Monday, Oct. 19, 2009

Dark Night goes crazy on the crazies in 'Arkham'

By Beefy, special to the Herald

The Dark Knight is an American institution. He's right up there with baseball, apple pie and childhood obesity. And like all American institutions, Gotham's protector has been exploited in every way imaginable, be it in a campy '70s TV show, lunchbox or a string of terrible video game adaptations.

Earlier this year X-Men Origins: Wolverine proved you could make a solid video game based on a popular comic book. Batman: Arkham Asylum proves that a comic character could be featured in an amazing piece of interactive art.

An army of villains led by The Joker have run amok in a super baddie penitentiary and it's up to Bruce Wayne to save the day? Count me in! But what I learned is that the game play in Arkham Asylum is so solid and varied that Rocksteady Studios could have put any hero in Batman's place and it would still have been an amazing game.

Batman plays like Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher with a cape, which is exactly how he should handle. This is a man who can disappear while you're in the middle of a sentence. I'm 99 percent sure he could vanish while you were shaking his hand. He's a ninja in a cowl, so it only makes sense to throw him into levels where he has to deal with armed guards without being seen. This is harder than it sounds and becomes increasingly difficult as the game progresses.

Batman has one of the best rouges galleries in the comic book world, and Arkham Asylum takes advantage of a great number of them, while still holding some up their sleeve for sequels. Between The Joker, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, Bane and a never ending string of nameless henchmen, you will definitely have your hands full. The combat in this game is really something to be championed. Batman flows from one assailant to another with such grace it feels like a manly ballet, but instead of Swan Lake you get to chop a dude in the throat then throw him at another henchmen. Being Batman, he never kills his enemy. He does, however, seem to leave a lot of them wheelchair bound.

Even the story in this new classic is worthy of any Batty graphic novel. Drawing inspiration from the Grant Morrison scribed Arkham Asylum, we get to see many new and familiar sides of the Caped Crusader as well as get an understanding into several main villains through the use of taped psychiatric recordings hidden throughout the game. We might have to take away Batman's title as world's greatest detective though. Sherlock Holmes never needed a device that would locate a person based on the brand of tobacco his target was chewing.

Fans of stealth and freeflow combat will find something to love in this game, not to mention the millions of fanboys and girls who have already picked up a copy worldwide. PS3 owners can even unlock the ability to play as The Joker. Parental guidance is advised. There's a lot to this game, and all of it is executed extremely well.

◗ Beefy Thompson; beefyness@gmail.com