T w e n t y S i d e d
Fair warning: My audio is WAY too loud in this episode. Even once I turn it down, it’s still too loud. Sorry about that. I realize this seems like a rookie mistake. “How hard is it to check volume levels?”
The RamblePak streams are a convoluted chain of cobbled-together technology. The whole thing is much more complicated than it probably seems on the surface. Audio passes through a lot of software on multiple computers before it finally becomes part of the stream, and it’s easy for a gain monitor to reassure you that everything is good, only to have another layer muck things up further down the line.
I did this sort of thing for years with the Spoiler Warning crew. The only way to learn how to avoid a pitfall is to fall into it. Eventually you learn about all the different ways that things can invisibly go wrong and how to avoid them. Until then, Chris and I are going to be stepping on rakes.
Anyway, with your expectations sufficiently lowered, here is the stream:
If you’re able to ignore my booming voice, then there’s a lot to like here. I think the GCPD building interior is cool. I think the VR investigation stuff is aces.Or at least, it’s aces compared to the “press button to solve puzzle” of the previous games. And I’m a sucker for the non-costumed “investigative hacker” versions of Barb Gordon.I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Batgirl. I just REALLY dig Oracle. And while our Gotham playground is probably bigger than it needs to be for the purposes of gameplay, it does look great.
It’s been years since I played through myself. But as I remember it, this first half of the game is much stronger than the second half. Later on we’ll careen from one overblown set-piece to the next, stopping for the occasional undercooked boss encounter or heavy-handed cutscene. This game eventually becomes the poster child for “trying too hard”, but these first couple of chapters are pretty dang solid.
Tonight we’ll be streaming at 8pm Eastern time. Check here for local time. Here is the link to Chris’ channel. Hope to see you there!
Footnotes:
[1] Or at least, it’s aces compared to the “press button to solve puzzle” of the previous games.
[2] I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Batgirl. I just REALLY dig Oracle.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
I already watched this last week! You can skip to 10:47 to get to where Shamus’ audio gets sort of fixed (though not entirely, unfortunately).
Regarding the episode itself, I find it kinda weird that Batman needs to beat up cops. As someone in the chat mentioned (I think it was Ninety-Three?) it seriously undermines Gordon’s character. It turns him from a stand-up guy who wants do the right thing into a chump – how delusional do you have to be to work in an environment where literally every single cop is corrupt? It’s actually kind of comical, if you think about it.
Also, that stealth section was a crime against stealth sections :D
The worst part is that he doesn’t actually need to beat up cops, except for the game forcing him to. It would be easier both in and out of universe to simply sneak past them but as far as I can tell the game places magic plot doors that for no reason can only be hacked open once the cops are defeated (after the big open room where I was wondering why Batman couldn’t just sneak past them, we get to a hallway with a hack-locked door and the interface won’t let you hack it until you KO the two random mooks nearby).
I really wonder what the news next day will be, after explosions and all the other nonsense, with a couple dozen police being carried off in ambulances after a brazen assault on the precinct. I’m sure the people of Gotham will be grateful to their nocturnal protector! /s
This. This cheesed me off so hard. It’s entirely possible to ghost your way though the whole building and complete the objectives without being seen…
…Except every room won’t let you leave if you do so, instead giving you a non-diagetic pop-up demanding you “eliminate all hostiles before moving on”, or some such.
Look, goddammit: am I the Batman or not? He canonically does this all the time, specifically to Gordon at the GCPD, in every media. The Dark Knight even had him appear and disappear inside a freakin’ bank vault surrounded by cops.
It turns out, every time he does that they needed to add 5 minutes of comic sounds effects of people being punched, gurgling noises, police yelling, an explosion, and then the loud sound of sirens.
Gordon: “How does he do that?’
I actually have this problem with Gordon’s character in general. I know Gotham City is a nightmare, but he’s been Commissioner of the GCPD for how long now? And yet it’s invariably portrayed as a total clusterfuck with maybe 1 or 2 other competent detectives, and all the other officers being useless or corrupt or both. I like the guy, but at some point you have to accept that the buck stops with him.
Alas, I must dissent. I can’t stand the police station. As far as I’m concerned, it is only better than Penguin’s ship in that it isn’t sinking or on fire. The police station is a bizarre, maze-like, and half-derelict space where one custom room connects to another without much in the way of rhyme or reason. I find it impossible to believe that anyone actually works there. It’s a nakedly video game-y space whose graphics are unfortunately realistic enough that my brain keeps trying to interpret it as a real space and failing.
Also, I got lost. A lot. I’m still kinda bitter about it.
You’re right about the surrealist layout. This is a problem throughout the game. The spaces have a sort of dreamlike quality to them. Any individual room or corridor will look reasonable in isolation, but when you back up and look at the whole it’s a linear brawling dungeon that runs entirely on videogame logic, without any attempt at verisimilitude.
I really appreciated the more grounded layouts of Asylum / City. It’s one of those things that you sort of take for granted until it’s gone.
More grounded layouts, you say? That does sound nice. You may have just nudged me into buying Asylum and City. There’s a Batman bundle over at Humble Bundle at the moment that includes all the Arkham games. Despite my carping, there are elements of Arkham Origins that I find extremely compelling, to the point where I occasionally consider reinstalling it. Perhaps it’s time to finally go play the Arkham games that people actually like.
Arkham Asylum in particular has a really good sense of place and even time. It’s one bad night on an island that’s _descending_ into madness and you can feel that descent. Too many videogames go 0 to 100 in the opening cutscene.
Asylum remains my favorite for how coherent the whole thing was. City added a lot of new gadgets, quality of life things, and fun activities in an environment that was closer to an open world. In every way it was a step up from an already good team iterating on their first effort… EXCEPT… in the process it got very long and a lot less focused. I can understand that many preferred the wealth of gameplay in City, but for me the tight story, sense of place and consistent atmosphere in Asylum takes the cake.
Even just on the time front, Arkham City takes place over one night because it’s copying Asylum. But it really doesn’t make sense to do that for City – because it’s a mini-City! That’s too big a setting to squeeze into a day. To really get the feeling of desperation and the changing politics in the Asylum-City, it’s a story that fits much better over at least a week (if not longer). Then you could dig into questions like ‘How does Batman sleep in an environment that dangerous? How long can he push himself without sleep until it’s too much?’
You see gangs fight turf wars with boundaries going back and forth, which is one of the cooler parts of City, but it all becomes a little ludicrous when thats happening over one day.
It sort of raises an interesting question: is it possible to complete the game in a single night of gameplay? Minus the overlapping time periods of the Catwoman segments (and any repeated sections due to death/reloading), playtime is theoretically real time to how long Batman himself takes.
I mean, I’ll bet speedrunners have got the main story down to something silly like 10 minutes by exploiting glitches and stuff, and I’ll bet a moderately determined ordinary player who’s already familiar with the game could manage the main story in one night, but following the premise of the game it should be possible to 100% the game in under 10 hours without resorting to speedrun strats or prior knowledge.
This goes for all 4 games. I wanna say it took me at least 2 nights worth of combined play time to finish “Asylum”, and it’s the most linear and bounded of the series.
When I think about it, this sort of timescale is actually pretty unusual. Most games either take place over several days, or don’t put any explicit timescale to the game’s plot/activities. I can think of ones that handle it oddly or vaguely, but not many where the gameplay is both real-time, and explicitly bottled within a single ~10 hour period. The ones I can think of are mostly short “walking sim” type games that clock in at 2-6 hours of playtime. It seems like a conflicted choice for an open world game of the “more hours = more quality” school of design.
You forget: daytime only lasts for three hours and fifteen minutes in Gotham. A player would have just over twenty hours to complete the game on time.
Obligatory Texts From Superheroes: https://textsfromsuperheroes.com/image/670327863202971648
I remember having this issue with City of Heroes random instances. A ridiculously complicated series of corridors seems perfectly fine to me when it’s dressed up as a medieval dungeon…but when it’s an office full of cubicles and whiteboards, it now seems terminally off.
I don’t know, I’ve seen plenty of D&D maps where there’s an underground labyrinth carved out of the rocks and the rooms are 50′-100′ apart (or more). I’m wondering who felt like tunneling through that much extra rock was worth it.
Equally I’ve seen some office buildings designed like labyrinths.
People describe the Tel Aviv central bus station as a fantasy dungeon. Easy to get lost in, and gets more dangerous the further down you go.
What are the dangers in the bus-dungeon? Hobos? Wild dogs? Kobolds?
One thing Arkham Asylum did really right was open with you walking though most of the main Asylum working as it “normally does” to receive dangerous patients like Joker. It forced them to have some level of logic to the flow, at least for some of the “main asylum” areas.
But, then, they also included a ridiculous 4 story Roman aqueduct in a cave so /shrug
My “favorite” version of this issue is actually in Arkham Knight, in which there are zeppelins flying over Gotham (and one crashed in the river) that are actually flying buildings. Literally no gas space inside, just the entire internal volume of the “balloon” fully crammed with rooms and hallways, top to bottom and wall to wall.
Actually it’s worse than that IIRC. The internal volume IS separated into gasbag chambers. The space between the “gasbags”, as well as between the gasbags and outer skin, acts as crawlspaces, and those interstitial spaces look like what you’d expect from a rigid-body airship (like the designers referenced real airships), but the internal volumes of the “gasbags” are entirely filled with rooms. This detail calls direct attention to the problem as you move through them.
Ok but, come on. They finally let you visit those zeppelins. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to be mad at that point.
No, that doesn’t follow at all.
Say the game finally lets you swing up there, and you’re all “AW YEAAAAH: I’m on a BLIMP, MFer!“. But then the moment you touch down you’re whisked via cutscene to the only playable location on said blimp: The Worst Toilet in Gotham. A button prompt informs you that thing you came here for is down there, and it’s time to get the batglove wet. Press the button to jam Batman’s arm in to the shoulder. Twiddle the right thumbstick to fish around, and the left thumbstick to crane and twist the bathead to keep the batface from touching the bowl rim. If you mess up, Batman will a have smear on his cheek for the rest of the game. Watch throughout the night as it gradually dries and sheds flakes into his growing stubble as part of the suit degradation system. Once the job is done, you’re promptly ejected to a glide below the airship.
That’s an extreme example, but the point is that execution can make or break an idea, or anything in between, regardless of how cool that idea might be in principle.
Oh I’m sure Shamus is just exaggerating about his audio being too loud, it’ll be fineOH GOD MY EARS! I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING ANYMORE
And how. I have been having issues with Elgato talking to my streaming software for a while now, and while I finally somewhat fixed it this morning, there’s now audio issues regarding the Elgato audio being received at all. It doesn’t help that I migrated backward from Streamlabs back to OBS Studio since the folks at Streamlabs stepped on a PR landmine of their own making. But I just spent my morning trying to find solutions to the issue, only to find none of the solutions work, and I still occasionally have issues where the Elgato and OBS programs are looking at each other but haven’t thought to actually shake hands without my prodding them forward. It’s all duct-tape and bubblegum over here and I’m halfway to just wiping the whole slate clean and restarting fresh.
Fortunately that doesn’t impact PC streaming, but I most certainly will try my best tonight to get Shamus’ audio sounding cleaner and less ear-murder.
In regards to the Gotcham PD, I just realized how many walls and floors Batman blows up or can blow up that were all paid for by the Gotham citizenry’s taxes.
It’s OK – those citizens were crooked, anyways!
“My taxes pay for your maintenance staff’s salary!” — Bruce Wayne
Yes, but built by the lowest bidder. In *Gotham City*. And that bid probably contained three bribes in it instead of the five bribes specified in the documentation, with $2.58 left over for the construction.
Admittedly, I misread this at first, but I like that misreading because it had me thinking your ultimate point was that it’s okay for Batman to beat up the union workers because those union workers were crooked anyway.
And the contractor is Wayne Enterprises.
Didn’t Arkham Asylum actually say that the reason the buildings are full of convenient gargoyles was because Bruce Wayne donated to rebuild them?
I’m suddenly picturing this being a standard business practice for Wayne Enterprises; they’ll only build a building if they can cover it in terrible mythology. The Asylum has gargoyles everywhere, Gotham Park has a harpy/manticore theme going on, Gotham General has the River Styx painted across all the walls.
Wayne demands all the vents are human sized and the rafters have little holes for grappling hooks.
*shrug*
We’re not the ones paying
In Arkham City, a decent chunk of Gotham is literally sinking into the ocean, so this seems accurate.
This is not inaccurate
You’d really think Twitch would have it’s own internal system for this sort of thing, given how many people do streams with co-hosts. It’s baffling to me that this requires rolling your own digital audio rack out of multiple 3rd party softwares and services.
Or maybe Twitch does have their own system, and it just honks so bad this kind of jury rigging is still the better option? IDK, since I’m not a streamer.
Either way it seems weird to me.
As I’m scrolling past it, the splash image looks like Batman has just smashed this guy with an oversized gun.
Because the stream is later tonight, I might be able to attend this one.
Lol now I can’t not see it. That’s a funny superhero idea, a dude with an absolutely giant honking revolver, but he never shoots it, just smacks people around with it.
Call him Pistolwhip.
Call him Buttstroke.
Sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon. Like how Spider-man in his show wasn’t allowed to punch people.
Brings back memories from Tim Burton’s joker.
Also took me several seconds to realize the guy still had a head.
Whoa, hey now, Wayne Enterprises has the market on neck braces cornered, not caskets. Not yet.
It’s been quite a while since I played Origins. I used to think of it as alright but the black sheep of the series, until Knight came out, when I started feeling more appreciation for it. There are still some preposterous design choices in the game but overall is not bad.
Knight is a bloody disgrace, though. I have yet to warm up to it. There are good parts in it, to be sure, but it’s irritating having to wade through all the crap to get to them.
I still have no idea what possessed them to have all those compulsory Batmobile sections. I mean, in every game the ultimade mode of transportation is flying. I never once chose to drive around instead of glide seamlessly through the city…
I feel like there’s roles where the batmobile can be considered useful, some of which are represented in game. It can be for when Batman needs to transport a person or object he can’t carry with him while gliding. It can be for when he needs a “tractor” to tear something down or supply generator power to something. It can be transport if he has to go somewhere outside the city where there isn’t anything tall to maintain his grapple-gliding. It can contain crime lab equipment that’s too bulky to carry on his person.
But there’s no reason for him to be using it as regular personal transport anywhere in the city, if the grapple-glide thing is part of the lore in play, and all that tank battle nonsense feels like it belongs to a completely different, non-Batman game. Doesn’t help that the design is fugly either.
I feel like if they had gone much lighter on the batmobile stuff, people wouldn’t hate it. No tank battling. Cut the tractor stuff down to just the setpieces (like getting it onto the movie studio rooftop so you can use it as a generator), without all the cut-and-paste wall-pulling and bomb-overloading busywork. Make transporting NPCs more than just a cutscene, but also without doing it over and over as filler (like aforementioned tractor stuff). And never force players to use the batmobile to get places they don’t actually need the batmoble to get to (e.g. don’t make your tunnels huge and long just to justify forcing people drive in them).
And maybe hire a better concept artist so it doesn’t look like a melanoma on Solomon Grundy’s ass rendered in sheet metal.
As is, the major problem feels like once they made the batmobile, they felt like they needed to squeeze as much out of it as possible to justify the investment. Like a bad movie producer who demands a monster be seen too often and too fully because the costume cost so much to make, and they think that’s how “getting their money’s worth” from it works.
I love the image of Batman idling the Batmobile so he can power the Bat-TIG-welder.
It’s obvious why they have them. They built a Batmobile, it was a major part of the design of their game, and you by his we’re gonna use it. They can’t let you waste thousands of hours of work making the thing.
It’s also obvious why they had a driveable Batmobile in the first place. Fans think things would be cool and ask for them. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes game designers listen to them, assuming that’s what will make their game a huge hit.
They’re frequently wrong, especially in cases like this where (as you point out) they should already know the movement feels fantastic as it is. Good designers recognize this and ignore fans when they’re wrong. Designers who don’t have a ton of ideas and are chasing whatever sounds like it will work don’t.
I don’t want spears in Elder Scrolls.
I always felt in Knight that the intention with the Batmobile was to replicate the scene in The Dark Knight where they are using Harvey as bait. Unfortunately it only hits the beat once or twice throughtout the entire game
I thought the Batmobile was fine as a means of transportation. It’s fast, it’s maneuverable, it lets you pull some sick plays where you jump in the middle of enemy mooks, etc.
It’s the bat-tank I didn’t like.
Yeah I loved the Batmobile in pursuit mode and I found it generally more fun to use as transportation than the grapple-glide.
If it didn’t have the tank mode at all then the game would be massively improved.
I liked Oracle too. But I always wanted her to have a nemesis named MySQL.