverging from it pretty hard. They reference Bane breaking Batman’s back in Knightfall, but when Azreal and the Order of Dumas show up in a side mission (the random guy standing on rooftops from time to time) Batman has no idea who they are in spite of the fact that they were a huge deal in the Knightfall story. Batman knows that Ra’s Al Ghul is centuries old and has come back from the dead, but know’s nothing about the Lazarus Pits. Stuff like that breaks the game for many people, or at the very least, distracts from the main story pretty severely.

However, this game’s attempts to remain so close to the source material and please fans make the end of the game that much more powerful. The Batman is one of my favorite characters in fiction because almost any story can be told with the character, and those other characters surrounding him. What Batman is can be interpreted a million different ways, and I’m always glad for a fresh take on Batman or a Batman story. Throughout the entirety of Arkham City, while it is a good Batman story and experience, feels a little safe so as not to piss off the fanboys. The very end of the game though, when Batman faces off against Strange and the Joker, they go completely off the rails and do somethings with the characters, the Joker specifically, that you didn’t see coming from a million miles away, and I thought it was great.

So, while the fan service is neat, and certainly lulls the player into an almost, but not quite false sense of security an familiarity with the story that gives the end game stuff such gravitas, I think it ultimately is less interesting and hurts the game’s story. The premise of the game is pretty far removed from anything we’ve seen in a Batman story, (putting Arkham in the middle of Gotham is nuts) but it still feels like, for the most part, a Batman story I’ve read before. Here’s to hoping that, if and when Rocksteady makes another Batman game, they take the bold moves they made at the end of Arkham City and take Batman to a place they can call their own. They’ve certainly earned my faith at this point.

-WC

New blog post about the Xperia Play up at walkingcarpet.wordpress.com 
 
It's probably already been discussed to death on the forums here, but I was just thinking about it so I wrote this post. 

I would really like some bigger screens, both of which should be touch sensitive.

There was also a rumor going around that there will be removable storage on the thing, which would be pretty awesome. I think the idea of transferring VC games to the DS via this memory is a really cool idea, and it would be great to see Nintendo implement it.

The camera and mp3 support doesn't matter to me so much. I have a iPod and phone for that.

Okay, so I'm in serious need of some new DS games. Like badly. I know I'm getting Final Fantasy IV and probably Chrono Trigger when it comes out. I need some other suggestions. Badly. I'm bored with the games that I have and I need new ones. So, if you guys have any suggestions, really, send them my way. Please.