Superhero video games have been pretty hit or miss for me. Actually there have been more misses than hits. I remember back in 1999 when I would check every week at the local Gamestop to see if Superman 64 had been released yet. “Next month”, they always said. I was so excited about it! I could not wait to don the red cape and fight crime just like the animated cartoon I was so fond of.
To say that Superman 64 was a huge disappointment would be a MASSIVE understatement. All my dreams of being the man of steel came crashing down on an emotionally distraught 13 year-old. It made my eyeballs leak, just a little. The “game”, and I use that term very loosely, was so hideous that it actually put me off from watching the animated show for a time. Yet I tried to trudge through it, because I had waited so long for the game to come out and I felt like I owed it that much. Still to this day I wish I could take those hours back. I actually can’t talk about it anymore now. I need to go to my happy place...
Well needless to say, I learned a very important lesson that day that all gamers struggle with at some point or another. It’s the fact that games based on movies, TV shows, or books, are generally as much fun as taking a blind cat for a walk. Now of course there are definitely a few exceptions. But it was on that day that I lost all hope for ever playing a truly entertaining superhero game.
I am a huge Batman fan, anyone who knows me well is aware of this fact. So when I heard that Rocksteady Studios was developing a Batman game for the Xbox 360, I instantly had a flood of leftover emotions that could only be blamed on Superman 64. I thought, that COULD be cool, but there’s a 95% chance that it’s going to be bad. Probably not Superman 64 bad, but bad. However, after downloading the demo on Xbox Live, I was proven so very wrong.
In the first five minutes, I felt like Batman. No...I became The Dark Knight himself. I was brawling thugs and swiftly dispatching them (but never killing them, Batman wouldn't do that). I was hiding in the shadows like the embodiment of pure nocturnal fear, taking them out silently one-by-one as their screams were swiftly muffled. It was glorious. It was everything my childhood-self tried to emulate after watching the animated series plus more. More comic book characters, more background story, more twists. And of course The Joker. But not just The Joker, The Joker as portrayed by Mark Hamill. The same voice actors that played Batman and The Joker in the animated TV series (which I was completely addicted to when I was younger), were playing their roles once again in the game.
Two years later Batman was back and the stakes were raised even higher with Arkham City. Arkham City was to the previous game what A New Hope was to Empire Strike Back. It was darker with a more intricate plot and deeper characters. I enjoyed Arkham City with its large open expanses even more than the previous game.
I am currently playing the newest addition to the Arkham chronicles, Arkham Origins. While it is strikingly similar to the Arkham City, I've really been enjoying getting immersed in the world of the caped crusader once again. This last one was developed by an entirely different team, but I think they did a great job and look forward to whatever the next installment is.
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