You attached your Batclaw to an Art Deco gargoyle and lurked up there in the shadows. For the first time you actually got to feel what being Batman and Spider-Man was like. With Batman and Spider-Man, video games allowed us to vicariously experience what in the comics was only approximated and what in the movies was only spectacle. Only with the city in play do both characters become fun to control.
But if you remove Batman from Gotham City or Spider-Man from Manhattan, you are basically left with two guys in funny suits. Superman remains Superman whether in Metropolis or cruising the rings of Saturn. Green Lantern remains Green Lantern whether in Times Square or a wheat field. None of this suggests a mother lode of compelling video-game material, so why have Batman and Spidey proven to be such successful video-game characters? I suspect it has something to do with both characters’ proclivity for gadgets, acrobatics, and urban environments. Both derive their powers, whether literal or assumed, from creatures of notable ickiness. Both have clowning, grinning psychopath archenemies. (What comprises interesting gameplay for a character that is essentially immortal?) The only competition Rocksteady’s Batman games have in terms of generally accepted video-game excellence is Treyarch’s Spider-Man 2, 1 so it might be useful to figure out what Batman and Spidey have in common.īoth are mortal. Superman games, for instance, are legendarily bad. The skeptical reader is probably wondering: Why, if video games are the perfect medium for superhero simulation, are most superhero games so terrible? Well, why has LucasArts never managed to make an Indiana Jones game as good as Uncharted or a Star Wars game as good as Halo? When it comes to good video games, intellectual property would appear to be considerably less than half the battle. Batman may have come to us through the comic book, but he belongs to American mythology now, and it is as hard to imagine him having been created by Bob Kane as it is to imagine Jesus having been created by Mark. Then again, what’s not to love about being Batman? After all, he is the only superhero who can make an introduction (“I’m Batman”) sound like a riveting existential crisis. Even though I had no particular longing to feel like Batman, there I was, every step of the way, loving the feeling of being Batman. Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum was a superb and enjoyable game in almost every way - and yet, when I finished it, I felt strangely demoralized. Forget all that, because nothing these intelligent, hardworking designers will come up can ever be better than being Batman.
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A question I have been asking myself lately: What if, of all the experiences video games make theoretically available to us, a simulated superhero experience turns out to be what, at the end of the day, video games do best? Forget the young game designer toiling away on her surgery simulation game, the ambitious triple-A game designer trying to figure out how to bring depth and moral probity to the shooter, the indie game designer trying to capture Super Mario lightning in a more contemporary bottle.
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