I will be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest Batman fan. Sure i've watched the films and even the odd episode of Batman: The animated series of which Batman: Arkham Asylum is based off. However that all changed when I played the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum this game took be back to when I was 11 years old and I picked up the Batman Begins game on PS2. Batman Begins wasn't the most highly rated game ever in fact it got fairly low review scores, but it made me feel like i was Batman and it was the first game that i ever completed the story of because i thought it was that good. Admittedly i am scared to go back and try it again as i think it will most likely be horrible.

Anyway back to Batman: Arkham Asylum :D.

I started the game on hard as I thought after playing the demo over and over i would be pretty good at it and i would find it fairly easy. Boy was i wrong, fighting large groups of goons was for me, very hard not to mention the fact that in many of the boss battles large groups of goons were thrown into the mix as you depleted the foes health. To put it simply on hard you had to fight as Batman would fight, by not letting anybody hit you, timing your punches, counters and takedowns to perfection which in a way is very good but at the same time is very frustrating particularly in the boss battles when you are trying to take out the boss while dodging 10-15 goons.

However the gameplay and the controls make things alot easier as i never felt like i was fighting the controls aswell as the goons. Everything came naturally and the buttons were laid out perfectly. This meant that i could thoroughly enjoy fighting enemies or taking out goons silently with the many different takedown options. The AI always acted brilliantly and seemed very smart too, for example when your in a fight with a group of goons some will try and open gun cabinets or pull metal boxes off walls to try and defeat you. Also when you are in a room silently picking off the goons one by one they will get increasingly more anxious and they will start to stick together so as not to get taken out by you. Not only that but they will start to act irrationally by shooting around corners that they think you are around and jumping around when they think they hear something.

One problem i do have with the game is the character design, it is obvious that this game runs off the Unreal engine as most people look like they are former COG soldiers from Gears of War. Commissioner Gordon doesn't look like the 60 something he is but more like a 25 year old body-builder with grey hair and a moustache. Then you have the classic Marcus Fenix finger to the ear when someone is talking thing, that batman has to do whenever Oracle is speaking to him.

 

(A rather buff Commissioner Gordon)

While the character design of some of the characters is done poorly this is out weighed by all the brilliant things that developer Rocksteady has put into the game. The graphics are still great despite some bad character design choices and the graphics are the best that the Unreal engine has ever produced. The gameplay and controls are brilliant and for once i felt the controls were better on the PS3 than the 360. Overall this is a brilliant game that any Batman fan or non Batman fan will enjoy.

 9.5/10 

   

I'm not going to act surprised or anything i knew it was going to happen i've been installing games to try and prevent it and BAM. After a year and a half it happens my first RRoD i was prepared, i knew what to do and i knew how long it would be before i re-color my avatars hair.

Hit the Jump to hear more of this well lets be honest crap.

 

 

Seriously though i get RRoD two days before Christmas!! WTF of all the days in the year it picks today! Then i thought how bad has M$ ****ed up i found this picture and realised getting RRoD for 360 owners has become a fact of life. People know that when they pick up a 360 they will probably at some point have to send it back to M$ so why not pick up a WII or a Ps3? There almost as good =) and don't have to deal with this problem take the Ps3 for example you have some great games, a blu-ray player and what was a passable online service. So too someone who hasn't bought a next gen console yet and is making the choice between all three what is to stp them from hearing about RRoD and automatically dismissing the 360? I no i almost did. Ahh well lets hope M$ sort this out for the 720 still can't believeit died on me two frickin days before Christmas but on the bright side Jeff Buckley's - Hallelujah has just come on my ipod so hs begun to calm me down =)

Till next time - which may be soon as i now have alot of time on my hands!

I've just realised how to do this (i have never used facebook or anything of the like) thanks to the front page on Tanzein hopefully i can come up with something good to write about every now and then. That is of course assuming i can find my way back here =)