Is The Fix In For Batman Reviews?
The talk of the video games world at the moment is the imminent release of Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms.
Based on Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s 1997 comic series, it’s been looking like Batman might finally get a decent video game to go with his solid film adaptations. Indeed, many fans of graphic novels have been pinning their hopes on this game so that we might finally see some other good comic to game adaptations, rather than the other way around.
Unfortunately, there are rumblings that the early positive reviews may be tainted. Gaming industry journalist and anonymous blogger RAM Raider has a history of ranting about the corruption he sees in the industry and these last couple of weeks have been no exception, especially his ‘Spot the Corruption’ posts.
RAM Raider claimed a few weeks back that several UK gaming magazines already had review code of the game, but were to sit on their reviews until the pre-release embargo passed (basically, no reviews are permitted before the game is released unless the publisher gives permission). RAM Raider said that Eidos would permit certain magazines to lift their embargo if they guaranteed a Batman cover and gave the game a score above 90%.
As with many stories floating around the Blogosphere, this could have been ignored, derided or parodied, but the recent updates have been showing Dark-Knight-adorned covers of several UK gaming magazines and all feature reviews giving the game well above 90% – 96% in GamesMaster’s case, going as far as to call it a ‘masterpiece.’
While I’m not in a position to really say one way or the other, as I haven’t played the full game and am not working in the industry, I will say that I was disappointed by the demo. It looks great, and I really wanted to like it, but it just doesn’t feel like a ‘masterpiece’ to me. Then again, I’ve been wrong about demos before – I loved the UFC demo, for example, but got bored of the game very quickly.
Unfortunately, Eidos have a perceived history of this: it’s widely believed that a similar ‘arrangement’ occurred for a score of 80% or over with the last ‘Tomb Raider’ game.
At the time of writing, Eidos have been quoting denying that this ‘arrangement’ with magazines has occurred, but for me the seed of doubt is planted. Combining this story with the demo is enough to get me asking questions, but I’ll hold judgement until I’ve played the whole game.
When it came to Tomb Raider Underworld, I feel that game well deserved an 8. To be precise, probably an 85.
It has never been stated that this game is based on Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (Morrison/McKean). It was co-written by Paul Dini and is based on many different elements of Batman over the entire history of the character.
Let’s get those facts straight…
Obviously there’s had to have been some embellishment to the original tale to get a game out of it, but it’s obvious that this is where the inspiration for the game came from.
We see this trend with most tie-ins in the video game world, be they film tie-ins or in this case a tie in with a comic.