Batman: Amazingly Awesome

I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum a couple of nights ago, and man is that game good! I found it damn hard to fault, which is all the more impressive given that it's a pretty complex and ambitious game.

That said, I always find it interesting to think about flaws that could have been polished out, or improvements that could've been made. Games that asymptote towards perfect are, in some ways, easier to pick on, because the imperfections are more glaring.

So my biggest complaint relates to the way that the various gadgets accrued throughout the game give you access to more of the environment, or rather, that they don't tell you this is going to happen. I spent a goodly amount of time trying to figure out how the fuck I was supposed to reach only-just-inaccessible secret areas - climb to the highest point, dive off, glide down and smack into the wall just below it; fire countless Batarangs at it from all angles; place explosives on all the walls underneath it, detonated to no avail; climb around next to, above and beside it trying to find a route in - to find out, an hour or four later, that you couldn't possibly access it without the next gadget being unlocked. I know I'm not the only one, too. If Batman had muttered, "I don't think I can get in there yet - maybe later", in his impossibly gravelly voice when you encountered the first of the accused secret areas, that would've been problem solved, methinks.

Next up is the lack of variety in henchmen. There are only 9 enemy types throughout the ga- wait, that's actually a pretty respectable number. And the combat never gets boring, and every encounter is different every time, and the difficulty increases steadily throughout the game, and the presentation is fucking fantastic, and the feedback is perfect, and it's probably the best fighting system I've ever had the pleasure of fly-kicking in the head. So...yeah, it's too good, that's the problem.

No, wait! The default henchmen all have exactly the same build! The models have different textures and details and whatnot, but they're invariably enormous beefcakes, and it gets a little weird when you register that the last seven chaps whose skulls you crushed with your elbow all had exactly the same bulging biceps and tree trunk thighs. Mind you, the biceps are impeccably detailed, and you could see the pores on their shaven scalps, but it was still slightly unnerving, wasn't it? Oh.

I'm really scraping the bottom of the critical barrel.

I could complain that the acrobatic twisting that Batman has to perform in order to play the appropriate combat animation sometimes looks slightly odd, but 98.FUCKYEAH% of the time it all looks brutally lovely and flows like butterscotch sauce over a sticky date pudding. I could also point out that in the climactic moments where Batman demolishes a henchmen's face in slow-mo, the demolition boot doesn't always connect perfectly with said face, but that would be an incredibly insignificant thing to point out, and I'd look petty if I did so.

My other criticisms are more general ones. For instance, global leaderboards are demoralising because all they do is fist you with how woefully inadequate a Batman you are - a complaint that could be levelled at any global leaderboard, and which is probably highly subjective anyway because some people might look at the highest score and go, "Yeah, I can beat 1,042,249,548,129!", whereas I go, "Quit". I also semi-rail against the lameness of having Achievements associated with simple gameplay progression, whereby simply finishing the game will net you bla number of Gamerscore points (which don't mean anything except LOOK HOW BIG MY GAMERDICK IS and that doesn't matter to me at all, no sir, not at all), but really I appreciate that type of Achievement, as long as they're mixed in with inventive skill-based ones, which in the case of Batman:AA, they are. So, again, I won't bother mentioning it.

Oh, and the fight with the Joker at the end was too brief and not quite tough enough, and the camera angle buggered me about a bit, but it was thoroughly entertaining.

Yeah, that's all I got...

Love: Loving?

I recently came across Love. Love is "a game to play with your friends, and for them to play with their friends", and it's  being developed by a sole individual, Eskil Steenberg. I highly recommend watching the gameplay video.

It claims to be a "First person not so massively multi player online procedural adventure game" - I will now boldly state that it's the first FPNSMMOPAG. It's entering public beta on Jan 7, so soon we'll be able to put that unwieldy acronym to the test.

Essentially it looks to be a combination of Second Life, in that players can heavily influence the world and the objects in it, and Quake Wars, where you have to shut down specific parts of the base in order to take out other parts. It also has elements of The Incredible Machine, thanks to intricate links between different elements of the world, and Fracture, an ill-fated third-person shooter that attempted to pioneer use of terrain manipulation in an action game. Ooh, and perhaps any number of real-time strategy games where you have to develop a base and try to take out the opposition's.

So, basically, it's a bizarre mix of disparate genres, with a procedurally generated coating, some (hopefully) clever AI and a unique art style. I'm intrigued.

What I find particularly intriguing is the name. If I had to guess at what a game called Love was going to be like, I'd be imagining a game about developing relationships, about exploring what love is in the context of a series of game systems and rules. Perhaps that's what this game is. There certainly seems to be a lot of emphasis on cooperation, and of learning to understand each other's efforts and the environment that's being created.

That said, when he starts going on about radio frequencies, keywords, proximity sensors, weaponry, power generators and forcefields, I wonder how appropriate the name really is. Maybe it's just a ploy, a clever use of evocative language to engage people so they'll dig deeper - if so, it certainly worked on me, and now I plan on checking out the beta. If it does turn out to be a good FPNSMMOPAG, that's awesome, but if it doesn't expand on and justify the "Love" theme, I'll feel a tad betrayed.