Power fantasy games; becoming a role-playing game person

I’m delighted to inform you that BACKLOG YEAR continues; the oldest game this month is twenty-two years old; still in the realm of covering modern classics for now.

I’m pleased that I’m continuing to manage to avoid buying games; and once the AYN Thor is in my possession, I’ll also be done with hardware for the next nine-thousand years. No, really.

I have the overriding sense that video game consoles have reached their apex in terms of power and fidelity. It’s not an arms race anymore; and that’s liberating.

I did buy an Xbox Series X last year for GTA VI in November, but when I’m done, that bundle, and a whole lot of other systems besides, are getting sold on. I’m looking forward to shedding more of my consumerist tendencies.

The meaningful hardware arms race is in handhelds now, as the Arm chips used in your Android handhelds and even your Windows laptops now become more capable in part because of chip revisions but also because Valve is funding open-source development into Fex, an X86-to-Arm (read: Windows to mobile, at its simplest) compatibility layer.

With my excitement for Arm pr, for the battery life improvements, and more games becoming playable on the move, I’m hoping that the AYN Thor lasts many moons in my possession. Focusing on playing games, rather than getting bogged down in chasing specifications on the device that plays them, so I can stay sane.

This feels more important as hardware prices rise, in a large part due to the artificial intelligence bubble, and because consoles are no longer subsidized to gather a sizable, “”””””””””mainstream”””””””””” audience (I’m using this term neutrally; to mean the demographic that just wants to play a game and isn’t fussed about nuances between hardware). The customer has gone from always being always right to being a bunch of mugs.

I’m excited about excising avarice from my body, and it’s in that spirit that I present this issue; there are superhero games, cozy games, text-based MMOs, RPGs, there’s one game that’s yet to come out, and two accessibility corners as I adapt to different genres as a person with hemiplegia.

Infamous (2009, Sucker Punch, Sony Playstation 3)

I played this when it came out and now I’ve been possessed by something to play it again now. It’s annoying to emulate, so I’m playing on original hardware.

You’re Cole MacGrath, a gruff-voiced courier who delivers a package that blows up Empire City (read: Not Yoik Citay baybee) and gives him electricity-based superpowers to deal with several gang uprisings as the social contract collapses in the sealed off city.

It’s grungy and urban, with a dark tone. I like that the cutscenes are comic panels; they’re over the top, and your man voicing Cole has been directed to be grudging about everything. It walks the line between pastiche and parody of the sorts of stories that inspire the ‘they’re not comic books they’re graphic novels’ thought well enough (I think of Batman and Spider-Man Noir for some reason; and the game’s director does cite a specific Batman book, No Man’s Land, as an inspiration, so this is about right). This is all complimentary.

The story is full of the beats that you’d expect; aid worker and Cole’s girlfriend Trish incorrectly holds him responsible for the death of her sister, and they have a will-they-won’t-they dynamic going on.

The idea that your choices matter should in a video game has been shown up to be mostly an illusion, but this is 2009; so a karma system where you can choose to perform heroic or villainous actions in and out of the story was novel. It might be the moody superpowers graphic novel setup, but I’m finding it engaging even now.

My current run is broadly heroic, though I played through both moralities when the game came out; and I like being able to heal people and perform live captures of gang members on the street.

I like the subtle (not pointed out in the user interface) calls to actions from civilians, who want me to stop muggings, or help the injured, or deal with some gang members. I like how the morality decisions present you with ‘evil’ choices that would be much easier to take (turn this valve to stop the water supply being poisoned, but be poisoned yourself, or make someone else do it for you under duress), and so in not performing those actions you are thinking about what it means to be a selfless person. On instinct now, if I bring direct harm to a civilian in the game, I do what I can to heal them, and Infamous’ greatest strength is the veracity of the role-playing; how willingly I buy into it.

It’s interesting that Cole’s powers don’t have a transportation element to them; you can grind on power lines and train rails eventually, but these moments are fleeting. To get around, you’re physically free-climbing buildings. This is fun; and one of the few things that makes Cole feel like a mortal with limits to his power, though I don’t often feel like Cole does what I want him to during a climb, and dropping down to ledges to pick up blast shards (one set of open-world collectibles that lets Cole store more energy in his body for him to use more of his powers, so it’s worth docking a few points for originality) is too finicky to look forward to.

It’s a challenge to get up high, though, and, considering that being on the ground can be a death sentence on a mission, I enjoy that you’re not an immortal god or anything. You have powers, but you’re also just a guy, still wearing your courier satchel.

The mission structure is familiar by now; last night alone, I encountered escort missions and defending things missions in a single sitting. There’s a lot of ‘go in this sewer and platform through and turn on the power’ sections which, aside from the promise of a new power, and each section being a practical tutorial on how to use that power, are not exciting.

The powers themselves are more underwhelming than I remember them being; I remember getting a code-exclusive power in the box that let you have electricity swords, but without going and obtaining that from somewhere, and, admittedly, only being at the end of the first island on this current play through, I have a standard bolt shot, a gust of wind-like blast, a sniper-like precision power, and ‘shock grenades’ (grenades). I seem to remember there’s one that if I press L1 and triangle together I throw like, electricity hammers, but that hasn’t come up yet. You can buy powers with experience points too, but none as interesting as that have come up yet.

It’s a Playstation 3 game released in 2009, so the frame rate is poor, and the visuals are saved mostly by the comic book sensibilities. It took my brain about an hour to put out of mind the jitters (relative to playing games at 60+ FPS, or at least games with good frame pacing) that affected aiming with a thumbstick. It’s already a difficult game, especially at the beginning as your powers are limited, but the performance hitches combined with the lack of aim-assist do not help.

I like October Moore’s earnest performance as Trish. I despise Zeke and can’t put my finger on why. Your man playing Cole isn’t miscast, but he should have been directed to tone down the gruffness if you’re going for a heroic run; he sounds pent up and mean all the time and it’s not a good fit for that.

Before I started playing Infamous, a game yet to appear on another console, I was thinking that it was good to still own a Playstation 3 for it. I feel less convinced of this now. It is good, and, thanks to the difficulty and some thoughtful limitations to Cole’s power-set, the superhero or villain fantasy is surprisingly grounded (that is not an electricity pun but let’s pretend that I meant it as one) and makes the idea of the game compelling, even when the repetitive mission structures start to wear.

I think I’ll finish it. It’s more than alright.

An account of my time in Torn.com (2004-, Torn LTD, web)

Torn (or Torn City) is a text-based role-playing game with graphics played in a web browser. You play a career criminal in a city that has seceded (or been forcibly ejected) from the United States. You do crimes, you can deal arms and drugs. You can also just work in a regular job, or run a regular company and not do any crimes.

It's one of those slow-burners, by which I mean people play it for years and get super into it, and progress in the game can be glacial.

Whether it's for you depends on if you like games about avarice and gang violence; you join a faction and go to war with other factions, and train in gyms to get better at going to war. This all sounds dreary, and it is a game that has peaks and troughs; you have an energy meter that you use to train in the gym, that you normally have to wait for it to refill, but you're also supposed to be refilling it by taking drugs (it is basically an online version of drug wars, built out to become a kind of Second Life for bastards), and for a while I just never did that and used it as an idle game, dipping in and out when convenient. I do this in a lot of massively multiplayer games, if I'm honest, but I also have periods where a game like this ends up dominating my life.

I'm in this mode with Torn right now; I've started taking the energy boosting drugs more regularly after getting frustrated with my slow progress, and I’ve been getting more involved with the faction. I’m still in the early stages of having good gym stats because I’m behind, even though I’ve been playing Torn for over two years at this point, but since I started focusing up on boosters I’m making astronomical gains, so I’m that much more capable, so I’ve been participating.

We’re actually in a war right now; you need energy to hit other players, so I accumulated lots of energy to be an effective foot soldier. The more players a faction hits in quick succession (known as a chain), the more points they earn in a war, so it’s been good to have a lot. So, I helped keep the chain up. Then I went to bed, thinking I was done for the night; having fun but not addicted. And then, at 4AM this morning; the morning that I’m writing this, I woke after a bad dream and decided to hop on for a bit and found that, hours later, our chain was still going. I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to chip in with the night shift, and ended up getting the 1000th hit in the chain, which, it turns out, gave me a solid progress boost.

The whole war has given me a boost; by completing ‘honors’ and ‘medals’ (achieving various things in game; think Steam achievements) you earn ‘merits’ which can be spent on various incremental upgrades (percentage boosts to your stats, for instance). In less than twenty-four hours, being switched on during a war has earned me seven merits and an entire character level; you tend to level up much slower in Torn than other MMOs, even when you haven’t been neglecting the game’s depth for two years like me.

My fascination with Torn comes from the fact that, like all MMOs, it’s a power fantasy. It’s taken me a while, but I now see Torn, the city, as somewhere I want to be powerful in. It can be so slow at times, but I’m finding it rewarding to set small goals and tick them off one by one. It’s compelling. I enjoy that the game has tens of thousands of active players, and it’s not like, say, World of Warcraft where the players are split between different realms per region of the real-world, so you really are in the pressure cooker with an entire city. It’s an exciting thought.

It’s been fun, and rewarding, to get the gratitude of the faction for my performance last night. They might be easily pleased, but so am I; and being told that I did a great job, makes me fizz up. There are payouts at the end of wars for those who perform well, so I might get something for the trouble; my new focus on energy boosters has put a dent in my in-game savings (the game has a massive inflation problem and just generally a fucked, so a tablet of Xanax can cost in the region of $800,000), so it’s comforting that my renewed attention in game might start seeing dividends.

I’m writing this from the in-game hospital; powerful players, such as those high up in the faction that we’re at war with, can still take me out of the game for a little bit, and once you’re hit, you’re essentially forced to take a breather and wait it out, unless someone revives you; which, of course, is an ability that you have to earn by working up through several starter (i.e. not player-owned) jobs. I’m in the process of earning that, because, in truth, I’ve always been someone who plays support in video games; Medic in Team Fortress 2, Mercy in Overwatch, a healer in World of Warcraft, a Lure and Toon-Up gag track person in Toontown Online. Being able to revive people, as part of a a warring faction or just people abroad (you fly to buy things like arms, drugs, flowers and animal plushies) as part of a lucrative side-hustle sounds most like the game that I would like to be playing. At the same time, becoming a better fighter is appealing, if only because there are people in the faction that I find arrogant and would like to take down a peg or two, but that will take time to get to.

I’m hoping that my year ahead in Torn City is fruitful and rewarding. I’m already hitting people several levels above me, and I’m already looking forward to the next faction war when I’m more powerful.

There are parts of the game that could be better; they’ve recently made it so that searching player-owned stores is more annoying by separating their listings from the dedicated item market, on top of a tax being added to the item market despite or possibly because of it being actually easy to find the things you want to buy in it. The writing is glib as opposed to being funny,

I like it. It’s eating my life and cannot be stopped. Some people get into it too much and need to get a grip, but what can you do.

Dr. Margaret Downs PhD.’s Tiny Bookshop review (2025, neoludic games, NS, PC)

I’m continuing my series of “receiving a game as a gift sight unseen from my partner” with Tiny Bookshop. Funnily enough, I seriously considered buying this as a gift, but my birthday came first so I was beaten to the punch. It falls firmly into the category of calming task management games with interesting characters that are my bread and butter here at the cozy corner.

In Tiny Bookshop, you play as a character who’s just moved to a small seaside town and operates a mobile bookshop. You choose where to set up shop each day, with occasional time-limited promotions that might help you maximize your sales. Throughout your journeys, you meet the residents of the town, help them with various tasks, and recommend books to them. It’s delightfully low-stakes, with a soundtrack and art style that strikes the perfect balance between relaxing and engaging. There’s a degree of randomness in what books you stock, as you just choose how many of each genre to put out on any given day, and don’t see specifics until the shop opens. It could easily be frustrating when you don’t have the right book in stock to meet a customer’s needs, but nothing bad happens, which is very calming for a recovering perfectionist like me.

It took me about 15 hours to “beat” the game, but it is one of those games where you can keep going with the quests you haven’t yet finished even after the credits roll. I don’t know that I’ll obsess over every last quest, as that feels antithetical to the spirit of the game. I got the most out of Tiny Bookshop when I wasn’t hell-bent on any particular quest, and could just sort of putter around town. After probably 12 hours of gameplay, I gathered where the story was going, but it took me longer than I was prepared for to wrap up the loose ends. Even so, the ending left me with enough warm fuzzies, and the overall gameplay was just so nice, that I'll certainly go back for more.

I’m playing Disco Elysium (2019, ZA/UM, NS, PC, PS, XB) but I’m not ready to review it yet and I might never be

You’re a police officer who wakes up and can’t remember that he’s a police officer.

Weird one this. I’ve made several attempts to get through this in the past, and I always seem to falter, because it starts to feel like a slog; mostly because I try to do the same things over and over; knock out the brick-shithouse-racist at the harbor, solve the supernatural event in the bookshop, whatever, and I lose sight of what it is that I’m meant to be doing; solving a murder.

So this time I’m maintaining a laser focus on the primary point of the video game, which is to figure out who killed the guy in the tree.

I’m also not getting on the amphetamine ASAP, and am not entertaining any of the supernatural ideas in the dialogue options and assuming that everything has a rational explanation. The game has designated me a boring cop and a ‘regular law official’ as a result. I’ll take it.

I’m on the third day, which is the furthest that I’ve gotten since the game came out, so I’m not doing very well.

I actually don’t know if it’s after a set number of days that the game just ends or if the counter’s there as information, because the main murder case is a powder keg.

In my quest to find low-dexterity games that I can play without my wretched noodle appendages falling off, I may be becoming a role-playing-game person.

I can go days without playing this, which I think is the depression talking, but then I’ll stick it on for a bit and get absorbed into the next step of the main quest. I find it exhausting, and I’m still feeling my way through what the point of it all is (unless, there is no point, ahhhhhhhh), and I don’t know if I’ll finish it, but it is highly compelling.

The art style is of an oil painting, the main narrator who also voices the skills is suave as fuck, and I enjoy that, for all that ‘choices matter’ in a video game, ZA/UM made a solid crack at making it work.

I’m caring about the choices that I make and don’t make. I want Kim’s (my detective partner) approval, which is shaping my desire to be a good cop, who doesn’t take speed out of the cabinet of a woman closely connected to the murder victim. At some point I may have started out by trying to be a socialist cop, and I still like trying those options from time to time, but I’m enjoying playing vanilla cop, mostly.

You can’t review this game unless you finish it multiple times, so I’m not going to do that, I’ll just say that it’s the kind of game that you don’t get often get, and so even though it is esoteric, bleak, and at times utterly inscrutable, I can’t help but chip away at it.

It reminds me of Waiting for Godot; the washed out colors, the rising despair of it all. I saw a production of Waiting for Godot in the past year, and I think it was case of the director taking notes from Disco Elysium and Disco Elysium taking notes from the play and extant productions of it.

In the theatre, it was in the way that the stage had a raised bit that acted as a hill, and the way that the characters moved up and over it, plus the washed out color scheme. It’s nice to think that there was a meeting in the middle there.

I’ve been getting back into reading fiction, and there’s a novel set in the game’s world, so I’ll get on that.

I’ve decided to stop playing this because of the psychic damage that it’s delivering via unfiltrated nihilism.

Steam tells me I have thirty hours in this, ten of which have been me playing it in the last two weeks. I haven’t ever gotten past day three. I have TRIED.

What’s happened is I’m stuck. There’s a skill check in the game that you have to pass, and it’s scripted that you fail it the first time, and then the game says ‘hey, go and explore and come back’.

So I’ve combed the area and have exhausted everything that there is to do as far as I can see. I’m just wandering around and the ‘I feel like a real detective’ vibe has given away to the fact that that I’m wandering an arid peninsula getting nothing done.

It’s exacerbating my mood and disinclination to play video games. After I made the decision to stop playing, I tried to play something else and I couldn’t bring myself to.

It’s draining and exhausting. I respect that it has a clear set of artistic principles, and I’m glad that it has an audience, but I cannot go on with it.

I am bad at finishing games; I’m not-not saying that, but this is different. I’m saying that if I’m drawn to looking up a walkthrough that’s arranged like a Burroughs novel, and I find that the tasks to clear the check involve characters that I haven’t met yet or quest-lines that I’ve locked myself out of due to role-playing a good cop, not one who aids teenagers set up an amphetamine lab, then I’m not going to be inclined to continue.

I could start over again on a new save, taking my past mistakes into account and following a walkthrough closely, and maybe at some point in the far-flung future I will, but, in the short term, all I think is that I shouldn’t have to do that.

It already feels endless because I play it in short bursts as a result of it being an interactive despair, so I’ll end up finishing it in the next life; the idea of starting over with it right now is not for me.

I maintain that I may be becoming a role-playing-game person; there may be Kentucky Route Zero and Baldur’s Gate 3 reviews in my future, but I am not a Disco Elysium person.

And it is an oil painting, but the bleakest, abjectly disgusting one imaginable. It’s a style that has its place, but it makes me sad when it streams constantly into my eyeballs.

I’m glad that the video game-as-depressant has an audience, I really am. I just don’t think it meshes well with anxiety medication and anhedonia.

An Android version where it’s a visual novel now? What were all that about?

Thoughts on the Fable (Playground Games, 2026, PC, XB) showcase on the January Xbox thing

I haven’t played the Fable games in any detail, but I enjoyed the bits in this peek at the new one where text like ’THIS PERSON THINKS YOU’RE A RICH TWAT’ and ‘THIS PERSON FANCIES YOU BECAUSE...’ appears on the screen, plus where it’s revealed that you can kill Richard Ayoade in it.

Lots of games play the ‘your choices affect the world’ card; literally Infamous at the top of this issue does this. However, I am strangely buying into it in the case of this game.

It looks visually striking and distinctive; fantastic, as in, of-fantasy. It’s appropriate.

You can be a landlord and evict people to the streets. This is a strange feature. I’m under no illusion that it’s going to be a living, breathing life sim; because the illusion always breaks, but I did enjoy the detail that every character in the world has their own name and routine. Bully had the same idea in 2006, but I’m excited to see what another company does with it twenty years later.

This year was going to be one where I didn’t buy any video games, but between this, Forza Horizon 6: This Time it’s Japan and Witchbrook (though I’ve absolved myself over that last one; TEN YEARS waiting for it), I could fail miserably; three times.

Or I could pay for Game Pass again and end up feeling even worse.

The vibes off Civilization V (2010, Firaxis, PC)

I’m horrible at this but I keep playing it, often on the lowest difficulty setting and with cheats on. I don’t care, it’s great.

I feel like this is about as intuitive a ‘4X’ strategy game (as they say in the industry) can be without overwhelming the player, and even saying that, it’s crammed with depth.

There have been two more of these since, and they just don’t have the same hold over me. The reveal that, in VI, buildings take up hex tiles was always going to kill it to me. It was an additional layer of balance that tipped the game over into busywork.

Despite having 200 hours in it according to Steam, I am so bad at this. Margaret looks to me for advice and I only have that much more of a clue because I’ve picked it back up recently. On a save where one of us controls the Civ and the other chips in as an advisor, we’re trying to play as pacifistically as possible, and yet have still got bogged down fending off Barbarians. On my own, on this, the day I’m writing this, I whiled away six hours, a working day, letting my inner bastard run loose over the course of several holy wars, as America threw its lot in with Islam. I love the counterfactuals and alternate histories that crop up while playing.

I often remark on here that I like achievement hunting; but that’s not the case here. I will never be good at this, and some of the civilizations do have starter bonuses and innate abilities that I’m too much of a dumbo to parse into a cohesive strategy. But I have to say; I could not give a fuck; it’s fun to piss away time in.

The AI is total bobbins; declarations of friendship dissolve at random when the other civ denounces you, and trades that start out impossible can open up, but only after several back and forth proposals. Maybe that is realistic and I don’t know what I’m talking about. The AI does only think in absolutes, though; sometimes they will outright refuse to trade because they won’t be able to offer me a ‘fair deal’, or they decide to be snide and offer me the worst deal possible - that I sometimes will just take to keep the wheels of diplomacy greased.

I stopped playing this for a year or two because 2K, up there with Take-Two for worst video game publisher, put their own launcher, that requires an external account of no value other than to scrape your data, on a video game that... already has a launcher? Bizarre, but it’s gone now, and hopefully that’s the end of that.

I’d love to figure out how to play this properly, but I’m no logician. I’m too impulsive. I’m bad at puzzles and at strategizing; thinking further than one move ahead. This is also why I’m a terrible Chess player, even though I love Chess on paper.

I think what this issue is establishing is that my favorite games are power fantasies; in the literal sense, as in the case of Infamous, in the ‘number go up’ sense, as in Torn, and in the political power sense (with a side of number go up here too, honestly) with Civilization V. As a series, as a genre, even; it doesn’t get better than this.

And okay, it’s an old (though technically modern) game, but I’m delighted that it runs just fine on an M1 MacBook Air that doesn’t have a fan in it. I should not have installed this on the computer that I’m supposed to be using to inch towards being a functional member of society, because there’s a not-insignificant chance that I’ll have more days like today, where I open it up, blink, and the day is gone.

Accessibility corner: Acquiescing to my body and becoming a turn-based RPG/strategy game person

On reflection, turn-based RPGs and strategy games are increasingly my bag baby, because they are the sorts of games I, a person who has hemiplegia, can play on the bus and in the cold winter months that are marked by long and insufferable bouts of chronic pain while wrapped up in a blanket.

Though Disco Elysium isn’t the game for me, I am interested in other, similar RPGs. My brain had gotten stuck for a while on the idea that all video games are action and combat and platforming where you’re pressing ninety buttons at once, and they’re not. I just have to know where to look, and to assert myself when I know that a game is just going to be not very fun, or even impossible for me, personally, to play. That’s always been difficult for me to accept, but I’m coming to terms with it.

Also: The latest in the accessible controller saga; Evil Controller PS4 review as someone with hemiplegia

I remember writing on here that the Pro 3 was comfortable and cut out a lot of pain for me, and it is and it does, but it’s still a conventional controller, and not something that has all of the buttons on the front.

SpecialEffect sent me the Evil Controller; it’s an adapted PS4 controller with additional buttons pasted on the front and back of the left handle, and with the right thumbstick detached so you can mount it to something and use your chin or your foot. I think this is overkill for my use-case. They also sent me a Trabasack Curve Connect, which is a regular bag that’s also a lap tray with velcro in it, and that’s where it’s at for me. I’m waiting for the AYN Thor to get here before I road test it by putting dual-lock (super-strength) velcro on the bottom of the Thor and seeing how useful that is out and about in the world.

I put some of the velcro that SpecialEffect sent over on the controller itself to try and find a comfortable spot for the stick to go; trying the back of it to use my leg to push the stick, on the left-side handle (too cramped) and finally on the spot where the right thumbstick should go; this, paradoxically, felt the most comfortable, but then I struggle to reach the additional buttons on the underside of the left-side handle, and it defeats the point. It’s also just not comfortable or accurate using my chin with the right thumbstick in this way, and it’s actually harder to use than how I would use the stick on a normal controller, because the manufacturer puts it in a raised base; useful for mounting purposes, but not here.

The other flaw with the controller for my use-case is that remapping the d-pad to correspond to the face buttons so that I can reach and use them in a one-handed layout is possible, but it’s not comfortable; the PS4 d-pad is blunt, and it feels unpleasant, even lightly painful, when I use the edges on my index finger to activate each button like that. This is likely a problem with all traditional d-pads, because I’m trying the same motion of the Pro 3 right now and it’s similarly uncomfortable. D-pads aren’t meant to be face buttons, so it doesn’t quite work.

I maintain that I really want the 8BitDo Lite SE, which has a d-pad but as separate buttons like on the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, but having to buy an Android one and an Xbox one separately is a cunt’s trick. I’ve spotted an Android one for thirty currency units but the Xbox one is holding steady at fifty, and that’s irritating, especially considering that I don’t know whether they’ll work with, say, the Brook adapters that I have for my PS3, Xbox Series X and Wii, and would rather not drop that amount of money to find out that they don’t, actually.

It’s this sort of minute dogshit that makes me want to bin it all off. Yeah, nothing about games is aimed at me. And I should go off and watch a film, or the last series of Harley Quinn, and stop banging on about it. I do do those things instead, but this isn’t a general culture blog. It could be, but I’ve steered myself away from that deliberately. This project is me confronting a hobby and making it work for me; finding the compromises. Documenting it. And also enjoying games; that’s good too.

Batman: Arkham Knight (2014, Rocksteady, NS, PC, PS, XB)

It’s another superhero game; I think that’s the mood I’m in.

I like this series, but I haven’t played this one before now; Scarecrow, er, scares me, and I always liked that City and Origins didn’t have him in it.

I that City made a baffling narrative decision by [redacted]. Fortunately, this game still [redacted], albeit under a flimsy narrative pretext.

It’s... more of the same. You’re Batman, and some bad stuff is going on over the course of a single night, except it’s set in Gotham proper now. This gives the game scale that I never thought it needed; Arkham Asylum is about right for the size of the game world, plus the streets have been made wider to accommodate a drivable Batmobile that comes with a combat tank mode.

All I can think of with the Batmobile is that there are too many people making the broth and it’s spoiling the product; the mechanic is shoehorned into almost every aspect of the game; even the Riddler has you doing laps of a race track, for goodness sake, and they lampshade this by having him say something like ‘if you can’t see the intellectual value in racing around my track, maybe you’re a big booboo dumbo who shids his pants’. The tank stuff is okay, although it doesn’t take long for them to trivialize it by introducing bright blue weak points that instantly explodes the tanks when you hit them. I prefer the pursuits where you’re chasing villains in the streets with the car. The puzzles where you’re winching the Batmobile onto roofs and remote controlling it to winch up elevators and what have you are the nadir of human experience.

I still like the game, but it’s not my favorite Arkham title. The best appearance of the Batmobile in the series is still in Asylum’s opening cutscene where you’re escorting Joker, The there.

It could be because I haven’t played an Arkham game in many moons, but this one feels like it has too many abilities and upgrades in it. The skill tree (closer to a skill web here) is massive. I’ve learned from Torn that I should try and spec in games towards my play-style, not to unlock everything, so I’m using that line of thinking as a get-out clause to not think about the overwhelming amount of attacks and takedowns in the game.

One addition to the move-set that I do like is the fear multi-takedown; you get the drop on one any enemy, and can then chain instant takedowns on an upgradeable number of enemies after that. You can clear small rooms with it; it’s ideal for hostage situations and other stealth sections, plus the Predator challenge maps.

I remain a big fan of the format of these games; big central ongoing mystery full of big action set pieces, followed by loads of other villains getting their own side missions. I went gliding over to a main mission, grappled over to a roof, and got jump-scared by Man-Bat. I love these side cases; where’s the Man-Bat-as-main-villain game? The Insomniac Spider-Man games took a few notes from this, but there still aren’t as many villains in those as the Batman game. ’Too many cooks’ doesn’t apply here; I love all the villains turning up.

I’m acutely aware that I’m not the world’s greatest detective; I’ve spent twenty minutes looking for the entrance to a car park, and comparable amounts of time analyzing corpses for evidence, and reconstructing crime scenes.

I saw online someone, reviewing it at the time, describing Arkham Knight as revolutionary, and I wouldn’t say that. It’s the third mainline entry in a series of games with many more entries than that, it’s not doing anything different mechanically or narratively. I already have a strong guess as to the identity of the title villain, and the crime reconstructions don’t work any differently to previous games.

The Batmobile’s evidence tracking tool (I was tracking skidmarks at the time) is reminiscent of Infamous having you follow ‘residual electrical energy’ (okay mate) to locate a missing person, and that’s from 2009; the same year as Arkham Asylum. Asylum, from memory, also has you tracking tobacco residue using the detective mode, so what they’ve done with the Batmobile tracking in Knight is reinvent a system that they already have. I’m not convinced.

The combo, gadget and counter-driven combat remains strong and easy to be good at. That too is old-hat now but, to be fair, Rocksteady did popularize it. I may just be playing it in the wrong era, with a virulent case of video game poisoning. I do like the game mechanics, but I’m not going to say that it’s ‘revolutionary’ at all.

It’s good! I’ll finish it! But it’s mostly to see the mainline games out to the end (the Suicide Squad game that comes after is not very good apparently) and not because it offers anything new. Alright, cheers.

Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

I’m enjoying that this year of the newsletter is running with the backlog concept; beyond soothing my brain, it’s something different from the sort of games writing that I see online, and even the sort that I read and enjoy.

The reason I started this site was to get me playing more games, and so I like that BACKLOG YEAR will get me playing the games that I own and haven’t played, or haven’t appreciated in some time.

(Fable does look good, though.)

Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. will be on hand to review cozy games. There are tentative plans for us to make the April issue a special one, but, because we live in the monkey’s paw universe, we’ll have to see.

As ever, if you’d like to get in touch, our email address is please@makebad.games.