Posts tagged Rocksteady

It’s hard to believe that, at one time, Adam West in his campy 1960s Batman television show was the best portraiture of Batman creative minds had to offer.

Even then, when “Biff! Pow! Zing!” became a clever way to spice up awkwardly choreographed fight scenes, the tragedy of Bruce Wayne was a much darker affair than fluorescent purple and cheese-ball dialogue. A boy witnessed his parents’ cold-blooded murder and, once grown, pledged to annihilate the evil in his city. The Batman rose from the ashes of a once-spoiled life to be the protector of a seedy metropolis called Gotham.

Spandex doesn’t sound like a good idea under those circumstances.

Yet over the last few years the concept of what and who Batman is to a mainstream audience has experienced a revolution in reassessment thanks mostly to director Christopher Nolan’s two movies, 2005′s Batman Begins and 2008′s The Dark Knight. Both films washed away a decade of popular culture nay-saying after the franchise hit a lull in the mid-1990s because of two awful movies by Joel Schumacher et al. Thanks to Nolan, Batman’s been given a clean slate for a new generation of consumers.

Unfortunately, the Caped Crusader’s forays into videogames haven’t assisted in improving his image. A plethora of developers and publishers have been handed the property over the last few decades to produce titles vacillating from mediocre to awful. It’s easy to think there would never be a quality Batman game available, especially after seeing the most recent films and realizing how great a Batman project can turn out.

Well gamers can officially chill and count their blessings in batarangs, as Rocksteady Studio‘s Batman: Arkham Asylum is not just the unequivocally best Batman videogame to ever sit on store shelves — it’s also one of the most engaging titles released in a very long time, let alone 2009. Arkham Asylum treats its source material with the utmost respect, and successfully blends the comics with a cinematic atmosphere to create an exciting and near-perfect interactive experience. Read the rest of this entry »