Arkham Asylum

The Goggles, They Do Everything

Nabeel Burney 2 Comments

I’m sure it’s happened to you: you’re playing a game and you come across a weapon, or ability, or game mechanic that you just love, and you wish you could use it all the time. Only you can’t, because the developer has placed restrictions on it in the name of balance. It’s understandable that you can only use the Super Gravity Gun at the end of Half-Life 2, it being the most powerful weapon in the game. Valve know that restricting its usage makes it more fun to unleash on the Combine.

Where does the designer’s responsibility for making a game fun end, and the player’s begin? Should the player be given full reigns over the available tools or should the designer limit them? Greg Miller at IGN raises this question using a recent example, the detective vision mode in Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. The mode enhances Batman’s vision, allowing him to use his detective skills and analyse his surroundings. At the touch of a button, a blue visor covers the screen and renders the environment in flat shapes in order to help highlight important details like vent covers and enemies. The mode can be activated at any time and for however long as the player wishes; moreover, it lets the player see through walls and points out key information like whether enemies are armed, if a wall is destructible, and so on. Sounds like a win button, doesn’t it?

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Arkham Has Moved

Nabeel Burney 3 Comments

Batman: Arkham Asylum 2Batman: Arkham Asylum wowed us this year by being not merely a decent superhero game, as we were hoping, but an excellent game further enhanced by its license, and hence a contender for Game of the Year awards. With its critical and commercial success Rocksteady would be crazy not to start immediately on a sequel, and so it came as no surprise when a teaser trailer debuted today during the Spike Video Game Awards ’09. The brief teaser, embedded below, reveals the new setting for the game, which seems to be Arkham Aslyum again – only … not quite.

The Joker is back, looking a little worse for wear but up to his old tricks again. It’s unclear exactly what new location is being shown; the first thing we see are the gates of Arkham Asylum, but the buildings that rise behind them don’t resemble anything from the first game. Instead of an old private estate we see a dense cityscape, perhaps Gotham City? The camera pans through city streets, overcome with prison inmates running riot and beating people senseless. A glimpse of a recognisable location flashes by – Iceberg Lounge, the Penguin’s high-class nightclub that fronts for his underworld dealings. Another mythos reference is in the huge sign labelled ‘Sionis’, not doubt referring to Roman Sionis, otherwise known as Black Mask. The trailer ends centered on an aged Joker hooked up to an IV drip, his frail condition perhaps due to the Titan shenanigans in the first game.

With no spoken dialogue in the trailer and no information past the fleeting images, very little is known about the game at this point. A website has gone up, entitled Arkham Has Moved, with no content other than a subtle hint of Two Face and a form to sign up for updates. While it was a no-brainer for Rocksteady to be working on the game, it is still interesting to see how soon it is being announced. It would probably be too hopeful to expect a release in 2010, but other sequels have been fast-tracked to come out within a year, so who knows. What is certain is that Rocksteady has an incredible task ahead of them, of living up to their first effort, and I am excited to see how they tackle it.

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On the PC, Only the Maximum Settings Are Canon

Nabeel Burney 9 Comments

The eternal cycle that plagues us PC gamers is the constant need to upgrade our hardware, to keep up with the newest and shiniest games. It’s not just the fact that we need a rig that passes a new game’s minimum requirements and barely manages to run the game at all – we desire more than that. We want to play the game at its maximum possible visual settings, so that we can see it in its full glory. I’ve wondered, though, whether it really is just a craving for the best eye candy that drives that desire in me.

Maximum CrysisWhen I play a game at less than maximum settings, there is a nagging feeling I get that is separate from the disappointment in the reduction of graphical fidelity, or the dismay that my PC is getting long in the tooth. I find myself wondering if I’m really experiencing the game as it was intended by its creators. Developers speak more and more about wanting to deliver an experience to gamers, and wanting them to play it just how they envision 1)http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3162366. I think about the interpretation of what I see, and whether what I’m seeing is ‘canon’. If the object detail is down so low that I can’t tell what a character is wearing, am I missing a crucial point about that character? If I make a certain conclusion about a room that I wouldn’t have if I could only read the writing scrawled upon the walls, is my understanding of what happened ‘non-canon’? It’s a minor point but it’s something I keep thinking of in an age of games that are finally able to tell stories with every kind of narrative device available.

Of course, console gamers don’t face this dilemma at all. A console game plays the same on every unit of that console, and developers have a lot more control on how the game will look and perform without having to think about different hardware combinations and permutations. So I’m just restricting this thought experiment to PC games. There are a number of questions that follow this thought. Does it really matter if the graphics are not at the very max? Would you even be able to glean some higher level meaning or nuance from the details? Are we at the stage in game technology where this would matter, and developers can use this level of detail to add subtle enhancement to a games story and atmosphere? If so, in what games released today would it make a difference? A few games came to my mind immediately, and I’ll restrict my selection to just these few already installed on my hard drive so as not to belabour the hypothesis.

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The Screw PC Crew

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

Beyond an excellent pre-emptive counter-example in Piranha Bytes’ forthcoming, PC-first Risen (thanks Richard), this year has been a veritable desert of simultaneous, cross-platform launches – what begun in 2008 in the form of GTAIV and Mass Effect continues full steam ahead this year; for instance, over the past few weeks, we’ve learned of PC delays for Borderlands and Assassin’s Creed II. Below, you can find a list of PC games delayed and/or intentionally scheduled after their console counterparts (with EU market launch dates for consoles and the PC, respectively):

Crimes Against Humanity

  • Alan Wake
    • Spring 2010 – TBA?
  • Battlefield 1943
    • July 8, 2009 – Q1 2010
  • Braid
    • August 6, 2008 – April 10, 2009
  • The Force Unleashed
    • September 19, 2008 – Q4 2009
  • Resident Evil 5
    • March 13, 2009 – September 18, 2009

Major Offences

  • Assassin’s Creed II
    • 20th November, 2009 – Q1 2010
  • Colin McRae: Dirt 2
    • 10 September 2009 – December 2009
  • Mirror’s Edge
    • November 14, 2008 – January 16, 2009
  • Red Faction: Guerrilla
    • June 5, 2009 – September 18, 2009
  • Street Fighter IV
    • February 20, 2009 – July 3, 2009

Technical Oversights

  • Batman: Arkham Asylum
    • August 28, 2009 – September 18, 2009
  • Borderlands
    • October 23, 2009 – October 30, 2009
  • Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X
    • March 6, 2009 – March 17, 2009

Have you gotten used to the idea of the PC version always arriving late?

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Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo Review

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Many websites have already titled this game “arguably the most anticipated game of the summer” 1)http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/08/07/batman-arkham-asylum-demo-released/: Though it easily makes top 5 twice at GameStats, it only comes close to cracking the top 20 at Eurogamer. That being said, however, Batman: Arkham Asylum could very well be the most anticipated game – not titled Call of Duty.

British developers Rocksteady dropped demos for the game last week, and rather than crumble under the excitement, we dedicated the entire Slowdown team to combing through the demo, three-man Bat-style, giving it a hard long look in anticipation of the forthcoming September release of the PC version. In fact, this may very well be the most ridiculously in-depth look at the demo you’ll happen to chance upon. Should you find a more thorough article, though, let us know in the comments section… and we’ll retract this boisterous claim. Consider yourselves warned!

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