VIDEO Batman: Arkham City (Arkham Asylum 2)

I think I got the Catwoman stuff installed with the game when I bought the it on Steam, I don't recall having any option to not install it as a separate thing.

I don't mind her story parts, they are just a break from the main story and a chance to do something different with another character. She's not a great character overall but I don't know who else they could have included (you get to play as Robin in another DLC anyway, he is much cooler than Catwoman)

Aren't most female comics characters sexist? Look at how many of them are drawn, Marvel's Black Cat is the same.

 

Oh totally - I mean, Catwoman's solo title has kind of always sucked, but there are still good takes on the character. Just because it is sexist doesn't mean anyone has to accept it.

 

Tbh most of these kinds of games and even related source materials are aimed primarily at males who like to have sexy female characters around.
Catwoman can be done well, but her sexuality is part of her character and she should utilise that however ridiculous & impractical it might make her outfit

That being said, the recent Tomb Raider game showed you can make a character work if you do them differently without taking away the fundamentals of what made them good in the first place.

The fact Catwoman can beat up the same level of villain as Batman (at least at the street level) does make her a suitably strong woman and her anti-hero moral conflicts do make for interesting choices (you can choose to leave Batman to die or help him). Even if she was included just to say "we gave girls a female playable character, go us!" it was different (although she had a worse detective mode thing than Batman) and offered some fun extra play options due to the alternate style of fighting and weaponry.

 

Sexuality being part of her character doesn't explain gender-specific insults, though. It's also a poor excuse for bad writing - her dialogue is basically a stream of double entendre a and innuendo, which isn't really much to base a character on. It's shallow, and the industry can do better.

 

And yeah, the walled prison - Warden Sharpe is not the most stable dude, then he becomes Mayor.

 

Have you read any of the fluff bits in the menus? They go into detail, but I think all that stuff is pretty meh. I'm keen on Origins because it's not even going to pretend like a prison city would work.

I think it'd be a lot cooler if Arkham City wasn't the way they did it - if they had done an adaptation of No Man's Land, it'd be a lot more fun.

 

I like the interview tapes, especially the ones with Riddler trying to troll Strange. The stuff with Strange & Freeze is good too, the way he tries to justify his crimes due to his wife gets thrown back at him.

I would have preferred the Arkham inmates take over Gotham itself rather than Strange and the Mayor hatch some weird plan to fence off parts of the city to engage in a social experiment with criminals.

 

The Arkham universe isn't exactly an extension of the TAS/DC Timmverse. It borrows elements from it as well as from other sources but it clearly stands apart. Truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised if Joker came back thanks to the help of a certain immortal that likes to take occasional dips in Lazarus Pits.

As for Grundy, I don't think Batman killed him since, after all, he's already an undead reanimated corpse. He just stopped him for a bit until the magicky what-have-you that fuels that body eventually restores him.

 

Batman's an uncaring jerk, Grundy gets redead, Oracle is jealous of Talia, and everyone hates women.

This is pretty far off from TAS, in my opinion

 

The connections to TAS are extremely superficial, in that many of the VAs are the same and the basic thrust of distilling characters to a recognizable, less messy essence is in operation. Asylum and what I've seen so far of City otherwise owe much, much more to the last ten to fifteen years of Batman comics.

RE: Grundy, there's a reason he's supposed to be Alan Scott's villain and not Batman's, dammit.

 

I love the Arkham-verse so much, outside of BTAS its my favorite adaptation of Batman outside the comics. Plus I always get giddy hearing Kevin Conroy and co.

 

Didn't Clayface also die? Although he fell into the Lazarus Pit so I guess he would come back to life once Batman left.

 

Half the inmates of the prison die, at least, and Batman is sort of fine with this. That bugs me.

 

Yeah but he could've stopped it almost immediately - instead he goes after Talia when the two main voices of reason in his world are saying, "No, seriously, that's a bad idea."

 

Batman didn't kill the inmates though, even if he acted like he might kill Freeze when out of his armoured suit.

 

But it's the same problem I have with Batman Begins - Batman wouldn't allow someone to die.

And yes, in Begins he allows Ra's to die and he does the same here, but in both it feels like such a "you die now" moment, especially because in Begins, he knows full well Ra's is just a normal dude that doesn't have a Lazarus Pit.

 

There were some prequel comics to the game, and a bunch of other shorter comics about various characters leading up to Arkham City. A few staged attacks courtesy of Strange to incite the populace helped setup Arkham City, but the game is still somewhat weak on story. Bruce Wayne is dragged into Arkham City and is barely mentioned again (unless Batman tells someone he "rescued" Wayne? Its been a while since I played the game), and both reporters are dragged in as well (the Creeper guy, forget his civilian name, though he's probably not the Creeper in this continuity, as well as Vicki Vale), and weren't there all those people dying from Joker's blood too? Unless the Robin DLC followed up on that loose end.

The prequel comics especially draw on Dini's Batman comics, its not in continuity with the main DC universe of course (and that is unstable enough as is), but reference ideas or characters Dini has used over the years.

Seeing so many villains is fun, but most of them weren't too relevant to the plot (cure Joker, stop Strange, randomly go to Ra's Al'Ghul for help with the cure and then it all comes together at the end, always been slightly disappointed at no Strange boss fight).

 

Dini wrote TAS so well and wrote some great comics. Asylum was a great game, and yet he's missing the mark here. This game is amazing, in terms of play and the mechanics, but the story just falls short, IMO.

 

Some of the costumes just don't translate well to AC's art style

And yeah, that would be odd, but I still have a few issues with AC's Batman. He's kind of a total jerk and he doesn't actually save anyone's life, really.



Thanks, Arkham City!

Narrative aside, this is a fantastically-made game, and I can't wait to see Origins. This is by far my favourite series and the best VG take on Batman ever. I could rave/rant/foam at the mouth over these games for ages.