A malodorous creature
By Alec Meer on December 13th, 2011.
Did you know that when he’s not delivering presents or selling Coca-Cola, Father Christmas actually spends his days in cocktail bars enjoying the good life, the old rapscallion? Why, he’s even been known to frequent the racetracks and beaches of Monaco in the company of young starlets. That’s his reward for picking a job where he only has to pull on the costume once a year. But not everyone has it so easy. Let’s take a peek inside door number thirteen.
By Alec Meer on December 7th, 2011.
Batman: Arkham City arrived on PC crazily late, and launched with a pretty much borked DirectX 11 mode. Which didn’t make a lot of sense, given what a song and dance NVIDIA and Warner were making about its graphics, and if forum-hounds’ apparent discovery that the release build was compiled back in September is to be believed. Finally, though, a patch has arrived which purports to fix it, for the price of 190MB. Unless you’re running 32-bit Vista or 7, in which case it makes DX11 performance even worse. To the point that you’re advised to only run the game in DX9 mode. Sigh. Another patch is apparently due, though.
A few other wotsits have been rejiggered too – full details below. No, they haven’t removed any of the preposterous levels of DRM, sadly enough.
Read the rest of this entry »
How much blood could a dead cat bleed if a dead cat could still bleed?
By Alec Meer on November 28th, 2011.
“You’re going to bleed like a dead cat.”
At first, I thought this was just clunky dialogue, some poor writer struggling to come up with yet another cat-based reference for Batman: Arkham City’s thugs to bellow at Catwoman, as a break from the rather more disturbing threats and insults they so frequently offer. Many have commented that the game’s dialogue, especially incidental comments from thugs, is unimpressive. And sometimes troubling too. Puzzling, given how lavish and polished the game is in almost all other respects. Then I sat down and thought about it properly. What if there was something I was missing? What if that line, “you’re going to bleed like a dead cat” was rich in subtext and nuance I was just too ignorant and lazy to pick up on? And what if, in turn, that meant all the apparently wretched incidental dialogue in the game had been misinterpreted? What if we’d made a terrible mistake? There was only one thing I could do – a careful, stage by stage analysis of the sentence in question. Only then could I truly uncover its mysteries. Some might ask why this game, of all games, should be subjected to such painstaking analysis. I have one word that perfectly addresses all such queries: “because.”
Read the rest of this entry »
A Knight On The Town
By Adam Smith on November 25th, 2011.
Bruce Wayne has finally returned to my PC, ready to swoop and scuffle his way through the prison-district that is Arkham City. It’s no secret that I used to wear Batman pajamas when I was a youngster, nor that I have been known to shed manly tears when thinking of the Caped Crusader’s tragic origins in Crime Alley. These facts make me the ideal person to tell you Wot I Think of this new crimefighting caper.
By Andrew Smee on November 25th, 2011.
Batman: Arkham City is now playable on Steam, after a week of mild confusion over its availability in various regions. However, more pressing concerns have arisen now that it’s been properly released: the DX11 support seems to be as broken as the bat after a few rounds with Bane, rendering Brucie’s latest adventure unplayable with the current DirectX package.
By Alec Meer on November 25th, 2011.
Cloud gaming service OnLive is banging its drum for new members in the UK again, so they’re reactivated their remarkable £1 offer (which they’re surely making a massive loss on – they must have ton of marketing money stored up). Your first purchase after joining currently costs just 100 pennies, and that includes the likes of Batman: Arkham City, Saints Row 3, LA Noire, Lord of the Rings: War In The North and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. All PC versions, but tweaked for OnLive – which in Arkham’s case means no GFWL. Woo! OnLive has its issues, but I really rather like it – I’ve played quite a lot through it now, and while the experience differs from game to game for a lot of titles on a decent ISP the experience is pretty incredible. Especially if you have the microconsole thingy and are sat back on a sofa – with your face stuffed directly into a monitor the cracks are that much more visible.
Oh, and if you already have an OnLive UK account, that doesn’t stop you from creating a new one purely to nab a game for £1. Repeatedly, in fact – you just need a different email address every time. Snicker.
A Good Year For Open Worlds
By Jim Rossignol on November 24th, 2011.
This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.
By Alec Meer on November 8th, 2011.
It was rumoured, and then it was confirmed, and then we were all like :(
For it is true: the man of bats will not strike back on PC in 10 days’ time, but instead in 17 days’ time. A small wait, perhaps, but we’ve already had to hang on for almost a month later than the console-folk. Yes, the already-delayed Batman: Arkham City PC port, mooted to be the very bestest version of Brucie-boy’s semi-open-world swinging adventures thanks to various technical jiggery-pokery done with the help of NVIDIA, has been delayed anew. November 25 is the new date, which at least is safely after all Big Three of November’s remaining new releases – MW3, Skyrim, Saints Row 3 – are all done and dusted and we’ll have time to think about something else/sleep.
There’s no word on why the PC version was delayed, and what the state of play will be for the various DLC by then. Oh well. Here’s a Nightwing DLC trailer to tide you over.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on October 31st, 2011.
Batman! A game so good that Yahoo awarded it 6/5, thus unwittingly demonstrating that review scores are little more than a media pissing contest whose only real beneficiary is publishers’ marketing departments and people who like to shout at other people on forums. Which is exactly why we don’t give scores here. Can Arkham City possibly live up to such drooling superlatives? Well, I can’t yet speak for the PC version – which isn’t out until November 18, though we’re hoping to have code before then – but I did spend far too much of my week off playing the console version (I’m sorry, I just fancied getting a different sort of RSI on top of the one I already have from my mouse and keyboard), thus have a very good sense of the game itself if not its technical aspects and improvements on PC. So, if you must, consider this not a Wot I Think, but an extended preview offering some idea of what to expect in a few weeks.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on October 19th, 2011.
I’m so sorry. There’s going to be a proper scandal about that. GamesIndustry.biz or Gamasutra or someone will probably run an expose about the awful corruption at RPS. Last week, I brazenly claimed, to your face, that this would be the last Batman: Arkham City trailer we’d post before the pointlessly-delayed PC release next month.
I LIED TO YOU.
Because here’s the first proper PC footage of Arkham City.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
The nebulous “November” date for Batman on PC has been confirmed for the UK as the 18th, and VG247 note that Amazon has the US one date (predictably) for the 15th. The PC version is going to support 3D, DX11, and a bunch of the other in-vogue technologies, making it one of this years most graphical games, or something.
Reception of the Batman on the console boxes has been uniforming rapturous, so it’s probably worth the wait for a definitive PC version. Or not. Depending on the tightness of your Bat-fetish. Alec pointed out that the last trailer was here, but expect a heaving torrent of game footage soon, as the game hits other, lesser machines on Friday.
