Game Review – Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3 Version)

It feels kind of useless to be reviewing “Batman: Arkham Asylum” at this point. It’s like a band that’s just finished performing a fantastic single, received a five minute long ovation and I only started applauding halfway into the next song. But for a game like this, the developer Rocksteady deserves all the praise it can get, so I throw my two cents into the wind in the hopes someone will read yet another opinion on how good “Arkham Asylum” is without going “nooooooooooooooo shit.”

The Batman captures The Joker. Again. Only this time, The Joker seemed to go down far too easily. Suspicious, Batman takes him to Arkham Asylum, from where so many inmates escape I expected its main gate to be a revolving door by now. When The Joker finally finds himself out of Batman’s reach, he escapes the guards and Harley Quinn is revealed to be in control of Arkham Asylum’s security system — which turns Batman into a guest of honor in a party thrown by The Joker.

The plot is written by comic author Paul Dini, who does an excellent job for the most part. He understands that Batman is, after all, totally fucking nuts. Let’s describe him, shall we? A multi-billion-zillionaire who wears a costume that only very vaguely resembles a bat and that looks quite ridiculous to be honest and refuses to kill anyone even after said anyone has murdered half the supporting cast and fails to be contained by any institution or prison you throw him in.

A particularly interesting moment is when Batman can stop the Joker before the shit hits the fan, but doing so would result in The Joker’s death: so Batman stays his hand and lets The Joker go ahead and murder… a lot of innocent people. So, as it is quite obvious, Batman is a genius crimefighter and also completely insane. It’s one of the things that makes him interesting and believable, and Dini fortunately understands that, toying with the notion especially on the sequences when you’re fighting Scarecrow’s fear gas.

But there are some nitpicks, like some of the moments Batman is talking to himself — one hilarious bit is when we see a bunch of dead guards and Batman goes, “The Joker’s been busy. These poor guards didn’t stand a chance!” Kind of strange why they’re EMPLOYED then, isn’t it? You’d think being a guard in Arkham Asylum would train you to handle murdering clowns, but then again it’s been established by now that the asylum might as well be a hotel for nutcases for all its efficiency.

Dini only truly fails in the ending, where he seems to decide that, this being a game, the narrative should end with a bombastic, action-packed climax rather than a more appropriate, cerebral one — and it could end with a combination of both, but he preferred to solve all the questions raised about Batman’s sanity and his relationship with the Joker with a simplistic one-liner and an ending that… feels like it doesn’t really end anything. In fact, like most games these days, the ending screams SEQUEL, and I really, REALLY wish game developers would worry more about telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end before they start to even consider another one.

Still, the plot is always interesting and there’s just the right amount of story and gameplay. Setting the whole thing in Arkham Asylum is an obvious excuse for Batman to fight his most famous villains, and the game delivers on that in varied and interesting ways. Each villain has their own style of fighting Batman — the Scarecrow uses the fear gas, the Killer Croc is sneakier than he seems and just as dangerous as he seems and Poison Ivy protagonises a “Dead Space” like boss fight. This is hugely important in keeping the game always fresh.

Mostly, the gameplay is divided in three: sneaking sequences, fighting sequences and going-from-one-place-to-the-next sequences. Rocksteady shines in all of those, adding brilliant gameplay elements to all of them. One gadget that is important for most of the game is Batman’s detective vision, which allows you to see through walls, find secrets, spot enemies and even see their heartbeats, all with a bluish filter. Some have asked, “why the fuck should I turn that OFF, then?”. I have to admit it’s a pertinent question, but the game does look way better on normal vision, so do train yourself to switch it on and off regularly. You whining little bitch.

The sneaking sequences usually consist of Batman and a room full of heavily armed thugs. In order to proceed, you must clear the room, and the game gives you a large number of options on how to do that. You can either do it at ground level, or climb on conveniently-placed gargoyles on the walls with the help of your quite staggeringly efficient grappling hook. From up there, you can oversee the whole room and take the thugs out one by one. Or three at the same time, if you wish.

You can drop down from a gargoyle, grab a thug and go back up, proceeding to hang him from the gargoyle by the foot. Or you can drop down from a gargoyle, open your cape and glide all the way to a thug for a meeting between his face and your boots. You can use the grappling hook to grab three thugs at the same time, pull them over a railing and have them fall ten feet to uncounsciousness (it’d be quite funny if one of them fatally broke his neck, but I guess their rippling muscles and the fact they all look like even tougher versions of Mickey Rourke make that impossible). You can use your explosive gel to blow up a weak wall next to a thug, or the floor below him, or above him. You can sneak up to one and perform a silent takedown. And the best part is that the more thugs you neutralise, the more nervous the remaining ones get, until they are shooting their guns blindly at loud noises and begging for mercy while Joker teases them from the intercom.

You have, of course, to suspend your disbelief at the fact that even if they spot you on a gargoyle, if you escape their shooting and hide yourself again, the thugs forget about the gargoyles like nothing happened. They are kind of idiots, but sneaking in games often requires a lot to be overseen, like in the Splinter Cell series, where enemies always fail to notice the three glowing, bobbing green dots from Sam Fisher’s goggles in the shadows. And to the game’s credit, the thugs do booby-trap the gargoyles later in the game.

More and more options keep opening up as you upgrade Batman’s arsenal with the points you get from your overall performance in the game, not just on the sneaking sequences, but also on the fighting ones. The combat system is nothing short of superb. You hit square to attack, triangle to counter-attack when a little warning shows up over an enemy’s head, circle to stun enemies with your cape and x to jump over their heads. The more attacks you successfully perform without missing one or being hit yourself, the more your combat multiplier increases, giving you the chance to perform takedowns or throws, and also handing out way more upgrade points. The objective is, whenever possible, to take down an entire room of enemies in a single, flowing combo. And not only the game manages to make that intuitive, it looks INCREDIBLY good. Batman’s animations are flawless and the punches and kicks are painfully strong, with a good variety of enemies that require different techniques to be taken down. And the only little, stupid nitpicks I have are regarding the fact that, while connecting combos, Batman can leap from one side of a large room to the other with preposterous agility, and that, when being knocked out by a final, overwhelming hit, the enemies clutch the area of their bodies where they were hit — which looks realistic most of the time, but some times it looks amazing that they can still be conscious enough for that after some of Batman’s bone-shattering kicks.

As the icing on top of the cake, there’s an action camera that beautifully captures the last thug in a room as you kick his ass into dreamland. Gorgeous stuff.

However, to say the gameplay is “divided” into those sequences is a bit unfair — “Batman: Arkham Asylum” struggles to be constantly fresh and varied, and it really is. Over the course of the game, you find yourself fighting huge aberrations, sneaking silently on sewers, looking for Riddler’s riddles (an interesting and surprisingly addictive mini-game that is entirely optional), fighting several different thugs, fighting the dark corners of Batman’s mind (courtesy of Scarecrow), gliding enormous distances with your cape — way more variety than you’d expect from a game that happens in a small island. It’s all thanks to Dini’s story, which always finds new situations to put Batman in, and Rocksteady’s good gameplay ideas. There’s some welcome little additions too, like character biographies that are far from being a boring read.

Technically, “Arkham Asylum” is amazingly competent. What immediately stands out aside from the good sound effects are the voiceovers. Guess who steals the show. As the Joker, Mark Hamill does his typically excellent job, even making some of Dini’s less successful one-liners into something acceptable. As Batman, Kevin Conroy’s strong voice is efficient, if ocasionally a bit cheesy (“These poor guards didn’t stand a chance!”, for example, even though this is largely Dini’s fault). The cast as a whole is efficient and Ron Fish’s soundtrack fits the gameplay and the mood of the story well, and has some memorable tracks.

And while I concede I’m sick of the Unreal Engine used for EVERY GAME these days… “Arkham Asylum” looks very good. The level design is exceptional, the animations are amazing, the modeling can look a bit stony but this is clearly part of the game’s visual style. It should also be said the physics are very well-implemented, and the way thugs react to your punches and kicks, aside from the aforementioned nagging nitpick of clutching their wounds, couldn’t be better.

With a single-player campaign that’s lengthy enough, and challenge rooms and riddles to keep you occupied for a while after it’s over, “Batman: Arkham Asylum” is a brilliant game that marries gameplay and story in a very balanced way and provides a varied and fresh experience. It also gets the main thing right: you feel like Batman while you play this.

The only exception being, of course, that he’s nuts and you’re probably not.

Comic Review – Ignition City #04 and Unknown Soldier #10

When it comes to artwork, this was a tremendously bad week.

“Ignition City” started very well on both fronts: script and art. But after issue one, Warren Ellis gradually let the initial momentum dissolve into a little story that is merely enjoyable, failing to provoke emotional impact — and in this issue, he introduces a character whose resemblance to the bartender Vas (aka Love Sausage) from Garth Ennis’ “The Boys” is nothing short of staggering: Doc Vukovic.

The difference being that Vas’ “russianized” English was convincing and funny, and the character suited the story well. And Doc Vukovic’s English goes from “perfect” to “broken” and back to “perfect” way too often, not to mention he comes up with some sentences that Einstein himself would have trouble thinking up on the fly, which once again touches on that recurring problem of Ellis’ writing: the lack of a character voice; a lot of the characters don’t sound like themselves, but like the man who’s writing them. Hell, in a certain moment, Doc Vukovic says “They’re stupider than mud that’s been fucked by a donkey”. Ellis said this almost verbatim to a good acquaintance of mine on Twitter: “You are stupider than mud that’s been fucked by hobos.”

(I don’t think he actually meant it, but that’s straying too far from the point. Back to the review…)

And really, Vukovic is TOO MUCH of a comic relief. He seems created not to serve the story, but just for the sake of humour — like on the (admittedly) funny panel he bellows “SCIENCE WILL FUCK YOU!” And just to make his resemblance to Vas even stronger, he pours a strong drink to the protagonist Mary Raven — just like Vas does in “The Boys”. Difference being, in “The Boys”, even that drink had a part to play in the plot.

But the real problem with “Ignition City” isn’t Ellis’ writing, which, despite the aforementioned problems, is mostly solid. The problem is Gianluca Pagliarani’s horrendous artwork (or perhaps, Chris Dreier’s inking, or perhaps both). I don’t remember the last time I saw someone’s pencils decrease so much in quality — perhaps Lewis Larosa in The Punisher Max #1 to #6, and really, his pencils were still pretty good on issue six. Sure, Pagliarani is notoriously bad at drawing human figures (and ESPECIALLY faces), but at least he tried to compensate for that with good composition and nice backgrounds on issue one. Here, he just stops giving a fuck, and the result is incredibly poor (but quite well-coloured) art that drains any impact the story could possibly have. I was willing to give Pagliarani a second chance after his weak work in Ellis’ (badly-written) “Aetheric Mechanics”, but now that he had a story with so much visual potential to work with and did such a careless job, I won’t be interested in anything drawn by him in the future — with the exception of “Ignition City #5″, since the story is interesting enough for me to want to know how it ends.

“Unknown Soldier #10″, once again, continues to be an absolutely brilliant ongoing thanks to Joshua Dysart’s writing and Clem Robins’ lettering — together, they manage to make up for artist Alberto Ponticelli’s and colourist Oscar Celestini’s staggering lack of talent. It’s truly astonishing, how these two have found work at all. It’s not like people who can actually draw worth a fuck are at a shortage. I have friends who could out-draw Ponticelli with one hand behind their back and only three fingers on the other.

You might think I’m being too mean, but honestly, it’s not too much to ask that Ponticelli at least TRIES to finish his artwork instead of leaving it as a sketch — some of his pages look like thumbnail pages. His art, which had improved a step further on the previous issue, stumbled two steps back on this one. His poor visual narrative and lack of detail are made even worse by Oscar Celestini’s colouring, who might as well use crayons and spit. His work would have looked amateur nine years ago, and in this day and age, it’s unforgivable, although I’ll concede Ponticelli’s art doesn’t give him much to work with. If this series is supposed to have a sketchy artist and a colourist with a simple style, I suggest Goran Parlov and Lee Loughridge, two actual professionals who know what they’re doing.

Fortunately, Dysart keeps things going ingeniously, never forgetting to develop both the story and the main character. I was impressed by the way the plot went in this issue (especially the assassination attempt), and at how violent the internal struggles are becoming for Lwanga Moses. And the scene where he snaps at Margaret Wells is one that probably won’t leave my mind — and here is where Clem Robins comes in. The way he changes font size and the style of the lettering depending on how loud the characters are speaking is always excellent, conveying the intensity Ponticelli fails to convey — something that is very important to this issue in particular.

And this might sound like too small a detail, but I like how Dysart puts the title and credits of the story on the final panel — I think it’s elegant, much better than a “to be continued” and much much better than “the end”.

A story that gets better and more gripping every issue, with the best lettering I have seen in a long time. In the hands of a decent artist and colourist (with this writing, “decent” is enough), “Unknown Soldier” could easily become a masterpiece.

Movie Review – Angel Heart

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092563/

When a movie flat out breaks at the box office but posteriorly becomes a beloved masterpiece, it’s called “cult”. In case you already knew that and are now thinking I’m an arrogant shit who finds himself clever for explaining that, sorry (and go fuck yourself). “Blade Runner” would be a perfect example – it was a disaster when it came out and is now acclaimed as one of the greatest films of all time. “Angel Heart”, though, wasn’t so lucky. It flopped at its release and, to this day, gets mixed reviews. Which couldn’t be stranger, considering it’s a wonderfully well-written noir that gets it right in every technical and emotional aspect and offers a stumpedous performance by Mickey Rourke.

Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a private detective, hired by a cult leader named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find a man that owes Cyphre a debt. The movie follows Angel’s investigations, that become more dangerous as he proceeds until it reaches a horrifying revelation. No, not very different from your typical noir story, but the power of the film is in the execution and in Rourke’s  inexplicably ignored performance, which wasn’t even nominated to a single bloody award.

Since the script seldom leaves Angel’s point of view (only in the initial credits, I believe), it’s fair to say Rourke carries the movie on his back – or he would, if the movie needed carrying. Even with another actor, “Angel Heart” would be interesting enough to hold your attention, thanks to British writer and director Alan Parker. The intriguing plot is moved forward by good characters whose  sharp dialogue never sacrifices realism for wit, reaching a balance between both that prevent the typical “nobody TALKS like that” reaction. It’s a polished screenplay that starts solid, becomes very good as the movie progresses and then superb in the third act.

As the director, Parker – apparently aware he was working with an excellent cast – favors angles that show the actors’ reactions, but also allows for good frame composition, aided by the beautiful cinematography and the precise editing. The shadows, for example, are used to great effect – something clear in the scene that happens in Dr. Fowler’s kitchen, which is initially dark, or in the moments involving the mysterious elevator. Parker is, however, as subtle as he can be – like when he portrays Harry’s fascination with the girl Epiphany (Lisa Bonet) by adding a close-up of her face as she washes her hair – a frame that exposes all her charm and pure beauty.

Parker also adds an extra layer of intrigue with quick scenes that seem to make no sense – they’re more like dream sequences Harry has, but which, by the ending, become quite clear and turn out to be good foreshadowing. Violent foreshadowing too, since the director doesn’t turn away from violence or nudity – there’s a sex scene\delirium that features both and which I understand had to be trimmed so the movie would be given an R rating. Both, however, are vital to the plot.

It would already be a great movie without Mickey Rourke. With him, it’s easily a masterpiece. Absurdly convincing as Harry Angel, Rourke’s laid back, smartass attitude never becomes cliche, since he constantly offers glimpses of further complexity – like his barely noticeable look of guilt when he finds out one of the people he interrogated has been murdered, or the charming tone of his voice when he talks to a woman, or the sudden glint of danger in his eyes when he’s threatening someone – or, best of all, how he becomes more disturbed by his investigations as the movie goes on, reaching a spectacular climax that is not only brilliant thanks to the script, but especially thanks to Rourke, whose performance in this bit is nothing short of perfect – it’s heartbreaking, the look of desolation within his eyes. How this work of genius was ignored like it was is beyond me, and I’m very glad to see Rourke’s talent being finally fully acknowledged in the recent “The Wrestler”, which I haven’t watched yet, but which I’m sure won’t disappoint me when it comes to the protagonist.

The rest of the cast is overshadowed by Rourke, but that doesn’t stop them from doing excellent jobs – special mention goes to Robert De Niro, who uses a careful speech and a hypnotic body language to establish Louis Cyphre as an enigmatic figure (the way he smiles in the ending of the film, amused, is a vital touch by De Niro). The beautiful Lisa Bonet does not limit herself to being beautiful, and is wholly convincing as a young, poor mother. The remainder of the cast, from the fat detective to the scared Dr. Fowler, is appropriate and inspired.

With a good, moody soundtrack by Trevor Jones and the excellent choice of licensed music (“Girl of my Dreams”, by Kenny Sargent, is vital to making the ending as poignant and powerful as it is), “Angel Heart” is brilliant from its very title to its last frame – and the best thing is that the third act doesn’t need to be taken literally: two interpretations are perfectly possible, and whichever you choose, it’s still a polished, interesting plot. And even if you dislike it, the movie would be worth seeing for Mickey Rourke alone.

Bravo.

Mmm, okay, I take this one back…

I mentioned McCain doesn’t like the internet as a negative thing, a sign of refusal to follow this world’s technological advancements. Well, for some reason, I decided to check what MySpace users are saying in the forums…

… and I can no longer hold his internet-hate against him. McCain is a bastard, yes. Obama might be a bastard, we don’t know yet. But I can no longer pretend McCain hating the internet is something negative. Mankind is fucking doomed.

On the Brazilian Elections

Since I just wrote a small rant on Brazilian elections to introduce a larger rant on US elections, allow me to expand on the former just because I have nothing else to do today.

We are forced — I mean, supposed to vote on a new mayor for Rio de Janeiro this coming Sunday. Yes, SUNDAY. On that marvelous day when we can wake up as late as we want and do absolutely nothing AT ALL with no consequences… we’ll have to march to the locations they tell us to and vote on one of the several cocksuckers who smile for us as wide as possible in the posters, probably thinking in our faces when he is finally elected and we see how much we fucked up by choosing him.

I’m doubtful on who to vote on, because all the candidates seem to believe in the same strategy: to treat the population like a tremendous pack of retards. Everywhere I go, there’s a moron handing flyers portraying their candidates. And they don’t just HAND the flyers. They walk up to you, bellow “GOOD AFTERNOON” and proudly hand you the flyer as if they’re the hitman you hired to kill your mother-in-law bringing you her head.

Everywhere I look at, there’s a poster of a candidate, smiling as if he was getting a double blowjob while the picture was taken, with a slogan like “He’ll fix the city!” or “He’s the candidate for you!” somewhere on it. Not a single candidate tried a different approach, maybe a humorous approach. No, all of them thought their ugly mugs littering the city would be good reason to vote for them.

But visual pollution is not enough for them. Oh no, your ears are raped as well. Whenever I’m walking on the street, lost in interesting thoughts, they are cruelly interrupted by a van driving by, with amplifiers spitting BLOODY AWFUL MUSIC praising its candidate by using rhymes so incredibly retarded they make the Teletubbies theme sound like Mozart.

I don’t watch much TV – but if I did I’m sure the programming would be constantly interrupted by political propaganda, with clips of the candidate in question kissing babies as if that’s a I’m-Not-A-Prick certificate.

But I have someone I plan to vote on, because, well, he plans to legalise pot. THAT’S FUCKING ORIGINAL over here, okay? So at least he’s trying something different.

“Ares” – First Cover

“Ares” – my sci-fi short story – is not finished yet, but I decided to make the first cover. Forgive the sloppiness of the lines, this was drawn with a mouse in Photoshop.

Larger version here.

Hiatus

I’ll be back soon. Shouldn’t take long. Out of time.