Teaser trailer talk: BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM 2

[thehefner]

I have returned from Tuscaloosa with a Henchgirl and a stomach flu, to discover that the teaser trailer for the video game sequel to BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM has made the rounds.

I couldn't actually play B:AA, so perhaps I missed out on a lot of the game's much-lauded appeal. I was expecting a lot more from it, between the Holy Trinity of Conroy, Hamill, and Sorkin united under the usually-superior pen of Paul Dini, and the rave reviews all-around. Instead, I found the dialogue to be far beyond Dini's usual standard, with the Joker being not that funny and Harley sounded rather more like Grant Morrison's tone-deaf Squeaky Fromme take from that abysmal BATMAN (purple) prose issue. I was holding out hope, that maybe it was all going somewhere really awesome. And then, yeah, not really.

Maybe it was more fun to play than to watch. Either way, I felt like the only person to be rather disappointed by the game.

That said, the trailer fills me with giddy geek glee. Hamill's laugh STILL makes my heart go aflutter, especially the way it's done there. The hints at the other villains to be included also pleases me gr... oh fuck it, if you watched that, you know exactly why *I'm* excited:





On one hand, I'm nervous about how this game might cock-up the character. On the other...*fingers crossed* get Richard Moll, get Richard Moll, ohpleaseohpleaseohplease get Richard Moll...

Comments

[dormsquirrel.livejournal.com]

The thing about video games is that while there is a huge emphasis on the visual design and storyline nowadays, the game play always will come first. Any storyline has to serve the mechanics of the game, not the other way around. The reason video games are so addicting is that they create a series of increasingly complex tasks to solve that engage the reward circuitry of the brain in a very concrete fashion (more so than real life, a lot of the time).

I think this is the major reason why Arkham Asylum was so successful and Ghostbusters was not. Yes, Batman had great voice acting and dialogue and an interesting storyline, but it was the somewhat innovative and seamless game play that really made the game popular. Ghostbusters, on the other hand, had the voice acting and dialogue and something of a story, but the game play was atrocious. Or, at the very least, more frustrating than fun. So all of the atmosphere and ambiance of the game (which is what the storylines are, essentially) couldn't save it.