“You are not going anywhere I don’t want you to.”

- The Joker to Batman in Batman: Arkham Asylum

I won’t make a habit about doing game reviews on this site, but I feel that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a very good representative of what’s going on in mainstream games.   It’s safe to say that the success of AA will lead to more games like it in the future.  Note that this is a review of Arkham Asylum, not 2011′s Arkham City.  I actually experienced the sequel first, but I was told that I should really go take a look at the original game which was a better attempt overall.  I’ve done so, and I think that the best way to explain my feelings would be to tell a short fictional story.

The Marble Game

Your friend tells you that you should check out this new game he recently got.  He excitedly brings out a bowl, and a marble.  He tells you that the rules to the game are that you put the marble into the bowl.  You look at him, a bit puzzled.  He tells you to go ahead and put the marble in the the bowl.  You awkwardly do so, and he’s like “Nice job, you win!”  You smirk.  He says you should play again.  Finding the whole thing funny and wanting to be a good sport, you say, “Really?  Alright, I will!” and you pick the marble back up out of the bowl, only to drop it again.  “Nice job man, you own at this!” says your friend, sincerely.  The initial humor has worn off now, and you’re starting to become curious.  “Play again, dude.”  He’s looking at you, waiting.  “C’mon, just a few more games”, he insists.  Now you’re starting to think that this isn’t a game but some kind of bizarre behaviorial experiment.

“I don’t… I don’t get it” you say.

“What do you mean?  Oh, I’m sorry.  I forgot to tell you.  You’re Batman.” He says quickly, and looks back down to the bowl, as though that bit of information ought to explain everything.

“Batman?”

“Yeah.  This game is actually called Batman: Gotham Hero.  Sorry I forgot to tell ya.”

“Really?  I don’t understand…” you say, looking at the marble.  “How is this Batman?”

“Well, this ball”, he holds up the shiny marble between his fingers, “is Batman.  And when he enters the bowl, it means that he has beaten up and captured the evil criminal mastermind, The Joker!  Pretty awesome, eh?”  He’s looking at you, smiling wide.

“So… this is all the game is, though?  Dropping a marble into a bowl?”

“Well… no – you’re Batman.  You get to kick criminal ass as Batman on the streets of Gotham!”  He detects that your facial expression hasn’t changed in the least.  “It’s… dude, do you not like Batman or something?”

“Batman’s cool, I like Batman… it’s just.  All I’m doing is dropping this marble into a bowl.  How is this a game, really?”

“How is it a game?”  he asks, somewhat appalled at your question.  “It’s a game, first of all, because it’s damn fun to play.  Maybe it’s just not your kind of game.”

You press on, mostly out of curiosity.  “How can this be fun to play, for anyone?  The only rule is that I drop this ball into this bowl, right?”

“Yeah… so?  Dude – need I remind you?  You’re friggin Batman!  Guh.  Anyway, sorry that it wasn’t your kind of game.”  You try to interject, but he cuts you off.  “I got one other game too, you’ll probably like it a lot more now that I think of it…”

“Okay, what is it?”

“It’s called Superman Vs. Final Fantasy” he says as he rustles through his backpack.  After a moment, he lays a glass and a golfball on the table, and looks up at you, smiling.

The Batman Games

There are many reasons why people might like something.  I am here to argue specifically that quality of gameplay is not something that anyone could like about these Batman games, any more than someone could like the Marble Game.  Essentially, you could like it, but you’d have to be insane.  All you have to do is keep pressing the attack button.  I killed enemies who weren’t on the screen – who I didn’t even know were there, because the combat is auto-aimed and almost impossible to lose.  I am pretty certain I could beat 90% of the fights in the game, on the first try, without even looking at the screen.  So essentially, it’s follow one instruction – mash the button and you win.  See the similarity now to the marble game?  The most common reply to this I hear is that the thematic elements make up for this.  That it’s because you’re Batman, going through this rendered world, with dialogue “happening” and a story and all of that.

You know, I remember when lots of politicians were all up in arms about GTA, and how you could kill hookers and all that.  The politicians would say “these games are teaching our kids to become desensitized to violence!”  But the gaming community, rightly, pointed out how our brains work when we play games.  It’s not about “killing hookers” or “killing cops” or anything like that.  It’s about reaching the goal.  Whether that goal be to escape from the police, or to get a certain amount of money, or whatever – games work on an abstract level in our minds.  When we’re making decisions, we have to boil stuff down into its necessary elements.  If you’re trying to make a tactical decision, your brain focuses entirely on those elements which are important in making the decision.  Everything is reduced to numbers, concepts, spacial relationships.

So, we can’t now turn around and say “oh, well now the thematic layer does matter, and it is what we’re thinking about when we’re playing”.  Either Batman: Arkham Asylum‘s gameplay sucks, or everyone who played GTA is now desensitized to violence – those are the only two options here.  You can’t have it both ways.  At the end of the day, any adult (and hell, most children) knows that the Marble Game doesn’t become more fun if we pretend that we’re Batman.  If the gameplay isn’t at least a little interesting and challenging, then the gameplay isn’t fun – for anyone.  For those who disagree, please watch this clip (spoiler alert).

If you thought you had fun with the software overall, who am I to say that you didn’t?  If you had fun with it, you had fun with it.  What I am saying is that the fun didn’t come from the gameplay.  There are many reasons why a person might enjoy something, and I invite you to either show me how I’m wrong about the gameplay, or offer up where the fun did come from, and why the brain-dead gameplay didn’t get in the way of it.

Epilogue – The Writing Sucked, Too

Sorry, this isn’t normally my thing, and I’m not really a writer by trade, but, Arkham Asylum‘s writing was not good and someone needs to point that out.  Real quick, though – “it’s like the comic” or “it’s like the cartoon” aren’t a defense.  Bad writing is bad writing, I don’t care what it’s being faithful to.

It’s inconsistent:   There’s plenty of implications in the dialogue that Batman and Joker already have a history at this point in the story.  Indeed, Batman even goes as far as to say that he knows that something that the Joker said was a lie.  When asked how he knows it was a lie, Batman says, “I know him”.  Alright, that’s fine…  although at one point, early on in the game, Batman shouts in the Joker’s face, “Tell me something… what are you really after?”  Isn’t Batman supposed to be a super-detective?  I can tell you I’m no super-detective and it’s plain as day that the Joker is an insane agent of chaos with a special vendetta against Batman.  Why would Batman ask such a stupid question?  Is Joker going to spill the beans right there?   This gets into my next point…

It’s stupid – I love super-detectives.  Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, Death Note’s “L” – I love them all.  I just love an open mystery and I love to observe a perceptive mind at work.  Batman, in these new games, is not a super-detective.  I think if he was really as stupid as he seems to be, he couldn’t qualify as a regular detective.  He’s just this big, dumb muscle-man.  Let’s see some examples of his stupidity.  Firstly, again, the above – asking the Joker what he’s after despite knowing that the Joker would never answer such a question in a useful way.  Also, yelling this at Harley Quinn:  “You have one chance to surrender, Quinn!“  The other guards around him had to be looking at each other like, “what is he doin?”   Seriously, this not only makes Batman look stupid, it also makes him look weak.  Batman isn’t just stupid, either – the whole game has an air of stupid-ness to it.  From the mayor referring to his campaign as his “mayoral campaign” to the loud-speaker computer-voice lady saying “Shoot to Kill permissions granted”.

This game’s writing is dumb as rocks.  Not a hint of subtlety, subtext, or cleverness.  If you really liked the writing in the game, I highly recommend you start watching professional wrestling on Pay Per View.  You’ll love it.

A Final Note about Cutscenes

Hey developers, who do you really think you’re fooling by allowing me to hold down the W key during your cutscenes?  You think I can’t tell that this is still a cutscene, just because you let me waddle around?  I can’t attack or use any of my abilities – I’m on rails.  Why not just let me take my hand off of the W key, eh?  Ridiculous.  Don’t let this bullshit tactic fool you – this game has a 30+ minute opening cutscene.  And like I said above, it’s not good.  I leave you with an episode of He-Man.  If you enjoyed these Batman games, I wonder what you will think of this?

Official Dinofarm Games Rating:  Forty-Four out of Two-Hundred and Ninety Seven Stars  

I often find games target a “retro” look and/or sound – usually this means some low-res, stylized pixel art, and music made with simple 8-bit synths.  I’m all for that – 100 Rogues qualifies in this way (although we were going for more of a Super Nintendo look/sound, using 16 bit SNES sound-fonts instead of the 8-bit stuff).  In fact, I think that setting a limitation in this way, artistically and musically can be a great help to composers and artists, in that it forces them to focus on the fundamentals of what’s great about the mediums.  For 8-bit music to be good, it just has to have good melody, rhythm, harmony.  It can’t get a pass by having some Arabian sounding woman howling random notes over some giant Hans Zimmer bank-vault door-slam sound effects.

What bothers me, though, is that there are a lot of developers, particularly in the indie scene, who seem to think that the answer is to just copy an old game design.  It is certainly true that in modern digital games, a lot has been lost.  If you go and look to the games from the late 80s or early 90s, you will notice many things that just aren’t found in today’s games:  usually things like “an actual loss condition”, or “a good degree of difficulty”, or “interesting decisions”.  Older games were closer to the fundamentals of games – perhaps if for no other reason, because chronologically they were closer to the days before digital gaming.  But again, just like music and art, the game designers were limited by the technology and forced to focus on the fundamentals of game design in order to make a good game.

So, what’s wrong with just copying games from that era?  Well, a lot is wrong with it.  First off, while older games definitely did a lot right, they also did a lot wrong.  Particularly, I’m thinking about RPGs from the late 80s and early 90s, here.  These games were very unsure of what it was they were trying to do.  They were part simulation, part role-playing, part game.  And what ended up happening was, with all of them, that they were an extremely opaque experience that usually led to a ton of grinding and the necessity of reading FAQs.  I’m talking about games like Wizardry, Ultima, and even to some extent, Fallout.  The games were overly complex, and I don’t mean “for casual players”, I mean they were just too complicated for their own good.  Needlessly complicated, somewhat for the sake of role-playing or simulation (a great example was how many skills there were in Fallout – Outdoorsman?  Doctor?  Gambling?  Who’s going to take these?).

Secondly, copying limits you to only being as good as those games.  That may be good enough for the hardcore fans of those games, but for most people, they’re going to want a new, and preferably better, experience.  One thing that modern games actually have been improving on is user interface (UI).  In the craze to attract more and more people who probably don’t even want to be playing games in the first place, we’ve actually sort of mastered the art of accessibility in games.  Of course, games need to be accessible and deep – that sage wisdom about games being “easy to learn but difficult to master” will always be true.  So again, by copying these old games – yes, we’re copying their strengths, but we’re also copying their weaknesses and holding ourselves back.

Spiderweb Software is one example of a company that pretty much exclusively copies the designs from 15 years ago.  Now, in theory, I should love them, because they are copying games like Fallout and Arcanum, which I consider to be, probably, the best computer role-playing games ever made.  However, Spiderweb is also copying the fundamental weaknesses of those games.

As you can see, we have an incredibly complicated UI here.  No less than SIXTEEN buttons on the bottom of the hud, TWELVE slots to equip something on your character, and a large inventory for all the LOOT in the game.  It doesn’t take a genius game designer to see the weaknesses in this kind of a “loot-oriented” system in a game.  It necessarily becomes busy-work:  Oh, look, leather armor.  That has more armor than this shirt I’m wearing, so let me go into the inventory and equip it!  Oh look, chainmail armor!  I wonder what I should do with this – equip it, maybe?  Now you have all these items, most of which are completely useless garbage whose most exciting destination will be the item shop in town for a few pieces of gold.  Hooray!

What scares me a bit is that when you get into this mindset of simply copying what we were doing 15 years ago, you stop thinking.  You have to, because if you think about it you will realize this sort of stuff.  I found a wonderful example of this in Jeff Vogel’s “Bottom Feeder” blog, in his post titled “Three Rules for Difficulty in RPGs“.

“Observation One: There are two sorts of fights in an RPG: Fights that are supposed to be easy and fights that are supposed to provide a challenge.
In other words, first, there are fights that will almost never ever kill a player, also known as trash, or trash mobs.  If your trash mobs are frequently killing the character, your balance is messed up.  Most of the time, the vast majority of the fights in a game will be this sort.  Then there are fights that the player can possibly lose (mini bosses, bosses). “

So, this guy has actually embraced the old game designs so deeply that he is totally incapable of stepping back for a moment and asking himself if these assumptions make sense.  Does it make sense that for most of the “fights” in your game, you can’t possibly lose?  Absolutely not, there can be no tension in a game without the threat of losing.  Does it even qualify as a fight if it’s “supposed to be easy”?  Again, this isn’t difficult stuff, but it’s very interesting, that there are game designers who have got themselves locked down in the “retro” mold so tightly that they can’t ask themselves fundamental questions.

There are many more examples of “pure retro” games that have come out, with varying degrees of validity.  There’s a series of DS games that Atlus publishes called Etrian Odyssey which are basically Wizardry clones.  I find that silly, but at the very least these games are introducing a new crowd – modern DS players – to an old game, Wizardry.  Spiderweb isn’t even doing that – they’re on the same platform with a similar (or maybe even less) visibility as the games they’re copying.

In short, it’s a good thing to learn from the history of games.  But at the end of the day, game design comes down to being able to ask difficult questions and to be flexible.