{"id":53381,"date":"2021-12-07T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53381"},"modified":"2022-01-04T21:44:27","modified_gmt":"2022-01-05T02:44:27","slug":"arkham-origins-1-deadstroke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53381","title":{"rendered":"Arkham Origins #1: DeadStroke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ramblepak64.com\/\">Chris<\/a> and I went through the first two hours of Batman: Arkham Origins. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/videos\/1220967790\">You can watch the VOD here<\/a>. Chris was playing, and I was running my mouth. It&#8217;s been <a href=\"?cat=188\">a few years<\/a> since I did this sort of thing, and it was a lot of fun. <\/p>\n<p>You can also watch the show in the following embed, which I&#8217;ve placed below the fold because Twitch embeds insist on auto-playing:<\/p>\n<p><!-- Add a placeholder for the Twitch embed --><\/p>\n<table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\"\n    src=\"https:\/\/player.twitch.tv\/?video=1220967790&#038;parent=www.shamusyoung.com&#038;autoplay=false\"\n    frameborder=\"0\" \n    scrolling=\"no\" \n    width=\"1024\"\n    height=\"576\"\n    allowfullscreen=\"true\"\n><br \/>\n<\/iframe>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><xiframe src=\"https:\/\/player.twitch.tv\/?video=1220967790&#038;parent=www.example.com\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" scrolling=\"no\" height=\"378\" width=\"620\"><\/xiframe><\/p>\n<p>EDIT: I figured out how to turn off autoplay, which should REALLY be off by default.<\/p>\n<p>Back in 2013 I did <a href=\"?p=21677\">a 5-part series on this game<\/a>, which I hilariously called an &#8220;over-analysis&#8221;. Oh <a href=\"?cat=612\">how far we&#8217;ve come<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t believe how overstuffed this game is. Black Mask, Nigma, Joker, the assassins, and Bane, along with the entire hour-long Penguin detour, the Croc cameo, the side-plot with the police, and the drama between Batman and Alfred. Not to mention the boss fight against Deathstroke, which the game treats like a visit from the pope. <\/p>\n<p>The writer jams in way too many plots, and then short-changes all of them further by having the Joker eat so much screen time. This game is nowhere near as bad as <em>Rise of Skywalker<\/em>, but it seems to be afflicted with the same panicked desperation. It doesn&#8217;t know what the audience wants, so it tries to give them a little of everything by lunging from one underbaked plot-point to the next.<\/p>\n<p>Having said all that&#8230; I don&#8217;t dislike the game the way you might imagine from the previous two paragraphs. It has a few good moments, and I really enjoyed this snowy Gotham playground. <\/p>\n<p>Chris emailed me this week, along with some further thoughts on the fight. I was going to write about it myself, but he perfectly covered everything I have to say about it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At the start, he dodges all punches, dodges\/leaps overhead, and cape stuns. He dodges\/deflects Batarangs. The only move you can do is counter his attacks, or, it turns out, batclaw. The batclaw works over and over again until it doesn&#8217;t. Then he dodges that, too. It turns out, you can perform follow-up punches after some counters and after you batclaw him (when it works).<\/p>\n<p>The obvious differentiation from Mr. Freeze is that all of Batman&#8217;s stealth abilities work at the start of Freeze&#8217;s fight. It is only as you progress that you have fewer tools at your disposal, and thus tests and encourages the player to make full use of Batman&#8217;s capabilities. Deathstroke starts out immediately able to avoid most of Batman&#8217;s moveset, and what works changes as the fight progresses. It doesn&#8217;t really test your powers of observation because his stance never changes to indicate when he&#8217;s vulnerable to what, and it still barely uses any of your tools or combat skills. It&#8217;s also really early in the game, so you don&#8217;t have a lot of tools or skills to use, period. It&#8217;s possible you can use the detonation gel, but I couldn&#8217;t recall the quickfire command to test it out.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, the quick-time portion of the fight where you have to button mash counter reflects a Deathstroke that is comically pounding away at Batman like a cartoon character rather than a skilled warrior.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s not a very good fight in terms of game design, nor is it a very good display of Deathstroke&#8217;s supposed awesome skill. Like Boba Fett, his inclusion is loved simply because people love the character, regardless of whether he does anything in this game to earn that beloved reputation (which he doesn&#8217;t).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So&#8230; not an awesome fight.<\/p>\n<p>Chris and I will be streaming again tonight at 7pm Eastern. <a href=\"https:\/\/everytimezone.com\/s\/cbc78cf0\">This link<\/a> should help you work out your local time if you&#8217;d like to catch the show. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/ramblepak64\">Here is the link to Chris&#8217; channel<\/a>. Hope to see you there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week Chris and I went through the first two hours of Batman: Arkham Origins. You can watch the VOD here. Chris was playing, and I was running my mouth. It&#8217;s been a few years since I did this sort of thing, and it was a lot of fun. You can also watch the show [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-streaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53381","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=53381"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53404,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53381\/revisions\/53404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}