{"id":27515,"date":"2015-06-24T21:30:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T02:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27515"},"modified":"2015-06-25T04:49:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T09:49:24","slug":"arkham-asylum-ep7-scarecrow-oclock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27515","title":{"rendered":"Arkham Asylum EP7: Scarecrow O&#8217;clock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/k_rdd8RyNb0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k_rdd8RyNb0'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>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 episodes<span class='snote' title='1'>So we ended up comparing it to Arkham City for 6 episodes. We tried.<\/span>. <\/p>\n<p>Mumbles brings up the subject of Joker&#8217;s taunting not being annoying. Like Mumbles, I thought it was a lot of fun. Like GlaDOS and Handsome Jack<span class='snote' title='2'>Your mileage may vary.<\/span>, it&#8217;s fun to hear from a well-acted, cleverly-written foe. Their taunting is a reward for progress. <\/p>\n<p>But the other side of that coin is that there&#8217;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&#8217;s much too similar to Kai Leng for my taste. He&#8217;s got the same voice actor<span class='snote' title='3'>The amazingly talented Troy Baker, who I don&#8217;t blame for this.<\/span>, the same &#8220;jackass high school punk calling you a cheater when he loses in Counter-Strike&#8221; delivery, a &#8220;trying too hard to be cool&#8221; costume<span class='snote' title='4'>To be fair, Batman is probably guilty of this, too.<\/span>, 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. <\/p>\n<p>His lines are repetitive, pestering, and not particularly clever. But while he&#8217;s annoying, I just can&#8217;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.) <\/p>\n<p>At the fifteen minute mark I try to describe using the takedowns with the mouse and keyboard controls. I was just guessing and I&#8217;m sure I got the details all wrong. On the controller, the upper-right buttons<span class='snote' title='5'>Y+B for Xbox, Triangle+Circle for Playstation.<\/span> does an instant-knockout while the upper left<span class='snote' title='6'>Y+X or Triangle+Square.<\/span> buttons will disarm a foe and destroy their weapon. These pairs fit nicely under your thumb so you can hit both buttons cleanly. It&#8217;s not so nice on the keyboard. Worse, your left hand is <em>already<\/em> doing WASD for movement and now you&#8217;ll need to put some of those fingers to work hitting attack buttons. I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>In case it&#8217;s not clear: I&#8217;m really enjoying this season. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[318],"class_list":["post-27515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-batman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}