Batman: Arkham Asylum. I have been skipping it till this day (not literally) because of extremely-left-aligned-camera tear my eyes out, now I am at 65% I feel safe to say this is one hell of a game. No-Not perfect, a lot of stuff could be improved BUT it is a great game which can still be played after 6 years of its release as if it was released just now. I have completed nearly 200 story modes in my life so I am not of "COD youth" (more like a die-hard Mass Effect and Fahrenheit fan) but not every game will age like that. Say, Saints Row 2 was also made in 2009 but its gameplay is on the verge of being unplayable. Batman: Arkham Asylum's gameplay is sure great. Story too.
What would I improve? More cutscenes, smoother boss fights, a bit of pacing adjustments. But it really is a great game. And I am looking forward to playing City (which I will do as soon as I complete this one, and will be very interested to see technological AND gameplay/storytelling advancements) and rest. One of the reasons contributed for me to delay this game so late was that I was simply annoyed by how they sticked to "Arkham" and kept and kept leaving Gotham out of the picture, but the game is so good and it is so interesting to see how will things develop that it almost makes you forget this. And I gotta hand it to them, they gave us a flashback/dream with Gotham AND Joker in it!
Right now I have most of the main upgrades done, 160+ riddles, I am truly enjoying the atmosphere, feeling of being Batman, not particular to fighting but to his character, his past, his thoughts, his humanity, his idea, actually when I stop and look closer for a second I can find similarities between him and myself. Well this may not be a shock if I told you I was grown with watching Burton's Batmans, but I don't think I quite felt like this before. I don't just think about Batman either, I think about the ideas and feelings that comes with a Batman story too, it is hard to tell I guess, this isn't exactly limited to being a hero and criminal, this is about the state of the plane that story takes place.
Music is good too, there are some Elfman bits here and there, and some new things, the constant announcements of Joker makes me feel similar to when I was in BioShock's Rapture. But I wish following games have more Elfman bits. I can't simply get over Batman Forever's Theme Music.
One of the annoying things about the game is the problem with PhysX drivers tough, I have a 560Ti Hawk which is absolutely capable of playing this game at 1080p60 at highest settings but with PhysX at High I get 3 fps at sections after 40-60 fps, switching PhysX to Medium sometimes fixes it, then playing with Medium a bit, switching back to High won't have the previous problem. I keep switching between these settings. I played most of the game at High, some Medium, when I had to turn it Off I barely played anything, I always found a way to play it with Medium or High. So long story short there is no solution to this and it seems to be random that sometimes you can play it the best way, sometimes not. PhysX .dlls in this game are so old that this kind of problems emerge. And Nvidia doesn't really help with the case. Oh well no biggie. I will surely complete the game with no harm done. But if anything like this happens with the 2nd game I'm gonna be pissed.
When this game first came out I had a HD4870, I was annoyed by the fact that I would not be able to play it with all the cool effects enabled, one of the reasons I bought my GTX was PhysX and I did not exactly benefited from that so far so much so this is a nice thing to happen. Actually I even forgot the fact that this game had PhysX feature underlined with it. I never imagined I'd play this game years after and still (actually more) enjoy it like the first day. Much like the feeling of time standing still in the game. Irony? Luck? Destiny? Whatever you call it, call it something storytelling-worthy, 'cause, you know, stories are better than reality.
This was taken from my Reddit post. It was written 21 days earlier than the official opening of this blog, so dated as so.
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