You, like me, are the cause of everything wrong with games development. Or at least some of it.
Batman is nearly perfect. So much of it is just so, so brilliant. Towards the end they kind of go a bit mental on the boss front, and the pacing isn’t 100%, but it’s so short and sweet that none of that matters. What matters is getting that x40 combo going with batarangs and ground takedowns to hit the variety bonus in the first challenge stage and not playing anything else once you’ve finished the story. I mean *MAYBE* you might do all the Riddler stuff, cos those are pretty sweet. Especially the ones where you take a photo of a question mark. You definitely agree with me on that, and you agree with me about the combat being visceral excellence and you agree with me on how alive the playing area feels thanks to judicious puzzle placement. You also agree with me that the Scarecrow bits are FUCKING AWESOME, and the bit in the morgue is excellent. You even spotted it coming because of the smoke and you STILL loved it, because you were right. Among other things.
What you also did ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE GAME is wish it was in Gotham City, and probably in co-op. Maybe with Robin. You want it bigger. You want bigger levels, more bad guys, more combat and you want to get into either the Batmobile or that Batplane thing. I’m pretty sure it’s called the Batplane. And that’s why you, like me, are a cunt.
Let’s choose a cunt’s analogy, then. Do you like football? I’ll wager yes, because of the aforementioned cunt status. Do you think it would be better if the pitch was three times the size and had three times as many players? Even you’re not that much of a dick. Or how about movies? After watching something amazing (like, say, Mannequin), would you want the sequel to be twice as long with another 19 characters to follow? The answer is still of course not, that would be tedious. So bigger is often also shitter. That’s not an elegant statement, but Batman doesn’t fuck about with eloquence.
I mean, I’m sure if you gave the greatest team in the world four or five years they could build a properly wicked Gotham City that’s as packed with character and Riddler puzzles as Arkham Asylum is and doesn’t get boring to navigate, but that’s not happening. What’s going to happen is the team that gave us the completely excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum is going to be the ones who roll onto a sequel,and they won’t have five years to make it. And that team is called Rocksteady.
Who the fuck are Rocksteady? If you’re anything like my flatmate you’ll think they also made Grand Theft Auto. They made, well, I have no idea. I’m not even going to Google it and make it look like I know everything about obscure teams that can make amazing games using middleware in short time frames. But what I will tell you is that whoever they are, they can’t make Batman 2 the way you or I want it. Because they’re not superhuman. Even Rockstar can’t make an entire city that’s interesting, and they’ve been trying for literally centuries. What chance does Rocksteady have? So I don’t even want them to make a sequel. I want them to stop there and instead make something else AMAZING that we haven’t thought of yet. Because if we’ve thought of it, we already hate it. And I don’t want to hate Rocksteady for not being able to make the perfect game I’ve already imagined in my head. Realistically, though, they’ll try to. And you’ll hate it. Because like me, you’re an idiot.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:43 pm
+1