About 4 years ago, the worst day of my life was at EGX.
In the retro area of the exhibition hall, in front of a row of black plastic LCD TVs, sat a little boy of about ten years old. Intrigued by the retro style of this modern era, I lingered for a minute as the loading bar finished spinning, and what I saw filled me with empty, existential dread.
Next to the Pac-Man cabinet and CRT with Super Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog flashing on the screen, the kid is not playing Arkanoid, Asteroids or any other kind, but Batman: Arkham Asylum on PS3 .
The Ark of the Covenant was opened, my skin peeled off, and my bones shattered to ashes.
At that moment, I also got old.
You see, Arkham Asylum isn’t a game I read about in a magazine, or a game I handed down from my dad in the 90s, or stupid enough to buy a re-release ROM just to be able to say I played it. It’s a game I bought, completed, and enjoyed in high school, and now it sits alongside Space Invaders and other Stone Age creations.
If you want to scare yourself with ruthless time, think back to the release of “your” console – it might have been the first one you bought with your own money, the one you spent the most time with as a kid, or just the one you Know it inside and out – and count how long ago it came out.
Then, take that number and look for world events with the same distance as you remember.
If “your console” is a Nintendo 64, I have some bad news for you. Next year will be 27 years since it first came out in 1996. 27 years before the N64, the moon landing happened (or did it…).
My game console is a PlayStation 3. When I was a teenager, I saved up for years to buy it and played one almost every day until I graduated college. We’re now almost as far from the original North American PS3 as the PS3 of the first-gen Gameboy, which is a scary-enough concept, but at least it means we can look back at a plethora of games with rose-tinted glasses that great games came along On that awesome console, they’re icy and highly influential classics.
One of my favorites, “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” just entered his teenage years — about the same age as Robin, Batman’s ward. So there’s never been a better time to think about what makes it so great.
Batman: Arkham Asylum begins in typical ominous fashion, driving a pouting Batman and a bullshit on the wet, cold streets of Gotham City as the Batmobile thunders through the gates of Arkham The gibberish clown is behind.
Ironically, it then turned into an early example of the kind of on-orbit exhibition I’m complaining about, where you trudge majestically with NPCs whose pace and speed you’ll never be able to match, which has started in blockbuster games. became very popular at the time.
But with unsettling strings swelled in the background, that walk did something crucial and set the tone for the rest of the game.
First, it introduces you to the dream duo of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill – yes, that – as the Joker. A pair of great performances perfectly captures the vibe of these versions of the two characters.
But what it does is also make you don Batman’s cape and cape for a quiet moment when both of you are thinking the same thing: “Something’s wrong, what’s the Joker doing?”
This immediately plunges you into role-playing at a deeper level than you ever imagined, building up the ideas you’re going through, making inferences and reacting to the same things as the characters, while figuring them out and driving their responses, rather than watching A story of superheroes that feels disconnected from their actions.
When things inevitably start, you’re slapped in the face with one of Arkham Asylum’s most enduring legacy – third-person combat – as you weave through a horde of bad guys, knocking combos, dodging and reversing timed, and Move towards a special ending to zoom in on the camera and slow everything down so you can hear every crunch.
Obviously, Batman didn’t invent third-person fighting, but like almost every FPS defaults to Modern Warfare 2’s controller layout, it defines the mainstream blueprint to the point where people talk about “Batman style.” “After years of fighting.
It’s simple and powerful enough to fit the character, no matter your skill level, yet expandable enough to actually offer a variety of different encounters. Guys with guns, guys with knives, big guys who can block, and all kinds of deviations to take on throughout the game.
Doing it right is satisfying, doing it wrong is punishing, but it can also be really annoying. No matter how deep the villain roster in Batman’s universe is, most fights will always be against various Joker-themed thugs, and it’s not always intuitive to distinguish them visually during the flow of the fight. I remember losing a lot of combos because I auto-locked on a blocker that needed to swish with my cape immediately.
While it may seem a bit cliché these days, it still executes its offspring better than some of the games you’d say. For example, in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, beyond a certain point in your progression, every battle feels powerless because you’re so madly overwhelmed. Batman: Arkham Asylum strikes a great balance of energy, effort, and expertise.
Another place where you feel empowered yet human is puzzle solving, thanks to another of Arkham Asylum’s most influential mechanics: Detective Vision, the fantasy X-ray technology in Batman’s helmet that will highlight information about targets and Useful information area for surrounding enemies.
Again, Batman didn’t invent the idea of an in-universe overlay to point players to key items (e.g. the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed series had its own “Hawkeye” a few years ago), but it did Advances in scouting and piecing things together from your environment. It further reinforces the idea that you’re Batman, not just Batman, that you’re the smartest guy in the room – giving you an idea of the tricks that make him seem omnipotent to outsiders .
In the latest gameplay trailer for the upcoming Gotham Knights, it will be interesting to see how the system evolves, incorporating new ideas from other popular RPGs, and after more than a decade of solid service, to see if it starts Getting stale is just as fun. .
But it’s this world hidden beneath the surface that also makes Batman: Arkham Asylum full of Easter eggs. One of the best things about this game is how it taps into Batman’s entire nerdy history to touch nearly every character in his sprawling canon.
I was fascinated by it at the time because I felt it greatly expanded the possibilities of licensed character games. It’s not just a cash grab like most things I play on the PS2, or arcade beating them like the great Marvel games, but a powerful concept that makes the most of the universe it’s set in.
Take the first two main villains you meet outside of The Joker: ex-Suicide Squad killer Crocodile and Victor Zsasz. Both are relatively minor villains, but they act as if you’ve had history together, showing you that this isn’t another origin story – you’re in the thick of the action, with established characters and plenty of well-loved man drawing material.
It’s all really good, and even though the lack of things like jump buttons is a very outdated relic of that era, we’re still grappling with some of the major issues that Arkham Asylum faces today.
As we all know, the final boss fight, in which you get into a fairly standard boxing match with an energetic clown, has been criticized as an anti-climax. But that’s just a bunch of big-budget releases I can start in 2022 (Dying Light 2, Horizon: Forbidden West to name a few).
There is also the double-edged sword of settings. Having a rough night for the Caped Crusader in the same location, it all brings the story into a tight focus that you won’t get in the wider additions later in the series, Arkham City and Arkham Knights, and more Downtime and distracting side quests.
It does mean, however, a lot of white-tiled hallways, the same gargoyles, and a repetition that even mandatory sewers can’t fix.
But filling an open world with worthwhile diversions is just one of the different and difficult issues that contemporary major publisher games have to contend with. It stands to reason that Gotham Knight is built on the solid foundation of the Arkham franchise, and when it goes down, the best parts of it may still be the same as the great parts of Batman: Arkham Asylum 13 years ago.
