TornadoCreator

Yeah thread merge... also you're wrong. I did write a larger post but fuck it.

The bolded is simply false. Countering doesn't break combos, it's basically the core of the combat system. I didn't mention it in my post because I thought it went without saying but the freeflow combat system is probably the biggest reason why the game was popular. It's just fucking tight. The way you seamlessly chain up hits, counters and takedowns, nothing makes you feel like Batman more than demolishing a dozen guys without taking a single hit or breaking combo. If you button-mashed your way through the game, you were doing it wrong. No seriously, I'm definitely right here... I was only playing it last week (and I know how to play it before you suggest I'm just doing it wrong). Countering breaks combos, fact. If you still have the game, stick it in and try it if you don't believe me. I have the game on PS3 just in case that makes a difference but I doubt it. My PS3 is connected to the internet so it doesn't need patching or anything like that. In combat, pushing 'triangle' to counter an attack resets the combo counter immediately. I thought it was a glitch at first but no, successful counters where resetting my combo every time. I'm sure counters where intended to build up the combo, and hopefully the do in the sequels but not here... perhaps you're mis-remembering. I would have marked it up considerably if counters actually worked.

It wasn't on the first page, and pretty much every forum ever has a "don't necro old threads" rule. If the admin/mods care that much they'll merge the threads. I'm not going to start a conversation in a thread that's already reached it's natural conclusion or derail an ongoing conversation to make my post, that's just silly (and counterintuitive if you want to encourage people to post). It is possible to have multiple conversations about the same subject especially if it's with different people... Becides, I don't care if it's already been discussed by someone else... everythings already been discussed somewhere by someone. *I* haven't discussed it, which is the whole point of a message board surely.

Well, this is disappointing... I posted this review on metacritic. I question sometimes, how some games get trashed in reviews for "repetitive gameplay" or "uninspired combat" while this game is praised endlessly. Whilst admittedly fun at times the flaws in this game are many and difficult to ignore. First the positives; This game is truly a realised vision of Batman. The cast of the animated show provide great voice acting, and the art style is very reminiscent of the show. The stealth elements are well integrated into the game also, giving it a somewhat unique feel. Special mention should be given to the Scarecrow sections, which are tense and very evocative. That's it I'm afraid... Unfortunately, now for the negatives; First, the combat in this game is sickeningly simplified. Repeatedly tapping 'square' will solve most situations, and once you've learned to dodge with 'x' when an enemy telegraphs an attack you're unstoppable. Counterattacking is pointless as it breaks your combo to do so, actually encouraging button mashing over tactics. Secondly, movement and camera; you have to hold down either the crawl or run buttons to centre Batman in the screen, now while a slightly off centre over-the-shoulder camera is standard for these games, this goes way too far. Batman is fixed to the left hand side of the screen, effectively making you blind to anything coming at you from the left. Since when was Batman blind in one eye? Couple this with a walk speed that's too slow and a run speed that's too fast and you'll be squatting you way through the game as though Batman constantly needs the toilet. The lack of a jump button and context sensitive grapple hook controls also contribute to fiddling control that really damages the experience. Next there's the boss fights, or lack-there-of. Most bosses are little more than fighting a wave of goons while the boss cackles and watches from a window somewhere. Occasionally there's a big enemy which is beaten by dodging and having them charge into a wall, a technique used more creatively a decade ago in Spider-Man on the PSOne. Lastly for the negatives there's the 'detective' mode which is insultingly linear. Touted as a means to allow none-linear gameplay, all it actually does is mean you have to cover the screen with a blue filter and follow the trail of glowing orange lights to the next part of the story. There's no actual investigation, puzzle solving, or intrigue; whether you're searching for fingerprints, blood stains, or tobacco smoke, your detective mode can sense it from across the room and instantly gives you a straight line to follow. It's monkey see, monkey do, and using it actively detracts from the great graphics. Now ow if an easy, linear, and by the book comic hero game with maybe a dozen hours of content is what you're looking for, great, but if not you'll be disappointed. It's not that it's a bad game, far from it; it was a fun game for a few hours at least, but everything it's trying to do has been done better. Honestly, the Spider-Man game on the original PSOne has more varied combat, better boss fights, a stronger storyline, more varied locations, similar stealth elements, and a far better camera... and that came out more than 10 years before Arkham Asylum. That's rather sad for a game that's supposedly a pioneer of modern gaming. Score -:- 5/10 - Average So, I was wondering; do people share my opinion? I seem to be massively in the minority and I just don't get what makes this game so great in so many peoples eyes. (Oh, and no, I've not played the sequels yet which I hear improve on this game significantly). What do you think of the game and why?

The way I see it, the game could be a festering pile of crap and it'd still be worth the price I paid for the spare box, in case of future breakages. I've got a scarily fast growing PS3 collection now, about half of which where bought on a whim for under a fiver. If I get more than 2 hours of fun from a game for less than the price of a pint at the pub I don't feel I can reasonably complain. That said, it's made me really struggle to justify any game at release price. It has to be incredible to be worth buying over more than a dozen other games combined. Will let you know what I think of Dark Void though.

Got to agree with Ethan there, it's far easier to misplace a file of only a few hundred MB on a 1.5TB hard drive than it is misplace a game disc or cartridge. I suppose you could burn it to a disc, get a blank case and print up your own label; but at that point it's a home-made physical copy and I'm here to play the games, not become an unpaid part of the production team.

On a whim I set up 50 eBay bids on games, all 99p bids with £2 or less postage. Only won three of them but I got 'Prince Of Persia: The Forgotton Sands', 'Dark Void', and 'Batman: Arkham City' all on PS3; all for a total of £6.

The scary thing is how little of today will survive. We've started to reach the point where we've realised CD technology doesn't last. Some early CDs now refuse to read, the data is just corrupt. Eventually this will happen to all discs; so CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Hard Drives... all gone. Solid State drives we know corrupt data over time too so they're no help. Pretty much all digital storage will be unusable in 150 years, and even if it was, would the future have machines to read our various formats? Not only does a disc have to survive but the machine that plays that disc has to survive too. It's already hard enough to find a working Jaguar CD, Commodore-64 Disc Drive or Laserdisc Player. Imagine how impossible it'll be to find something to read a UMD, HD-DVD, or something really obscure like a CD-i or Nuon disc in say, the year 4000AD. There are other mediums obviously. VHS may survive longer but magnetic tape and video/camera film rots unless stored properly, and even then it's damaged by simple things like light and water. Stored properly it might last a few hundred years, no more than 500 I'd say. Paper is probably our most reliable medium, but even paper is reduced to cellulose unless kept in ideal conditions, shockingly fast. Annoyingly paper will likely outlast anything digital as the words in a book can't corrupt while it just sits there. Still, even books rarely last more than 1000 years when well preserved because again, they rot. USA will be as though it didn't exist for the most part. Plastics will degrade over the years, and wood will rot. Houses are usually made of wood in USA so they won't last. Large cities may use concrete but everything is regularly destroyed and rebuilt as buildings fall into disrepair. Few buildings are more than 50 years old in an American city compared to say Liverpool in UK where most of the city is over 300 years old or Chester in UK where a sizable chunk of the city is over 1000 years old, and a significant of the roads, walls, and larger monuments etc are over 2200 years old. We just don't build things to last any more. At least stone and brick buildings last more than the wood, glass and alloy buildings of USA, but that's not much. What we know of the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians, Inca, Aztec and other ancient races is largely carvings and sculpture... outside of gravestones, our society carves very little into stone now. It may be that in 4000AD more is known of Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire than of the United States Of America. Sure some things like Mt. Rushmore and the Statue Of Liberty may survive... but not much more. It's an interesting thought experiment at least.

Never seem to find the time to read. I should make more time. Will start with an old favourite... Gerald's Game by Stephen King

I won't need to back up..so far the internet has done a decent job of that and showing how to do it Emulators and such. I'm more than certain we will have a 360 and ps3 emulators down the line. That's actually a genuine worry of mine. Emulators are flawed, quite considerably. I've still yet to see a decent Sega Saturn or Gameboy Advance emulator that runs without glitches or performance issues on even modern PCs. My phone has more processing power than those consoles by at least an order of magnitude at this point; it should be facile, trivial even... but still people haven't managed it. Hell most 8/16-BIt emulators have one or two games that just refuse to work properly. So, modern games like PS3... I don't think I'll live to see decent emulation of the PS3. The cell processor, much like the processors in the Sega Saturn, is counter-intuitive at best. The Saturn came out almost 20 years ago and we've yet to properly emulate it; I wouldn't be shocked we still don't have any decent emulators for the PS3 by 2030. They'll likely have working PS4 emulators before they have working PS3 emulators as x86 is far easier architecture to emulate.

Quite right, physical media is far from perfect and with disc protection damn hard, though not impossible, to back up. That said, once I've found a way to rip my discs, I can... backing up digital products is often harder unless the service, or at least the original server is running. I'm a collector though, as I said. For me keeping the physical media in working order and good condition is part of the hobby.

Well technically it was two universities and one technical college; but that's splitting hairs... It's good to see someone who appreciates my intellect; ...in all seriousness though, if I'm wrong I'll admit as much. If someone can counter my points and debate with decent etiquette, I will concede. I'll happily say I hope I'm wrong concerning the scope of this crash and I sincerely hope that the systems are all selling well by next year. Obviously I do, I own three of them. I don't see it happening personally, as the effect of this craah are far larger with the industry also being much larger this time... but no-one can say for sure. One killer app and the industry could recover rather swiftly. I just thought this would make for a fun debate.

In terms of the game industry where games routinely cost over $100 million; no it's fucking chump change. Now stop being a pathetic fanboy offended because I dare have you question your beliefs about the industry and learn the scope of the bloody debate rather than hurling insults. So far you've failed to refute a single point I've made, where as I've refuted EVERY point raised in contention. Try harder rather than resorting to an ad hominem... Google it if the latin is too confusing for you.

Unlike you, I try not to talk out of my ass. That's just the initial kickstarter, do your research right. They're still taking donations. Notice how it says accomplished next to the 48 millions stretch goal? And they're already 34% of the way towards 49. If fans are willing to throw AAA-levels of money to fund a project then yeah, I'd say that qualifies as massive interest. What's your definition? Wikipedia is very much out of date. It claimed it had £6.2 million in a mix of crowdfunding and private investment. I then looked up the Kickstarter... fair enough, my mistake. I was only looking it up on the fly though. Admittedly that's a decent budget. It's still a little lacking for AAA but it won't need a marketing budget. Still it will need to sell a decent amount to be successful as it's own profits funded its creation, therefore it needs twice the profit margin of a standard AAA game to sustain it's developer... which, if self published it could manage. I still wouldn't say "massive interest" just yet as the project isn't finished; anyone who's been waiting for The Last Guardian knows that a game doesn't exist until it's in you hand. I am admittedly quite impressed though. I doubt it's an industry saver, but as I've said, a crash doesn't necessitate a lack of product or even a lack of profitable product... who knows thought, this could admittedly make a difference.

I have no issue with Kickstarter, I've backed a few projects there myself; though I'd back far more if they included a physical release as a stretch goal... I can't collect digital games after all. This must be how vinyl collectors feel about iTunes. When it comes to Kickstarter I just know not to get taken in by the hype. Sure a website says Star Citizen is popular but actually only 31,000 people thought it was good enough to back for the full $30 and actually get the "free" copy when it's finished... even if twice that bought it on release it'd still struggle to top 100,000 sales, which is sad by anyones estimation. It's certainly not "massively popular", and it's all because Kickstarter blows all this hype everywhere. The problem with predicting PC is that not all PC users are gamers, Secondly, PC gaming is much more of a niche than people realise. Even massive mainstays of PC gaming like the Civilization series, sells only around 4-5 million copies on PC. Console ports do much worse rarely topping 1-2 million, when they're selling twice or three times that on consoles. While PC will be unlikely to go anywhere as a medium, if anything PC gaming may experience a boom period if this crash continues; I still doubt it'll hold the line. Physical media on PC is difficult to come by with so few retailers stocking decent selections, and as we've established digital just doesn't attract a massive sub-set of gamers (just look at the anti-XBO rhetoric of last year). PC is a wildcard as always, but unlikely to be the industry saviour... though it may help reboot the industry.