The PD Chronicles: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Right off the bat (bad pun #432) I just want to say that I'm impressed. I was expecting a dumbed down game. I was expecting something for children of about 10 (even though it's rated T for Teen). I guess part of this is because I was force fed utterly stupid and campy Batman movies for most of my childhood. I remember watching the 1960's TV show on FX when I was a pre-teen and thinking it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever seen in my life. Then Tim Burton came around and he did a fairly good job. The first time. His second one was awful. And then it got campy again. So yeah, I was expecting a campy arcade game. I'm pleasantly surprised.

First, let's go over the bad.

Controls -- I'm the kind of guy who likes to set his keybindings on the fly. If I don't like the way I mapped something, I want to change it in game. You can't do that in this game. You have to exit all the way out of the game and start it up again to change any keybinding. That's annnoying.

Camera -- Not a big fan of the "over-the-right-shoulder" view.

Upgrades -- None of them are like, you know, really cool.

And that's really about the only complaints I have about it. The rest is golden. Some highlights:

Kevin Conroy voices Batman, and Mark Hamill voices The Joker. They do the voices in the animated series, which I have seen, so they really do sound like Batman and Joker to me. I recognize the voices, and that's really cool.

There are points in the game where I feel like I'm playing Half-Life, and that is a very big compliment. Crawling through ventilation shafts? I'm so there, and I love any game that reproduces that correctly. I know it's a silly thing to mention and get hung up on, and it's hard to explain exactly why I like a game that makes me crawl through small enclosed spaces. But that's me.

Grappling around is FUN. Waiting for a thug to walk underneath you and then string him up before he even knows what's happening is hilarious, and it's cool to just grapple to a different high vantage point while the remaining thugs come over to investigate what the hell is going on (and then go searching for me so I can continue to pick them off one by one).

The fist fights are great, but I'm still getting the hand of blocking. I have this problem where every time I need to block an attack, I'm in the middle of a combo and can't do it. I haven't lost a fight yet that wasn't a boss fight, so I guess it's really not that bad, but I get annoyed when I am fast enough to react to something, but because my character is already in the middle of doing something else he won't react to me.

The Scarecrow's levels are AWESOME. This is the perfect example of something I did NOT think I would see in this game. These levels are dark, psychotic, and utterly creepy. As they should be, since, you know, it's The Scarecrow. Probably some of my favorite visuals in the game are on those levels. I've seen him twice so far.

Seeing, hearing, and finding references to all of Batman's villains is very cool. Naturally, we have the Joker as the main villain. But I've also seen Croc, The Scarecrow, and Bane. I've heard The Riddler. And I've seen references to Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and Zsasz. And given that I'm only 15-20% through the game, I'm sure there will be much more to come.

Oh, and not having to worry when I fall off a ledge is fantastic. Heh.

Here's some screenshots from the game. Obviously, the graphics are superb as well.