{"id":53487,"date":"2021-12-28T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-12-28T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53487"},"modified":"2022-01-05T00:38:09","modified_gmt":"2022-01-05T05:38:09","slug":"arkham-origins-4-grate-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53487","title":{"rendered":"Arkham Origins #4: Grate Move!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to everyone who stopped in for the stream. I&#8217;m really enjoying these. We&#8217;ll be streaming again tonight at 7pm Eastern (<a href=\"https:\/\/everytimezone.com\/s\/58066b20\">click here<\/a> for local time) on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/ramblepak64\">RamblePak64 channel<\/a>. I hope you&#8217;ll drop in and join the fun.<\/p>\n<p>And here is the VOD from last week:<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.twitch.tv\/?video=1241493805&amp;parent=www.shamusyoung.com&amp;autoplay=false\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" frameborder=\"0\"scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>For the record, I played through this section this week. And sure enough, the entire Harley Quinn sequence is there.<span class='snote' title='1'>Fun fact: According to Steam I last played the game on Dec 15, 2015. This playthrough started on Dec 17 2021.<\/span> Like Chris, I have no memory of this section, but I must have played through it back in 2015 and then flushed it down the memory hole. It&#8217;s interesting that we <strong>both<\/strong> forgot this part.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I guess Blackgate Prison keeps a psychoanalyst on call at all times, even at 2AM on Christmas Eve, just in case any nutters get dropped off and we decide to analyze them in the middle of the night for fun?<\/p>\n<p>And I also guess that Harley Quinn wasn&#8217;t slowly turned by the joker after months of manipulation. Apparently she fell for him during a ten minute conversation? Okay then.<\/p>\n<p>And while we&#8217;re bitching and moaning about things: This Bane fight SUCKS.  <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>You beat him down in gameplay, then a cutscene happens that negates your progress and resets the fight to the beginning<span class='snote' title='2'>Shit guys. At least give him a health bar that carries across the two halves of the fight so it feels like I accomplished something in that first section.<\/span> and makes you fight him again. <\/p>\n<p>That fight starts with Bane hitting you for huge damage the <strong>instant<\/strong> the cutscene ends. Batman stands there and takes it on the chin. You could see the attack coming, but the game doesn&#8217;t release you from cutscene mode until Bane has already run you down once. <\/p>\n<p><tt>*BEGIN LOOP*<\/tt><\/p>\n<p>Anyway, Bane runs at you. Maybe he runs you over, or maybe this isn&#8217;t your first time through the loop and you manage to dodge.<\/p>\n<p>Then once Bane is behind you, you&#8217;ll want to swing the unhelpful camera around so you can see what he&#8217;s doing. Bane magically ping-pongs off the wall without regards to inertia and slams you again before you get your bearings. Also, Bane will often still hit you a second time, <strong>even if you press dodge<\/strong> like the game is telling you to do. It seems to be random. I dunno.<\/p>\n<p>Then Bane will launch himself at you. This is an attack that is &#8211; in defiance of the rules of the game &#8211; not telegraphed whatsoever. You just have to know that he does this leap attack after rushing you twice, and you have to also know to do another sideways dodge to avoid it. <\/p>\n<p>Then the game throws up the prompt for ultra-stunning him, telling you to hit B three times. Except &#8211; because of the previous move &#8211; you will ALWAYS be too far from Bane when this prompt appears.<span class='snote' title='3'>Either you dodged away, or his stomp landed and shoved you back.<\/span> So you push the buttons when told (because this game designer is in LOVE with his quicktime events) and discover that <em>oh shit, I&#8217;m waving my cape around at nothing<\/em>.  So then you run closer to try again. Right about now is when Bane will attack you. The BBB prompt is still there so you&#8217;re probably going to press that instead of hitting counter like you&#8217;re supposed to. <\/p>\n<p><em>Congratulations. You&#8217;ve just been hit four times and the fight just started.<\/em>  You&#8217;re more than halfway to dead and you have four more trips through the loop to go. The game designer is using your existing muscle memory and your trust in his garbage button prompts to trick you into making mistakes. This isn&#8217;t a fight against Bane, this is a fight against a griefing jerk game designer that looked at this <a href=\"?p=36613\">wonderfully interesting and deep system<\/a> and thought what it needed was quicktime events, abrupt rule changes, and exhaustive repetition.  <\/p>\n<p>It makes you loop through the exact same sequence several times. Every time you hit him, he turns himself invulnerable. So then you need to attack him again to disable his invulnerability, then stun him again, then beat him down again, then see that awkward animation where it feels like you messed up and he grabbed you <em>but no wait Batman does a weird sideways kick<\/em> to take a chip off his health bar, and now you go all the way back to <tt>*BEGIN LOOP*<\/tt> and the process begins again. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like the fight exists in this horrible dead zone between quicktime event and gameplay, so you can&#8217;t tell if you&#8217;re supposed to be playing the game or following prompts. The real trick to the fight is to just lose a couple of times until you get the pattern and timing down. I realize a lot of games take this approach to boss fights, but I absolutely <strong>hate it<\/strong> and it feels <strong>wrong<\/strong> in a Batman game.<\/p>\n<p>And then at the end when you finally &#8220;win&#8221;, you actually lose in a cutscene but then Bane leaves anyway. <\/p>\n<p>This game has a lot of really awful boss fights, but this one still manages to stand out as particularly atrocious. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to everyone who stopped in for the stream. I&#8217;m really enjoying these. We&#8217;ll be streaming again tonight at 7pm Eastern (click here for local time) on the RamblePak64 channel. I hope you&#8217;ll drop in and join the fun. And here is the VOD from last week: For the record, I played through this section [&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-53487","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\/53487","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=53487"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53584,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53487\/revisions\/53584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}