<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nOnce the game was over I tried the “challenge” modes. <\/p>\n
Challenge mode sticks you in a room with a bunch of thugs to see how efficiently you can take them all down. I was feeling pretty good about my skills with the game at that point. I tried the lowest-tier challenge and got through the fights completely untouched, and built up some long-ish combos. It was the best I knew how to do, and I missed getting “bronze” by a long way. I had 5,500 points, and I needed 6,000 for the lowest prize on the first-tier challenge. The gold medal? 18,000 points.<\/p>\n
I could see that I needed to build up longer combos, but that didn’t feel possible. Up until that moment I really had been operating under the false impression that I was good at this game, and I didn’t see how I could improve. I’d get halfway through the fight and there would be nobody left within strike distance. Or everyone was on the floor, waiting to get back up. I couldn’t see how to keep the attack chain going without needing to take a step and break the chain.<\/p>\n
I think that having a serious challenge for serious players is a great idea, but this is a case where I had no idea what I might be doing wrong. I’m sure there was a trick to getting the higher scores, but I had no idea what that trick might be and the game never kicked any hints my way. I could spend hours and hours practicing my thumbs off, but without any idea of what I was doing wrong it would not lead to improvement. <\/p>\n
I figured I could go on YouTube and see how it was done. I exited the game and… never fired it up again. My heart wasn’t in it. I was looking at a lot of practice just to beat the lowest level of the first challenge. The game had fallen below the critical threshold of reward vs. time invested, and I no longer cared. It’s the same reason I stopped playing World of Warcraft when I got near the 40’s. <\/p>\n
Still, finding Riddler’s hidden crap was fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arkham Asylum is a fantastic game, if a bit short. I beat the whole thing in a weekend, and it took another evening to run around and finish up 100% of Riddler’s sidequests. Still, it was uniformly entertaining. Once the game was over I tried the “challenge” modes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350","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=7350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}