Something Like "Uhhhhhh!"

You don't really start to miss having a sound card until you've tried to read lips during a porno.

[Review] Batman: Arkham Asylum

Merriam-Webster defines headspace as the area above a liquid in a closed container. I define headspace as the area behind the lips and teeth. You would be right in thinking that this has precious little to do with Bruce Wayne, except for the fact that Batman: Arkham Asylum can blow me.

These are Batman's lips.

It’s generally accepted that B:AA is the greatest Batman game since that one where you tied a sheet around your neck and tried to beat up your friends. I feel this is indisputable. Writing that, however, does nothing to quell the burning desire within me to take something beautiful and twist and mangle it until it’s a heap of bleeding flesh and red hair. Get it? That’s what Joker did to Barbara Gordon. B:AA gets it, because you’ll spend half the game talking to the Oracle.

Batgirl after The Killing Joke.

The story picks up with Batman having just stopped Mark Hamill from doing something hilarious to the mayor. He drives recklessly down city streets and arrives at Arkham Asylum, Labyrinth for the Criminally Insane, designed by the Criminally Insane. He mentions on multiple occasions that he knows Joker is up to something and would never give himself up this easily before turning to the camera and comically shrugging his shoulders while saying, “WHAT ARE YA’ GONNA’ DO?” in a cartoon voice. Joker uses brute force to realistically overpower half the guards in Arkham while his goons cleverly take care of the rest. It’s up to Batman and Commissioner Buff Bagwell to stop him. OH. SHIT.

Gordon looks bigger when not standing beside a brick wall.

The game progresses and you beat up some punks and the Riddler effs with you through the whole game and you never once get to see him or find out how he managed to hide trophies on ledges hundreds of feet over solid ground without access to so much as a step ladder. I’m not even going to call into question how he managed to drum up the raw materials to make the trophies. Or how he got the time to hide them in the hundreds of secret passageways no one else seemed to know about. I guess these circumstances would be harder to accept if the standard Arkham guard’s uniform wasn’t a bright green suit with black question marks all over it.

One of the things I hate most about this game is the lack of a mini-map. I wouldn’t be bothered by it if Arkham didn’t consist entirely of M.C. Escher paintings filled with raving lunatics who are inexplicably well-trained marksmen. Rocksteady Studios, the developer, expanded on this concept by including a fun mini-game. Here’s how to play:

1. Enter any part of the game world.

2. Pause the game to bring up the map and orient yourself. Exit the pause menu.

3. Turn in any direction--north, south, east, or west.

4. Pause the game again.

5. Turn around, you idiot.

The art style for B:AA is best described as a mix between Hot Topic and something else that is shitty. In fairness, it works for me. I like the horror elements the setting incorporates, and considering the textures in the game all fall between rust and dirt, they play that hand extensively. When I played Resident Evil 2 as a kid, I remember being terrified. I was young and it was a game that, if you lost, you were treated to not only a game over screen, but also your character being eaten to death. To fight back the trauma, I imagined what it would be like to play through the game as Superman. He’d be punching the shit out of every zombie he laid eyes on—assuming he didn’t just use those eyes to melt their faces the second he saw them.

Anyway, playing B:AA is kind of like that. It’s a little haunting, but you don’t get scared, because you’re fucking Batman. It also helps that you’ll spend the whole game fighting glowing blue skeletons. You fight so many fucking skeletons in this game they should have called it Sinbad: Arkham Asylum.

See, Rocksteady decided to handle Batman being the World’s Greatest Detective by implementing a system called detective mode. That’s probably the most sensible thing you’ll have read in this whole review. At various points in the game, Batman is meant to backtrack to areas he’s already visited to flip on his Blue Vision and scan the area for traces of bourbon vapor and, more believably, fingerprints. It works. It’s fun. Until it isn’t.

Arkham Asylum, the hellish labyrinth that it is, features no less than nine hundred vents for Batman to crawl into, four hundred weak walls for Batman to destroy, and eight thousand enemies modeled to wear the exact same colors as the floors and walls they patrol along. The trouble is that playing the game without the aid of detective mode will force you to miss three quarters of all of those ridiculously inflated figures.

Detective mode is such an intense feature, it turns structural abnormalities into highly noticeable shimmering ice, renders Looney Tunes characters holding wooden signs shaped like arrows pointing toward all the hidden vents, and lets Batman see through walls. Only one of those things is a lie. Oh, and it also turns everything blue.

Actual gameplay footage.

That’s the inherent problem with the feature. No longer can you simply play to enjoy the combat and the setting. Every new area you enter begs you to put on detective mode and never, ever take it off lest you risk missing some crucial piece of the game. And you will put it on. It takes all the hard work the artists and level designers put into the game inside a paper bag and writes FUCK OFF on it with a Sharpie. I wasn’t kidding about those skeletons, either.

Condition: Trick or Treat!!

When you enter a room full of enemies with guns (the red skeletons) try to pick them off without using detective mode. You can’t do it. You’ll take out one guy just as another guy rounds the corner and blows your cocky ass to pieces. The game is nearly unplayable without the ability to see through walls. Just like real life.

Also like real life, when you get about three quarters of the way through and decide you can’t take it any longer, you can simply put the controller down and walk away. That’s what I did. The choice is in your hands. You can be a quitter and keep playing B:AA or finish the game by not playing it ever again.

I give Batman: Arkham Asylum, 3 out of 4 stars.

On Templates

I discovered today that the majority of Blogger templates are made by the same sort of people that create garish neon signs for storefronts. The rest are made by murderers.

Instead of battling with glossy web 2.0 code and images for the next three weeks, I've decided to go with Minima Black. You'll recognize it as the very same template in use on popular industry blog Everyone Else Uses This. Dot com.

But at least there's an image in the header. It's the small things.

Stange and Wonderful Things

There is every chance in the world this blog could be undergoing some changes in the near future, not unlike the time you first noticed hair where there should be no hair, or at the very least, hair where there was no hair before. Hair.

Equally likely are the odds I'll neglect to write anything remotely insightful for publication here for a period of several more months.

You just never know with this guy.

Singularititties

Sure, I might not update this site, but I just wrote a pretty rocking theory on multiverses.

So you can go ahead and put that in your pipe. Smoke it. You know, whatever.

Ass.

Edit: You can not name your sci-fi skin flick Singularititties, it is mine.

Right.

in b4 'shit i havent posted in a month'

Yeah, it's like that.

Election Day

Which is something this post isn't about.

This thread over at Digital Webbing is a perfect example of how to be a subpar creator and then right out of the gate refuse to even consider getting better. You know, if that's the kind of thing you'd be interested in learning.

The thread gets out of control, of course, which is awesome. It's like showing up to a rally and then some assholes start pulling out guns. Sure, you didn't do any shooting, but you're still getting arrested.

I will confess to a small amount of scumbaggery, though. But only a dash.