T w e n t y S i d e d

I’m so glad Josh was the one who brought up the subject of what Ivy “eats”. Saved me from having to ask the question.

For the record, I don’t REALLY need an explanation for where Ivy gets her energy. In fact, I think it’s good if they don’t try to explain it. It’s not a problem here because it doesn’t come up. If there was a plot point where the warden took away her food, or if she got the power to escape because someone left her too close to a grow lamp, then we’d be obliged to think about this stuff. The game doesn’t explain it, and it doesn’t matter, because fighting her never comes down to directly controlling the energy intake of her physical body.

But I don’t mind discussing the idea of how she sustains herself. It’s a bit of a fan-wank, like asking “which superhero would win in a fight?”, but it’s harmless and fun and sometimes leads to interesting or unexpected conclusions.

I’m sure other people have done this over the years, but let me have a go at it:

Let’s say Ivy does photosynthesize, but she’s also carnivorous via the plants that eat peopleThere are an awful lot of calories stored up in the average person!. (The Harley Quinn DLC in Arkham Knight explicitly shows Ivy’s plants eating cops.) She taps into these huge networks of building-sized plants and soaks up the solar power and calories while she’s on one of her rampagesUndercut somewhat by the fact that these rampages usually happen at night, but shut up.. That gives her lots of power to be ambulatory, grow more plants, produce spores, and whatever else she’s trying to do. Then Batman comes along, foils her plans, and they stick her in a tank with no access to plants. From there she’s living off whatever she’s got stored in her body.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We have a long-running joke among the cast that we say awful racist things when not recording”Oh, you’re recording now? Man, I’m glad I got all that hateful stuff about Chinese people out of my system earlier!”. And then sometimes we make up fake racism to joke about how we’re not recording yet, or that we need to get all our racism out before we start recording. So the screwy tirade about Canadians was a reference to the fact that this footage wasn’t supposed to go in the show. And then Josh left it in. I wouldn’t mind (Josh trolling us is one of our running gags.) but this racism joke will only make sense to members of the castAnd really, it’s not so much a “funny” joke as an idle way of dealing with the paranoia of recording hours and hours of unplanned commentary for a large audience every week, and also a way of making the “are we recording yet?” conversations less tedious..

So if that bit didn’t make sense… hopefully now it makes slightly less not-sense.

For the record: I’m okay with Canadians coming to America, as long as they learn English first.

The “Batman is sad” footage Chris was talking about is a reference to this video that Chris made about Arkham Origins.

“Batman agonizing over his dead parents” has now been featured in every Arkham game.

I’m going to straight-up recant what I said in this episode about allowing the game to continue if you failed to save Dr. Doctor M.D. from Zsasz. It’s true that it doesn’t make any difference to the plot, but it does break Batman’s trait of hyper-competence and obsession with saving everyone. A failure like, “I wasn’t fast enough, and someone died.” is a HUGE deal for Batman. It does happen once in a while, but it’s usually part of some sort of character-building moment. It would be the kind of thing he would agonize over for the rest of the game, and would need to be incorporated into some sort of arc. It’s totally inappropriate to have a failure like that stand without giving it the attention it deserves.

Batman doesn’t see the death by exploding safe as his fault, because he couldn’t have saved her from that. He’s spent his life training to resolve hostage situations, ambush people, and hit stuff with Batarangs, so that failure would sting in a way that the exploding safe doesn’t.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Arkham Asylum EP8: Some Kid’s Parents Died!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Whelp, Arkham Knight is out. I wanted to start Arkham Asylum a few weeks before the launch of AK. I knew that once the game was out, comparisons would be unavoidable, and I wanted Arkham Asylum to stand on its own for a few episodesSo we ended up comparing it to Arkham City for 6 episodes. We tried..

Mumbles brings up the subject of Joker’s taunting not being annoying. Like Mumbles, I thought it was a lot of fun. Like GlaDOS and Handsome JackYour mileage may vary., it’s fun to hear from a well-acted, cleverly-written foe. Their taunting is a reward for progress.

But the other side of that coin is that there’s nothing that sucks all the joy out of a videogame quite like a dumb adversary. If we define a spectrum with GlaDOS on the high end and Kai Leng on the bottom, then Arkham Knight falls on the very low end of the spectrum. He’s much too similar to Kai Leng for my taste. He’s got the same voice actorThe amazingly talented Troy Baker, who I don’t blame for this., the same “jackass high school punk calling you a cheater when he loses in Counter-Strike” delivery, a “trying too hard to be cool” costumeTo be fair, Batman is probably guilty of this, too., the ability to poof in and out of the scene at the whim of the writers without regard to reason or means, and the same super-power where he makes you fight like a complete dumbass in cutscenes. Arkham Knight is just a milder version of the same horrible approach to motivating the player.

His lines are repetitive, pestering, and not particularly clever. But while he’s annoying, I just can’t work up the energy to hate him more than the main villain, the Batmobile. (See my Twitter feed for my four-day rant about that.)

At the fifteen minute mark I try to describe using the takedowns with the mouse and keyboard controls. I was just guessing and I’m sure I got the details all wrong. On the controller, the upper-right buttonsY+B for Xbox, Triangle+Circle for Playstation. does an instant-knockout while the upper leftY+X or Triangle+Square. buttons will disarm a foe and destroy their weapon. These pairs fit nicely under your thumb so you can hit both buttons cleanly. It’s not so nice on the keyboard. Worse, your left hand is already doing WASD for movement and now you’ll need to put some of those fingers to work hitting attack buttons. I don’t think this is a case of bad porting; I honestly have no idea how you could improve on what we have. This is just a game that was designed for a controller in the same way that Civilization is designed for a mouse, and using a different input system is unavoidably going to be an awkward compromise.

In case it’s not clear: I’m really enjoying this season.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.