Stumbling Towards Greatness: A Batman Retrospective

by Xav de Matos on Aug 26th 2009 2:45PM

The intro to Batman: The Animated Series ... reimagined with game footage

Batman has had a long and (mostly) horrendous career as a video game crime fighter. While his big screen adventures have evolved into masterpieces, most of Batman's video game outings have made players want to poke out their eyes with a Batarang. To celebrate the arrival of Batman's latest and (we assure you) greatest adventure – Batman: Arkham Asylum – Joystiq looks back at the rest of the Caped Crusader's games.

Don the cape and cowl and bring a flashlight. We're going to have to crawl through a lot of darkness to get to the light at the end of this licensing tunnel.

Continue to the Batman Retrospective

Tags: batman, batman-arkham-asylum, DS, gallery, Microsoft, Nintendo, retrospective, Wii, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (64)

IS THIS GAMETRAILERS DID I MAKE A WRONG CLICK

You should have made a left turn at Albuquerque.

How can one rabbit make the same wrong turn sooo many times??

Never realized there were so many

I was really enjoying the video until the commercial at the end...

That intro is 15% of my childhood. (The other 85% is comprised of Star Wars, Legos, Spyro the Dragon and Star Trek: TSG.)

Are you my long lost twin?

*fist bump*

I miss the old Batman Animated series now all they have is that new Batman and the Bold BULLSHIT!!

Brave & the Bold is easily one of the best shows on television. Everybody seems to hate it because it isn't as *moody* as TAS, but that's its charm.

The Brave and Bold is great. It's alot of fun. It's very clever in a tongue and cheek kind of way.

But Batman the Brave and the Bold is so lame it's pure gold!

...obviously it ain't awesome like the Batman Animated series, but I find it rather enjoyable to watch. :P

And hey, it's a lot better than that The Batman series.

Batman pwns... there really isn't anything left to say. AA is the first first day video game purchase I've made in a long time... maybe my life.

TAS > Brave and the Bold > The Batman > watching paint dry > 60s Batman

I stopped watching after Beyond ended. The new batman looks too weird for me.
Now if it was like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZbfOVuX0dQ
I would make sure to never miss an episode. Especially if it had Adam West.
KA-POW!

The Brave and the Bold seems to be a throw back to the 70s series. It's ok, but nowhere near as good as "The Animated Series".

Seriously, Batman: The Brave and the Bold is a GREAT show. Ppl like you make me sick. You probably don't even like batman you idiot!!

I can't get into the Brave and Bold no matter how hard I try.

Something about Oswald from the Drew Carey Show voicing Batman just doesn't sit right with me...

Brave and the Bold isn't any good as a Batman cartoon, but as a "DC's obscure all-stars" sort of thing, it rivals Justice League Unlimited, at least in its ability to dig up nobodies and make them fascinating. Nothing quite beats JLU's over-the-top story

Brave and the Bold is awesome you guys are crazy. It might be different from TAS but it's still awesome

To me, Batman TAS IS batman. Everything before that was just leading up to that show, and everything after is trying to capture its brilliance. (And sadly, for the most part, failing)

um...did i see Batman have rocket boots? first it was R2-D2, now him? no...not like this...not like this

Arkham Asylum is sooo good. Mark Hamill should win an oscar or somethin for his voice work.

That's right, I said a motherfuckin oscar.

I just wish they'd opted for more traditional camera work in the game. The fact that Batman's covering up the left-hand side of the screen whenever you're walking makes me feel like there's some detail I might miss if he's not in the center instead. It irritates me to no end but so far it's my only real main gripe.

It's called the Options menu, and perhaps people should visit it once in a while.

I always thought that Mark Hamill could do a Live Action Joker, his face is already pretty messed up these days.

I must apologize. I'm also in the middle of playing through Siren Blood Curse and there's a setting you can change in the options menu of that game to have the camera be directly behind the character or behind and slightly to the right like Batman. I must have gotten the two confused. My apologies for the undue snarkiness.

Only mostly horrendous because the NES Batman game was awesome.

PS I will be downvoted into oblivion but I didn't really like the Dark Knight :O

I will admit that Heath's depiction of the Joker was pretty great (though after playing AA I must say I enjoy Hamill better), but what's all that nonsense about everybody's cell phone suddenly having 3d mapping tech, or Two Face's eye not drying out, etc?

It's all about taste.

In hindsight, I don't really like Batman Begins. Go figure.

AA has done wonders for my appreciation of the Batman as a detective and crime fighter.

I liked the Dark Knight as its own movie, it was the best thing hollywood had done in a long time.

As a Batman fan though, I was kind of disgusted by the amount of things that were just wrong. I understand Nolan wanted to put out his own version of the batman universe, but Heith Ledgers joker, as brilliant of a character as it was, was NOTHING like the jokers of the past aside from the purple suit.

Also really confused as to why they invented a really cool moody Gotham city for Batman Begins and then they decided for the Dark Knight they'll just throw that all away and shoot in Chicago.

@ CaramelZappa

Finally, another person who doesn't think that the Joker was portrayed correctly.

I didn't mind Ledger's Joker at all. It wasn't as campy, and it was a bit more realistic than Jack's Joker. Hamill is the voice of the Joker, but Ledger is the guy on screen so far.

Great retrospective. Going through the image history brought back so many memories, and a realization that Batman was an important figure in my gaming history.

NES, GB, SNES, Genesis, I always gravitated to the Bat games on these systems. I guess he was the bigger superhero in my eyes versus all the mutant powered bullshit of the 90s.

Thanks Joystiq!

I remember paying $60 for Dark Tomorrow when I was like 10 or 11. I finally decided to use the money i saved up for a while to buy it, and was I disappointed. That game was so bad it was probably the most expensive POS I had at the time. I ended up playing mario party with sister on the GC, and I had a lot more fun like that.

Is your sister still a gamer? Oh and is she hot & single...?

Fun article, Xav!
For the record, I've always loved the 'purple' Batman '89 NES Sunsoft game. The level 1 'Streets Of Desolation' song is my ringtone, even.

I have the Main section of Metroid as mine..

Nobody ever recognizes it. I'm sure the same goes for you.

Good lord get over this game.

Just because other Batman games sucked so bad doesn't somehow make this one any better than the 7.8 out of 10 that it is.

BTW, Batman for SNES was the shit.

Good lord get over yourself.

Just because you're a regular poster doesn't make you better than the pretentious twat you are.

http://squadblog.com/images/oh-snap-460px.jpg

I didn't know about that top down Batman from 1989. The first one I remember was the side-scrolling Batman: The Movie. It has decent controls and was pretty tough. Batman Returns for the SNES blew me away with its graphics at the time.

Man, I remember Dark Tomorrow being hyped up as this awesome exclusive GameCube title back then (I am guessing the Xbox version got added later). To be honest, I had assumed it never got released, I stopped hearing about it. Funny, apparently it was terrible.

I thought Batman for NES was awesome at the time. I never beat it though. The end where you had to fight Firebug (?) and Joker back to back was fucking brutal!

Yes, the end was a little insane. I did eventually beat it, I was actually fairly proud because the game was so freaking hard. Then I sold my copy at a garage sale :P

I have a distinct urge to go back and play that again :)

Regarding the Revenge of Shinobi Cameo: I bought that game on launch day and it had the giant bat in it, not Batman. So he never made it into some early copies too.

No mention of Batman for Game Boy? It's a pretty good platformer with awesome music (as is the case with most Sunsoft titles), but don't go in expecting a Batman game - he carries a gun and shoots his way through the levels. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this was converted from a partially-completed original game and just had a Batman sprite inserted at the last minute.

Also: did you guys even play some of these games? Several that you've grouped together are absolutely nothing alike. Batman on Genesis is as different from the NES game as the NES game is from the PC Engine game.

Oh sweet, sweet childhood. While it's not exactly the greatest game ever, the arcade game of Batman (1989) was one of my childhood favorites, because Batman was and still is my favorite film of all time, and that was probably the only movie tie-in game of the time that actually used the real music from the film. I still love that game, though now I can see all the flaws. And the Batman Returns SNES game is still one of my favorite games of all time (who says movie games always suck?). Oh, and the SNES version of Adventures of Batman and Robin was infinitely better than the crappy Genesis version. Yeah.

And has anyone ever found the secret code or whatever to unlock the Batboat level in Chaos in Gotham? I have been searching for that since that game came out and have never been able to find anything on it.

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Stumbling Towards Greatness: A Batman Retrospective

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