Batman Arkham Asylum *Review*

Everyone else has said it, and you really can’t get by without repeating it. Batman AA (Arkham Asylum) is probably the best movie/comic book character to video game translation ever made. Perhaps the reason for this isn’t so much the idea that someone finally got the formula right, but the fact that technology has finally caught up in the gaming developing arena to actually be comparable with what you would see in a movie.

I’ll be honest, 2K Games could have easily made Batman AA just as good as Rocksteady did. I mean, Bioshock is Batman without the Batman. Sure they might have gone with the first person mode instead of third person, but then again you are the character in Bioshock, while in Batman you play as Batman. The 3^rd person perspective of Batman AA was perfect for this very reason. You aren’t just playing a video game as some guy, you are Batman.

I compare Batman AA to Bioshock also because of its world creation and how immersive both games are. Both games deliver in mass amounts. Rocksteady actually managed to tell a Batman story that hadn’t been told before, all while maintaining the rich world of Batman that everybody knows.

Like I started with, technology has reached the point that a games graphics can be so good it can compare to a movie. Obviously the storyline has something to do with the games greatness, but nothing can really bring out the quality as much as these graphics. It just wouldn’t be the same game if this was made on the PS1, it wouldn’t have that last punch of quality necessary to make it a game worth of the franchise. When the entire franchise is based on the art form known as the comic book, and then also sided up next to a box office extraordinaire movie, you’ve got to make an amazing game, and technology is what let them do it.

Graphically the game is gorgeous. The environments are well crafted, the island is actually really large and as the game progresses the amount of terrain you’re able to cover just keeps expanding and expanding. The skyline of Gotham City from Arkham Asylum is beautiful. You can’t ever get there, but you wish you could. At some points the lighting changes are a bit too drastic, like when the entire screen gets saturated in pink and red. All of the characters are well crafted; you can even unlock little pictures of statues of them that you can analyze up close as you go through the game. It’s really unfortunate though that after how good the game looks, half of the game will be spent staring at a washed out screen in what is known as “Detective Mode”.

Detective Mode gives Batman X-Ray vision. Kind of silly when you stop to think about it, and I’m not sure what the excuse is that he can see enemies through up to 3 walls and rooms away. Other than just showing you enemies if the camera goes in that direction, it also pulls up a handy little box that literally tells you how many enemies there are in a location. Incredibly useful, but is a complete drag on how immersive the game is. Detective Mode is also the only way to tell if certain walls or grates can be moved, because it highlights them in a nice bright orange compared to the blue that it washes the screen out with. You have to spend many of the stealth sections of the game permanently in detective mode so you can keep tabs on the enemy the entire time. It literally saps all color and life from the game when you turn it on, and it could have been implemented so much better.

Back to the character models, Batman is a little stiff at times, especially when he’s walking, but it’s most likely intended since Bruce Wayne’s a stiff guy anyway, not to mention that tight leather outfit kind of restricts your movement. Does anyone else remember the old batman movies with Alicia Silverstone where we heard stories about how their leather outfits were so tight they constantly had to be repaired after simple things like bending over? They had to make room for their nipples in those things they were so tight. That’s how Batman looks when he’s walking around or running through corridors. When Batman starts to fight though… everything he does becomes incredibly fluid.

Watching Batman fight against thugs is like watching a good action movie. He’s able to juggle 20 enemies at once just coming at him; countering guys sneaking up on him with quick rapid knockdowns, punching, leaping, flying kicks, not to mention batarangs and other tools all useable on the bad guys. The combat system is well made for both the stealth situations and for the mass combat situations that Batman finds himself in. While fighting the game goes into automatic bullet time effects if you’re pulling off a particularly vicious move, which looks great.

If only the controls were just a little better. I played the game on the PC with a keyboard and mouse, and it’s obvious rather quickly that this is not how you should play the game. I can’t think of any way in which Rocksteady could have really fixed the issue for most of their game. It’s a 3d issue with having to use the mouse for movement, targeting, and countering. The problem is that when you play the game with a keyboard and mouse you only have 4 directional buttons, which leaves you with the end result of only 8 possible directions to move in at once. Enemies don’t come at you on a square grid they come at you from 360 degrees.

You’re supposed to make up for this lack of directions with the mouse I guess, but when you’re attempt to target enemies and jump over them and now instead of just pressing the gamepad in the direction of the guy you want to attack or counter you have to move the camera and then move Batman, and I don’t think there are many people who can actually do that in the amount of time you’re given. If you want to truly enjoy this game, plug in a gamepad, because it’s just not as good as it could be if you don’t.

Now I don’t know what possessed the guys over at Rocksteady to do this, but you go from a game that’s 100% 3D combat in the beginning, to a game that slowly turns itself into a fixed camera mode, some of the boss fights even use a fixed camera! It is horrible. There’s a reason bad games are made with fixed cameras, because the camera ruins the game. Again this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you have a gamepad to play with, but a lot of the enjoyment disappears from the game when you aren’t fighting the bosses and instead you’re fighting the controls. I know I died countless times due to Batman only having 8 directions to move in. When you take the camera control away from the keyboard player, you took away any hope he has of doing anything successful. The last 15% of the game was almost pure frustration because of this. I know games bosses are supposed to be hard, but this isn’t how they’re supposed to be hard. Besides fighting the controls the bosses were actually complete jokes, so that’s another let down.

I think one of the major problems with the game is how you can extend any fight as long as you want by simply vaulting over the bad guys. Even the giant mega bad guys that are supposed to spell death when you get close to them can be vaulted over if you find yourself in a bad situation. Honestly that was my saving grace since I didn’t have a game pad, I couldn’t have even completed the game without this cheap vault move. It really all just comes back down to the controls, it’s what turned this game from a masterpiece into just a really, really good game.

Basically the game looks great but you don’t see it half the time because you have to use Detective Mode. The fighting looks awesome but blows without a gamepad, and fixed camera gaming blows for 3D fighters, hell it blows for 2D fighters where you can move up and down on the screen, we’ve known this for over 30 years! The boss fights are as simple as fighting the normal thugs you run across, find the twist and go, talk about bland. Which brings up another annoyance, when you die the game gives you a “hint”. The “hint” is actually exactly what you have to do to beat the boss, and you can’t Not see this unless I suppose you close your eyes and spam the start button until you hear the cut scene starting again. I’ve died before even getting to a point where I might need the hint, and having the entire boss fight ruined for you because of it is incredibly obnoxious.

10% Music Atmosphere: 8/10 – Nothing memorable, but it doesn’t have to be memorable, it has to set a mood, and AA definitely has a mood. This score probably isn’t fair since I was too engrossed in the game to notice the music, but it’s fair enough since it didn’t stand out.

10% Sound Effects Atmosphere: 7/10 - Sound effects were good, but at the same time completely pointless. This probably shouldn’t be worth 10%, but for now it is. I mean, you’re in a sneaking situation and you bust down a grate and then run all over it, making all sorts of loud noise, and the guy 3 feet from you doesn’t even notice.

50% Game play: 9/10 – This probably would have been a 10 if I had played it with a gamepad, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t get one.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – For a comic/movie to video game… game, that is a 3D fighter/puzzler, this is the top.

15% Graphics: 10/10 – These graphics are amazing. The only awkward moment is when you walk through water and the camera gets all shimmery but Batman himself doesn’t get wet. His bat suit is just that awesome.

Final Score: 90 – Means Awesome, but it could’ve been better.

On LOL and AA

League of Legends came out a few days ago and I've managed to play a couple games since then. LoL is still in some sort of launch stage right now where players can play as any Champion they want without paying extra money. It's supposed to last for a little while longer, a couple weeks I believe, so if anybody is looking into finding out just which Champion type they like most then they should start playing now. Not all of the features are currently implemented, but you do get to gain experience that will carry over into the first "pre-season" stage of the game.

LoL is set up to work in seasons; so there will be pre-season weeks, and then probably a few months or so of an actual season as players battle for supremacy. Whether or not you get everything wiped at the end of a season I'm not sure yet, that would suck if you did though, and I kind of think you will lose all your experience. Not that it's exactly hard to gain back, but it's still a number of games just in order to gather it all.

The artwork style is superb. I think it's cell shaded for the Champions and mobs, and it just looks very well on the ground they're using. There's even many different kinds of maps, only two available at the moment with one being in beta, but that's already got me interested to see what else they can come up with. They technically have 3 maps, the third being the tutorial map, but it's a 1v1 map and LoL really isn't meant to be played as a 1v1 game.

If you've ever played DotA, LoL is basically the same thing but better. All of my personal issues with DotA that I can think of have been resolved. Buying things in the shop with recipes is fast and seamless. You can select the end recipe and all the parts needed are highlighted right there on the screen and you don't need to go search for them. Character movement even feels smoother, much easier for me to control then the Champion's in DotA. Speaking of controls, the hot keys have been remapped and it creates a much much better feeling game. Q, W, E, R, D, F, are the skill hot keys. The tutorial mentioned A and S but I don't remember ever really using them. The skills themselves don't feel so overpowered as last time. Positioning feels more important than raw power, usually.

The match making system so far is great as well. The game chooses people for you to play against based on your personal record, or that of your combined teams. If you want to read it yourself they have a giant post on it, I only skimmed it after getting halfway through since I already know how the Blizzard Arena system works. The three games I found were all found very fast, I played two solo games. The last game I played was with a friend and to do that I had to invite her into the game, and then hit the start button and solo players all flooded in the extra 8 spots. Or maybe some of them were also 2 or 3 players, I couldn't tell. It did take me 2 games and a lot of questions of others there to figure out how to actually invite a friend into my game with me, and at first I was sorely disappointed with the matchmaking system, until I figured out how to do this.

I'll go ahead and explain it here in case anyone is curious. Basically you click on the Play button, just like you would for a practice game or if you were going to enter a game solo. From here you click on the group pre-made button, and it brings you to a screen with options for what kind of game, how many players etc. all those options are locked right now though. Then you click okay, and then it takes you to a screen where you can invite people off your friends list or people that are in the same chat rooms you're in. Once you have everybody in there, then you hit start and the pre-game continues like normal as if you had entered a solo game, but everyone that you invited is on your team. You cannot use this system to play ranked matches against people you want to, if you want to play a ranked match against someone you know then you'll have to play a practice match.

That's enough on LoL for now, I'll try and write up a review later. These reviews are mainly for my own practice at doing them, the above isn't a review just a blog post.

Arkhan Asylum. Game is awesome, what can I say. Oh yeah, I can say one thing. If you are a perfectionist, do not play this game on the PC without a gamepad, because fighting is very hard with a 360 degree system and you're limited to 8 directions with the W, A, S, D keys. I have half a mind to just put the game down and go buy an xbox.

Defense Grid - The Awakening *Review*

Aliens are invading your planet and it’s up to you to stop them! That’s the gist of this Tower Defense game, and it’s already a better story than 99% of the Tower Defense games out there. I’ll let you decide if that’s saying something or not.

If you have played a Tower Defense game before, then you can jump right into this one, the entire genre basically screams conformity. If you haven’t played one before, then it really isn’t that complicated. There is something you want to protect, and then there are lots of creatures trying to steal it from you. You build defensive structures, or Defensive Towers you could call them, that kill these creatures before they can take your precious items. The more creatures you kill, the more money you make, the more towers you can build. The genre is surprisingly addictive despite how similar each game is. There’s something about lining up the perfect defensive gauntlet so that not a single creature survives that just makes you want to do it over and over again.

In The Awakening, it is your job to protect some funky glowing balls that are called power cores. There are all the standard tower defense monsters. Fast little guys that speed by everything unless you slow them down, massive groups of cannon fodder that die to AoE damage towers, bulky monsters which are basically immune to AoE damage, and then boss monsters which are just giant, slow, and refuse to die. Thankfully The Awakening isn’t a complete repeat of the past, as they’ve thrown in some nasty new monsters as well. Imagine a Boss monster that takes forever to die, and when you kill it, two more boss monsters spawn from its guts. Yeah, they went that far.

You’re given access to a ton of towers to help you defeat all these baddie aliens, but unlike the aliens who have a lot of nice variety, many of the towers over lap on their purposes. A lot of the towers you gain access to later in the game completely trump the ones you were using earlier, and it just feels like you got an upgraded version of the same thing. Flame Towers for example, are awesome, until you get Concussive Towers, and then you wonder why you even still have the option to build a Flame Tower. It does look a lot more fun roasting the enemy with 6 fully upgraded Flame Towers, but when the aliens don’t die to that you’re kind of in trouble.

The same issue with the towers is also an issue with the aliens. What kills an alien on the third wave may not kill the exact same looking alien on the fourth wave. Aliens actually get stronger for each wave they go through, but there is zero visual representation for this. Every alien looks the same no matter how strong it is in relation to another alien of its same type.

The graphics are very nice. The particle effects on fire and the designs of the aliens and just the landscape are all very good looking. The three levels of zoom don’t ruin the experience either, you really want to sit in at the closest zoom to watch the action, but you really can’t afford to ignore the zoomed out tactical view.

The music is enjoyable for a little while, though I wouldn’t exactly call it memorable. I can’t even remember if each level had a different song or not. The sound effects are right on the mark though. Hearing your fully upgraded Cannon Tower shoot triple guns into an unsuspecting alien is wonderful.

The game does start having problems once you get past the first 10 levels though. It’s about this time that you realize most of the tower space you’re given to build towers is just there to mess you up. Even on the large maps you end up concentrating all of your attention to a tiny portion of it, creating a gauntlet of death is all good and fun, but when you’re ignoring the rest of the map it just feels like you’re missing out. Why bother even having the rest of the defense grid if all the action is going to take place within the same 5 by 10 hallway of death?

The flying aliens are a particular annoyance as well, and not due to difficulty, they’re actually the easiest alien to handle in the game. They offer some nice cash infusion, but they really feel empty when compared to the other alien types on the map. It’s because they lack any sort of interaction. All of the ground aliens come together and support each other with, if nothing else, sheer numbers. Flying aliens just make you watch the radar screen and spend money on missile towers if you see that some are going to be coming soon.

The game gets even more annoying as you progress to the “hidden” levels, the last 4 of the 20. Why these levels had special locks on them, when all the levels before them were locked in the exact same manner, just graphically different, is beyond me. These latter levels further stress the concept of the developers that there is only one right way to do things. You put your towers in this order, with these variations, in this spot on the map, and that’s how you’re going to win, anything short of that is asking for all your power cores to be stolen. Tower Defense games are supposed to be about making choices and finding different ways to a solution, not making you find the one possible solution that just barely scrapes by.

That brings up the last major issue with the game, and really the worst of them all. Your towers might fail because you placed them wrong, or they might fail because the game randomly decided that you didn’t destroy that one alien this time, when all 99 other times you would have. Hitting the backspace key returns you to a previous checkpoint, often times you will then see a wave of aliens go through your death gauntlet once more, but then each time they go through it’s a different outcome. Sometimes they die early, sometimes they die late, and sometimes they magically don’t die at all. One of the maps is literally you holding down the fast forward key and then hitting the backspace after 30 seconds after seeing that the wrong outcome occurred.

Oh right, one more complaint. Now this one isn’t unique to Defense Grid, and is more of an issue with the genre in general, as it has happened in many other games of this type. Every few seconds the game checks to see how many resources you have, and then gives you a percentage of that as interest, increasing your money pool. If you have less than 100 resources you don’t get much, but when you have in the thousands of resources, you’re getting a heft amount every few seconds. But if you spend resources on upgrading your towers then you ultimately lose out later on. Compared with the already perfectionist nature the game drives you towards with the ending levels, this is just another nail in the coffin to a game that lives in a genre of choice, but only gives you a singular solution to beat it. And don’t even try the achievement modes unless you want this perfection requirement times 50.

This is still a very good game. The length of the game is about perfect for the price I would say. $5 to buy it off of Steam, $10 on Xbox Live, if you enjoy tower defense games then go buy this one. It is a solid 10 to 15 hours of enjoyment. If you haven’t ever played a tower defense game before, then go look online for a free one and play it instead. Freearcade.com has a good number of them, and if you enjoy the genre then spend the money on this one, because it’s probably the best out there at the moment.

10% Music: 5/10 – Decent, but not memorable.

10% Sound Effects: 8/10 – Some of the sounds are excellent, but then there’s a lot of sound that is just nonexistent. That narrator gets so old.

50% Game play: 6/10 – Great the first time through. No real replay ability despite the achievement modes. Sure, you can play again, but it won’t be nearly as enjoyable. The story is also rather lackluster.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – The best Tower Defense game in the genre.

15% Graphics: 7/10 – It’s a beautiful game for what it is, but it never makes you go wow.

Final Score: 68.5 – No idea what that means, first time I’m using this scoring method.

Beginning of the comic

I'm going to start working on the comic with some real effort tommorow. My drawings are still somewhat not that great, but I think I'll be able to manage. I mean Dark Legacy is drawn on a sheet of lined paper, then uploaded and colored so... yeah. I don't have a scanner, but I guess this old digital camera will work to start. So, hopefully it can work.

If you haven't seen it, it has language but it's rather good, CCP's rap video called HTFU by Permabaned. A nice twist on words for the name of the band. Now my only question is, when is Blizzard going to release something even more awesome? Since Blizz isn't underground though, they should go for some more mainstream kanye style. Speaking of kanye, which you have to include P. Diddy in with that, which brings me to this video I can't believe I like by Ke$ha. Tik-Tok is the name of the single, as well as her album. This song, with the video, is just the perfect mixture of california, pop, the 80's, rap, techno, and rock all mixed into one. I mean, she's singing about a young Mick Jagger while also having lyrics regarding the way a DJ works the party. It's a pretty amazing song. I say I can't believe I like it just because it's so pop.

I was reading penny arcade the other day and noticed that gabe mentioned that Aion doesn't even really get going until level 10. I gotta say, that's what I thought at first too. Then you hit level 20... and go wow, the world just opened up a lot more. And then, and then you hit 25 and can go into the Abyss. I haven't hit 30 yet, but I'm pretty sure 25 to 50 is the real game, since I believe there are two different levels of Abyss zones. If they can get rid of the bots, make leveling 15% faster, and crafting/gathering etc. 40% faster, and fix the controls, they would have a top of the line game. Right now it's a little below top of the line. Everything works, but it's not that perfect. It's a hard thing for many gaming companies to get right, and it's surprising, you put all this money into your game, but then the camera or controls suck. Developers need to focus beyond the final dollar and work on making the damn thing run right first.

Wow vs. Aion once more

Not a full blown review, but I will say that, despite how much I loathe WoW right now, I'm still logging into it over Aion. Aion requires concentration, lots of effort, you can't multi-task, you should probably be in a group with other people. I can't afford all those things when I have a chance to play, and so I'm back to WoW in part... though WoW is making it harder to do these things as well. Lower time before you get kicked from a BG, lower time to enter a BG once you get the queue, it's all rather sad for casual players like myself.

I applied for a job at IGN the other day, but I'm pretty sure my application was rather horrible. They asked for my resume, so I used my resume... but my resume doesn't exactly consist of all my MMO experience, which is what the job was about. I really should have probably added in a cover letter, and just made a resume fit solely for that job... but the whole process confuses me to be honest. They use an outsource program to take in resumes, and the outsource program only asks for a general resume, it doesn't want any type of cover letter or specific details, so I feel that while I completed the outsourced resume part right, I really f'd up when it came to the real resume and now I probably won't get the job. I didn't have all of the qualifications in the first place, but it still would have looked better if I had just listed my MMO experience instead of the crap that's on my actual resume... which really is crap. I need a real job so bad. Money, experience, for my resume to show I'm doing Something... sigh.

The Death of WoW

Don't worry, nothing killed it. It killed itself.

WoW right now is one of the most retarded MMO's on the market, and sadly, they're still one of the best despite that. But seriously. Wrath is one of the worst MMO expansions of all time. I've been playing WoW for a long time, I know my classes, I know how to PvP. I stood there free casting against a resto druid today. Just me and him. My gear isn't great, but I have 800 resilience and one of the worst level 80 ranged weapons in the game. The problem is that scaling is completely out of control. Vanilla, woulda had a chance. TBC, woulda had a chance and it would have been a very skill centric combat, even when resto druids were considered OP back in S3. In Wrath I have MS, MS is up 100% of the time for 40 seconds, that's 5 Aimed shots by the way. The druid doesn't drop below 95% health... 95% health. Full rotation, no movement on either of our parts, he's not even in ToL form, he's in fucking caster form.

Needless to say, the game is dead. Not just to me obviously, if you ask for Blizzards numbers you'll see just how low their subscriptions have gone. Even more interesting to look at would be just how low the average play time has gotten per account. I can't imagine it being much more than oh, 10 minutes a day on average. There aren't that many raiders. There were a lot of BG players. Now there's none. BG queues are 10 minutes long, nobody is playing.

Why is it so hard for Blizzard developers to understand what the community wants? Vehicle combat is horrible. SotA is horrible. IoC is horrible. You think they would have learned something about making BG's when everybody ranked EotS as their least favorite, and AV as on of their most favorite, BG's. Even the god damn broken AV was ranked higher than EotS.

Hey Blizzard. Guess what. IoC is nothing but another EotS. And it fucking blows. You developers should be ashamed of yourselves.