Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What can you do in 41 seconds? Clean answers only, please. I ask because that’s the length of the first Batman: Arkham Origins trailery thing, and your time might be better spent elsewhere. You could clean out a dirty nail, or pick your nose, or maybe check that you flushed the toilet the last time you were in there. If you’re determined to watch it, let me quickly break down what you’re about to see: if, say, you wanted to ignore the logos then you’d be down to 11 seconds of footage of Batman fighting new series villain Deathstroke. And if you only wanted to see in-game footage, then the trailer would be exactly zero seconds long. Of course, they’ll argue it was a teaser trailer, and that the full trailer is out on May 20th. In which case I’ll actually have to add those days to my count, which means that this trailer is minus 345641 seconds long.
Read the rest of this entry »

My brain’s reaction to Batman is to remix the music from the TV show, the Tim Burton movie, and the U2 song. Oh look, there are some new Batman: Arkham Origins screenshots! Sigh. That’ll be in there for the rest of the day now. What if I can’t get it out? What if it lodges in there, and the inevitable happens and I turn mad and, because mental illness and villainy seem to go hand-in-hand in the Batman universe, evil? Mashup sounds like a good name for a bad guy: I’ll create music from the bones of other songs. My choons will be so layered that people will be driven insane attempting to unravel each element. They won’t realise that I’ve made my music from an infinite number of songs, trapping them in a hypnotic appreciation of my DJ skills forever. I’ll replace the Bat Signal with a Winamp visualiser, and all of Gotham will be trapped by my phat beats, and my sidekicks DubStep and Autotune will steal their wallets.
Read the rest of this entry »

Aha, perhaps rather predictable, eh? So predictable, in fact, that when Craig wrote his thoughts about the game down for us, he said: “You feel awfully like you’ve just bought into a free-to-play shooter. On one hand it offers a range customisations for you to trim the fat from the character, or add to it if you want a tougher head to deflect the bullets. There’s an overwhelming number of weapons, body types, and costumes you can tweak. But on the other hand it’s stingy in the way that f2p games are.” But now, with it quietly going free on Steam, the primary element of stingyness, actually having to pay for it, has been removed. That probably doesn’t make it a better game, but hey, at least you can try it for nowt…