I want to start this by saying I love
Batman. The Dark Knight is one of my heroes, and I still have my
Batman movie hat with a mesh back that I got when I was a kid. Growing up when I did was a great time to be a Batman fan... the
first two great films came out and the merchandise exploded, and
when I grew older there was the animated series to lose myself in.
In 1990 Congress passed the Batman
Entertainment Law, making it legally required that from that point on
every console produce a glut of Batman games. After growing up for
years with nary a Batman game to be found (other than a Commodore/Apple game that scarcely bears mentioning) suddenly the
movie came out, and every Batman game had to have the Joker, Axis
Chemicals, and follow some bizarre alternate script to Batman that
involves the Joker's army of killer robots. Batman for NES is a
freaking classic which I still play, so it was with the hope of
finding a similar joy that I picked up Batman for Game Boy. Surely
this will be a monochrome port at worst, or a similarly mechanized
game with different levels, at best?
Dunnnnn dun dun duhhhhhh
dummmmmmm dummmmmmmmmm!
The opening scene tells us that Jack
has sneaked into the Chemical Plant, without bothering to tell us who
Jack is. You can almost hear the writers say "Its just like the
movie, remember?" Stage one starts and I am confronted with a
short, stunted form wearing a little hat with points. Is he... is he
crouching? No, I quickly realized. This is Batman. A stout, wide
creature with the proportions of Gimley. In a laudable move. The
makers of this game apparently envisioned a world where Batman was
born with some sort of deformity, leaving him a twisted, midget-like
form instead of the tall and powerful shape of justice we're familiar
with. The effects of this are two-fold: Batman no longer leaps and
bounds about like a freudian-damaged ninja, preying upon evildoers.
Instead, he is content to simply jog around and hop up little
platforms. Seriously, the man can't even climb stairs step by step,
instead having to leap up them, representing no doubt the trouble he
has in mounting the inclines. The second part is this Batman
apparently has stopped giving a darn and brought a gun.
BatGlock in action
That's right, as a side effect of
putting on weight, Bruce Wayne has abandoned his vaunted code of
honor and has decided its easier to just start putting caps in people
and let God sort 'em out. I guess he decided its less exhausting
than running after them. Its just a strange, strange game. It's uninspired, really, and typical of the Game Boy
games that got shoveled out. Walk right, hop a surprisingly short
distance, press the button to fire your BatGlock. You CAN upgrade
the BatGlock but the upgrades are of questionable usefulness... a
personal favorite is the "wave" bullet that wobbles up and
down as it travels, adding no usefulness at all but ensuring that
Batman can't actually hit a target. Its not a terrible game, and I
guess if you just want a run and shoot game that has nothing
spectacular about it, you're not going to go exactly wrong... and
I will admit its almost worth it just to play the pistol-toting Midget
Batman who doesn't give a dang.
Batman never could explain why he liked watching Mohammad Ali and Dracula on TV
Other quirks of note: The fact that the
hit detection on the blocks is so tiny its a pain to hit them. The
enemy design in the first few levels are just empty. The fact is
the game is so repetitive I couldn't keep playing for more than a
short bit before being bored. This game doesn't excel anywhere, but
it's also not so fantastically bad so as to elicit a
blistering review. It just commits the cardinal sin of a game...
being dull. If you see it in a bargain bin for a few dollars, its worth it, but anything more than the cost of a bottle of pop? Pass.
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