Batman: Arkham Asylum

Arkham Asylum’s principle accomplishment is the one thing I was sure it would fail at: the player really feels like Batman, and, when I say Batman, I don’t mean your average guy wearing tights, but rather the semi-invincible master-at-everything who can take the matchup Batman v. Anything and Everything and win every time.

A big part of that is the fighting system. One man is never a problem in a hand to hand fight with Batman, so the game becomes more about crowd control, combos, and flow than the specific trading of blows. The sheer power that is impossible to not feel as you twist through the air from one end of the room to the other (landing to savagely smash a criminal down with a beautifully rendered spin kick, and then leaping off again to drive your fist into the skull of another foe on the other side of the room) is immense, but what makes the experience is the feeling of dancing on the tip of a needle. You’re invincible unless you fuck up, but a single misstep yanks back into normal time, where everything runs like sludge and it feels like everyone in the room is about to break every not-so-fragile bat-bone in your body.

Unfortunately, that feeling is an illusion. Batman has a prodigious amount of health, and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the combo system should never have any trouble with the campaign’s fights. Later on, the game tries to remedy this by the inclusion of knife and baton armed thugs, but both only succeed to badly break your flow for the first two appearances and then simply become targets to take out as soon as possible, before you resume your general rampage. To make matters worse, the Challenge maps offer exactly what the campaign fights needed: huge swarms of enemies, a leap so obvious that I’m unsure how whoever did the details of the campaign maps never thought of it. Unfortunately, you’re likely to discover the Challenges after doing a quarter at best of the main game, and once you play those adrenaline-infused fights for long enough to start getting thirty hit combos with ease, the toughest encounter in the campaign begins to seem like a laughable tutorial.

The other half of the Batman feel is the stealth aspect, though the developers have stated that they prefer the term Predator to Stealth; while that sounds like a meaningless distinction, it pretty much sums up those parts of the game. The first few times the player meets enemies armed with guns, they freak the hell out. Suddenly, there’s a foe that’s so much stronger than Batman that the difference between the two is almost comical. And yet, after an encounter or two, the player is ready to strike from the shadows, orchestrating traps and pulling off hit and run tactics. It’s true that the stealth, like the combat, never really evolves from what it starts out as, but that’s far from a deal breaker, because it’s awesome to begin with. The Predator missions are, without a doubt, the highlights of the game, and I soon found myself playing far longer than I intended to because I knew there had to be a stealth section coming up, and I simply had to experience it.

Finally, exploration is quite fun. This aspect of the game is hampered by the general lack of respawning enemies when you respawn an area later, eventually making it so that exploration's more footwork than adventure. Still, the grappling hook is extremely well done, and flying down from some high perch is great fun (and is even better when there's some squishy inmate/mortal down there to land on). The game's collectibles are generally fairly well placed to be a bit of a challenge but not impossible, and most of the important ones (IE, the ones that unlock challenge maps) are easy to get without too much trouble, even if the occasional one will have you scratching your head with three different guides and two maps spread across your desk.

As for the game's story, it's about what you'd expect. It primarily serves to get all the villains roped in so that Batman can beat them up, and the ways in which that's done do occasionally seem contrived, but there're no obvious false notes, and the Joker is amusing enough to gloss over any weaknesses.

Every once in a while, events come to a head and the game throws a gigantic set piece at you. Now, this is a Batman game. The Batman universe is filled with fun villains. By all rights, the boss fights here should be awesome. They are not. They are terrible. The vast, vast majority of boss encounters go exactly like this: 1. Huge Enemy 2. Huge Enemy Runs at You 3. Throw Batarang and Dive Away 4. Huge Enemy Hits a Wall 5. Every Few Times Huge Enemy Hits a Wall, jump on its back and hang out for a little while.

Now, the initial Huge Enemy (Bane) fight wasn’t too bad. Generic, but entertaining. The fights with the other, more colorful villains were bad. Poison Ivy is defeated by throwing batarangs for about five minutes, dodging every once in a while. Croc is defeated by walking…really…slowly…for…a…really…long…time… and then hitting him in the face with a batarang. The first is banal, the second tedious. But those are nothing to the Huge Enemy/Bane-clone fights that are repeated again and again and again and again and again.

The absolute pinnacle of those occurs between two thirds and three quarters through the game. It’s two Huge Enemies v. One Batman.  Every thirty or forty seconds, one of them charges. You hit them with a batarang, and, when they hit the wall, they are stunned for something approaching thirty seconds or more. It’s absurd. The two almost never attack together. You’ll wait two or three minutes before charges, at times while they stomp around and occasionally chuck some slowing moving crud at you. Then, when you finally take away one of the three health bars that each of them have, you have to jump on that one’s back. If you don’t, it gets the health back…somehow. When you jump on its back, you simply ride it around for an ungodly long time with absolutely nothing to do. The fight took over half an hour (without dying), and it occurred to me near the end that, if I died, there was no way in hell I was ever playing that fight again. Thankfully I didn’t die, but I can safely say that that one boss battle was the absolute least fun I’ve ever had playing anything that dared to call itself a game.  

In the end, Arkham Asylum is a fun game. It’s got some good atmosphere, and I usually consider that the most important thing, but that same atmosphere stays exactly the same for the vast majority of the game. There’s a difference between being powerful and being immortal, and combat here often feels more like the latter, compromising the feel of the world while you sip your coffee in between attacks. Of course, those are the good parts, because when Arkham Asylum tries to break out of its own mold, it falls on its face so hard that you can hear the bones break. If you’re interested in Batman, or want to play a game with a great stealth concept, or just want some fun, you won’t be disappointed in this. Just don’t expect anything too great. 

Jeph Loeb - Batman: Hush

Jeph Loeb’s Hush is intense. If you are going to go into the book knowing one thing, make it that. This book is painfully difficult to put down, every scene flowing into every other with all the momentum of a train speeding off a cliff.

Of course, Hush is more than a collection of fun action scenes, though the main plot’s development due to it occurring almost entirely in the shadows of explosions and grand gestures. A large part of this is the narration of Batman’s thoughts which frequently color the scene and give information that would be otherwise impossible to convey.

Generally, these work quite well, but they bring up two problems. The first is the presence of Batman’s thoughts in scenes where Batman is obviously not present. Here, they act as more of an omniscient scene setter, but they are presented in the same style as the monologues, so telling the two apart is impossible. More important is Loeb’s tendency to litter fight scenes with thoughts, which works for the most part but can occasionally lead to the odd moment where the action is frantic and Batman’s thoughts are contemplative and, by comparison, almost bored, making it hard to really care about the action (you'll have to click the picture to read the text):

For reasons not completely clear to me, Jeph Loeb decided that Hush needed to include every single character to ever see a bat shaped light go off in the sky. As someone relatively unfamiliar with the Batman mythos, I saw a huge number of new faces, but familiarity isn’t required as Loeb does a great job of bringing you up to speed in a few quick lines. The characters themselves generally come off quite well, even though most are only given a limited space to develop, and though none of the sub plots are particularly important on their own, they each do a good job of keeping you interested while the main story slowly builds behind them.

Of course, there’s the inevitable straining of suspension of disbelief that occurs whenever you’ve got more than one guy in tights on the page at once. For the most part, this is handled well enough with the standard Batman characters. It is at times hard to see how the seventeen sidekicks that Batman’s had over the years don’t bump into each other all the time, but Loeb focuses on the character’s on screen well enough, and gives them enough depth, that I can forgive that. What’s harder to forgive are the characters that come from elsewhere, namely the Superman mythos. I’ll just say it right here: I don’t like super hero crossovers. It just seems silly. Still, when Batman was in Metropolis, I was able to tread the whole thing as a mildly enjoyable cartoon, but even that slight connection was blown apart when a super dog came on stage, and I laughed the rest of the way to the issue’s end. Thankfully, superdog didn’t make another appearance.

By far the most important of the side characters, and the only one to really stay with the story for more than five minutes, was Catwoman, who begins a romance with batman towards the beginning of the story. Their relationship is more commented upon than acted upon, which can be fairly annoying, though fitting with Batman’s character, but their interactions do lead to several good scenes and do serve to lend both characters more of a human side than they might have otherwise have had, as well as providing the lion’s share of the text’s rare breather moments.

In the final issues, the main plot that’s been, we’re told, slowly building the whole time starts to emerge. I specify “we’re told,” because, despite a few out of place events, most of Batman’s theories come across as pointing fingers at random and seeing Cthulhu in the shadows behind his dresser. Still, the last issues do a good job of trashing our expectations, and the several layers of reveals at the end had me quite interested in who the villain would turn out to be.

As for that villain’s actual identity (I won’t spoil the particulars for you), I’m unsure if it’s a brilliant turn or a cheap trick. If this is one of your first Batman comics, try as hard as you can to guess the villain. You’ll never get it, because the villain’s scheme relies on an ability wholly unknown to the newcomer, but obvious to the veteran. At the time, I was more than a tad annoyed, but, in retrospect, I’m not sure that’s fair. How much of bringing us up to speed is really Loeb’s responsibility? If the device is already established in the Batman mythos, I guess it’s fair game, so I won’t hold the trick against him.

The best word for Jim Lee’s artwork is iconic. Every frame and character that the man draws is larger than life, including the monolithic muscles under Batman’s suit to the fight scenes, which are just choreographed enough to have the feel of a martial arts master but just frantic enough to feel dangerous and unpredictable. Lee’s style is, in no real way, realistic, but none of his characters ever devolve into caricature, and he’s fluid enough for his super models to feel natural and powerful, fitting into the world rather than sticking out like an overly buff sore thumb:

Besides, the athleticism of the characters makes a degree of sense. Providing you weren’t immediately shot in the face, jumping from building to building to knock out criminals night in and night out would shape you up pretty well, I think. (Of course, that only explains one aspect of Lee’s universal male anatomy, and damn little of his female equivalent, but we’ll just let that slide).

When it comes to scenery and fight scenes, Lee is equally competent, blending subtle hints that bring the scene to life amidst the more boisterous elements of the artwork in much the same way that Loeb does with the plot.

At several points in the storyline events break into several strands, some operating in different chronologies, with the majority of the work of differentiating between them falling to the artwork. For the most part, different color choices keep the scenes distinct and provide each with its own feel, though the washed out palette of the recollections can make telling the details of the scene difficult. That could, of course, be argued as intentional – after all, it’s not like we really remember every part of that day twenty-five years ago equally – but whatever the intent, things have certainly gone too far when I mistook the two boys for each other on several occasions.

Hush can be a bit hard to take seriously at times, and not all of Loeb’s ideas work out with quite as much finesse as one might hope, but the ride is fun from beginning to end. If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for a few hours, you won’t want to stop reading until the ending, and you’ll enjoy (almost) every minute of it. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone looking for their first taste of Batman, but if you’ve got a few Graphic Novels under your belt, Hush is an entertaining read.

Frank Miller - Batman: Year One

So far in comics, I’ve loved Watchmen and V for Vendetta, have been entertained by Y and Hush, thought the Killing Joke was very good, and have pretty much stuck with established opinion for all the Graphic Novels I’ve read. For Batman: Year One, however, it’s time to break out the dissenting opinions. Batman: Year One isn’t a bad story, but it’s not the titan that I’ve heard it was.

Though this story is supposedly the ultimate Batman origin story, the actual Batman origins portion of Year One is fairly weak. We begin as Wayne is returning from his training afar, when he’s on the point of beginning to clean up Gotham. But there’s no motivation. We don’t see Wayne’s parents killed, and we don’t see the resentment he’s built up over the years. Now, everyone obviously knows the basics and details of the origin story, but, without it being featured here, there’s no emotional core to the book. Batman’s here, and he’s pissed. There you go, that’s your character. Take it or leave it.

As for Batman’s martial skills, Miller creates a bizarre contrast between the realistic and the ridiculous. In the opening scenes, Batman kicks down trees. Later, he smashes a stone column. And yet, in his fight scenes, Batman is often in over his head and gets the shit beaten out of him at times. It’s totally fine to have an ungodlike Batman, and it’s (I guess) fine to have a stone smashing one, but, when they’re the same person, it’s just bewildering.

Unfortunately, Batman is a paragon of characterization when compared to Selina, catwoman. Selina is a whore who decides to leave her occupation and become Catwoman. Right there, you have the whole arc. There is simply no depth or motivation to the character at all. Worse, there’s no closure and no point to her existence. Alright, this is an origin story, so I suppose I should have expected some set up and all, but she quite literally affects the main plot in no way.

The best developed character – and, thankfully, the one Miller spends the most time on – is Jim Gordon. Gordon is the one straight cop in a city of criminals and crooked cop, and, to make matters worse, he’s held down by his wife’s pregnancy and his slowly developing affair with another officer. Gordon’s moral dilemma, and the odds stacked against him, draw the reader in more than Wayne’s bound-to-succeed struggles.

Still, there are some weaknesses here, too. The affair felt like it was taking us into interesting places, but when Gordon confesses the whole thing to his wife, we’re not even shown the following conversation. The overall plot, too, is both familiar and predictable, remarkable only for it’s over the top nature. Finally, Gordon is a martial arts master that makes Wayne look like a fool in tights. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it’s just odd that the policeman is always much more confident in his fights than the super hero (not to mention that, as far as I’m aware, Gordon’s kung fu skills never come up again in the mythos).

Despite difficulties with character, Miller can get your blood pounding. The first portions of the book are more concerned with set up and detached stories than a building arc, but, later, things do kick into gear. When Miller brings his threads together, playing Batman off against the police, we are treated to some incredibly tense sequences. The ending, unfortunately, goes back to the model of the early stories, and, while it’s no doubt very traumatic for Gordon, it’s hard to even consider the possibility of a negative result.

A very large part of the story comes through thought. There’s generally nothing wrong with that, though it’s odd when the characters are narrating something incredibly obvious, such as when Gordon informs us he spilled his coffee a panel after he does so. The real annoyance with the style, however, comes when we’re hearing Wayne’s thoughts, which are, for some reason, written in a hard to decipher script.

The artwork has a rough feel that sacrifices detail for mood, or at least tries to. Ironically for something that, in its introduction, claims to be a far darker Batman, the artwork feels cheesy and cartoonish throughout:



This was a pretty negative review, I realize, and I should point out that Batman: Year One isn’t bad. It’s just that I was led to expect Watchmen, or at least The Killing Joke, and I got a basic origins story instead. Perhaps a large part of the appeal to hardcore comics fans is the difference in tone from other Batman works (which I’m just assuming there is from what I’ve heard, because compared to some of the other comics I’ve read – V for Vendetta, say – this was a walk through a sunny meadow). Billed as incredible, this isn’t so much bad as eh.

Alan Moore - Batman: The Killing Joke

So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the Emergency Exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away. Forever.

The Killing Joke is the familiar story of Batman and the Joker. We see the Joker begin his plan, some hints at the Joker’s origin, and then Comissionar Gordon and his daughter, Barbra, are at home, and the doorbell is ringing...

The Joker enters and, with no preamble whatsoever, blows both Barbara’s spine and any pretences of the rules away.

The Killing Joke is a psychological battle a personal duel between Batman and the Joker, where the stakes are reality. Convinced that all the separates sane from insane, perception from reality, is “one bad day,” the Joker puts Gordon through hell unimaginable. Shown photographs of his wounded, nude daughter. Stripped naked and surrounded by the deformed and the deranged. Subjected to the Joker’s arguments and ministrations. By the end of it, the Joker knows, Gordon will be insane.

The Joker is a mockery of everything that is human. Having seen beyond us, he is the master of everything that we are and hold dear. He is practically asexual himself, yet he strips Barbra and shows Gordon the pictures, all to destroy the man. At the height of his power in the novel, he speaks to his minions, those who have been enlightened, about humanity, and he does it by describing a creature in a cage, something obsolete, interesting in the same way as any specimen is, any part of the past, but something hopelessly inferior nonetheless. His expressions and poses are as manic as his dialogue. At times, he’s scared and almost comically intimidated, at others he’s maniacal, others terrified, and, at some times, he’s simply hidden by shadow:


Of course, Batman shows up, invited by the Joker. The two are opposites, diametrically opposed and fated to clash again and again:

I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me…We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later…Are you listening to me? It’s life and death that we’re discussing here. Maybe my death. Maybe yours.

Batman and the Joker are opposites, yes, but they are more than that. They are two heads of the same man, victims to that same One Bad Day, each taking a different lesson from their catalyst. The Joker dedicated himself to destroying that existence that he’d once had, proving to the rest of the world that darkness is all that matters. Batman dedicated his life to preserving the reality that he no longer shares.

The Killing Joke is marred by two flaws. The first, and the lesser, of the two, is Gordon’s sanity at the end. Now, I’m not disputing the end result. What I do have a problem with is that we never really see him change, at all. I don’t know if a man would truly break, no matter the man, in circumstances like those here, as the Joker claims, but it’s clear that it would change him. While I’m sure that Gordon does change, in the course of the narrative, we don’t see it. We see his horrified, naked figure as he’s tormented, we see him a cage, and then, at the end, we see him say: “I want him brought in by the book.” There’s no indication that Gordon felt anything at all; we are kept entirely out of his head, leaving us with a perfect picture of both extremes, but nothing much in the middle, no real grasp of how the common man fits into the picture.

My other complaint stems from Gordon’s aforementioned line. Let’s look at that for a second: “I want him brought in by the book.” Uh, by the book? Excuse me? I’m pretty sure that the book does not include a masked vigilante chasing down the criminals, beating them to a bloody pulp, and then handing over the leftovers. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that’s as far from any police procedural as you can get.

The second flaw is far more important. The Killing Joke is a novel that explores the human psyche, but it’s one that does so from firmly within the formula of its genre, and it even goes so far as to call attention to the tropes that it’s obeying…because. At times, it’s hard to feel like anything in The Killing Joke matters. Batman’s sending Joker back to Arkham, but neither character even bothers to pretend it’s the last time, and both of them openly acknowledge that there will be a final showdown someday, but certainly not here. The possibility that maybe Batman won’t find the Joker, or that the Joker will win, or that he’ll get away, none of that is even considered here.

The atmosphere and psychological aspects of The Killing Joke come off brilliantly, but the page turning suspense that one assumes to be the core of a super hero comic is totally missing. Still, if you’re a Batman fan, or are just curious about the genre, this is a great read.

Graphic Novels

[This is a Breaking New Ground post]

Graphic novels are a bit different from Urban Fantasy in that, if I’ve ever truly looked down upon them, that period ended long ago. Still, for the longest time, they just didn’t seem like something I’d be interested in. Why would I want to read a book where half the imagining was done for me? It almost seemed like a worst-of-both-worlds between books and movies, where the images hamstring your own mental picture, while the lack of motion leaves said images static and unimmersive. Besides which, I just wasn’t sure that there were any stories told in Graphic Novels that I would actually want to read. From my ignorant outsider’s perspective, all I could see was pretty much super heroes. Now, I used to love super heroes – and perhaps I still do, because I think that The Dark Knight was several hours of sheer perfection – but I wasn’t convinced that you could make a convincing book out of a guy who beats people up while wearing tights and a cape.

Then, back in April, I read Watchmen. Well, that was the end of any real prejudice on my part. The story was excellent, and the super hero framework made it quite plain that it would never have succeeded in another form. At the time, I said (in my Reading in April post) that Graphic Novels were: “something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now.” Months later, I’ve read followed that initial success with…nothing.

So, unlike the Urban Fantasy challenge where I’m trying to go from distaste to some degree of enjoyment or at least a position of knowledge, here I’m just trying to read some fun stuff. But, seeing as this was a challenge, I did decide to jump in at the deep end of my old apprehensions about Graphic Novels. It is, it seems, superhero time.

Now, I originally did the same thing as I did for the other Breaking New Ground post. The problem is, there I actually researched the books. Here, knowing nothing about the field, I figured out what to read by the highly scientific method of emailing someone I’d seen reading a book with pictures in it, specifying that at least some of the five had to involve super heroes. In the end, I decided that writing several hundred variants of she said to read this one. And this one! would get sickeningly old, so just pretend it says that under the pictures if you want.

Anyway, the five lucky novels are:



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Seeing as I doubt I’m going to really hate any of these, I’m not going to bother with the Breaking New Ground posts that are following the Urban Fantasy reviews and just stick to the tried and true schedule of reviews broken up by random musings.

And yes, I’m aware there are seven titles here. Blame the person who picked them.