I Am the Batman
To say Batman: Arkham City is the best videogame to come out this year is a hefty mouthful of a statement indeed, but the more I think about it, the more it rings true. Y'see, analysis of this game comes all but rationally. I've thought long and hard, and I've decided, as full of unbridled awesomeness as Batman is... it is really, really hard to do it right. I've been rewatching The Dark Knight, the Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman: The Animated Series, and as good as they all are - and they're pretty much all universally brilliant - there's always elements of Batman that come off as pretty damn, almost irredeemably, stupid.
Batman started off as a funny pages strip, of course. It wasn't until incredibly recently in the character's long, varied history that he became less of a detective and more of a fucking ninja, and the series started to focus less on a colourful array of comically fiendish bank robbers and arsonists, and more on a staggeringly dark, painfully accurate depiction of the depths of the insane, criminal mind. Modern Batman is incredibly deep and psychologically rooted. It's not quite Watchmen standards of dark, brooding, edgy and psychological, but it's damn close, and that says a lot for what started off as an incomprehensibly silly game of men-in-flashy-tights-beating-each-other-up back in the Golden Era of comic books.
