Alright, I think the time is right… I now declare the rest of august to be… BAT-MONTH! (nanananananananana, BATMONTH!) That’s right. I decided that every august I would dedicate a good part of the month to reviewing games that all fit a certain theme. This year I’ve chosen to review three games based on Batman. I’m going to review them in chronological order of when they come out. First up is Batman for the NES.
This game came out in 1989, same year as the movie it’s based off of, which also has the same title… Batman. (1989 was a good year, eh?) Honestly though, the similarities between the movie and video game are very minimal. Here’s what it has in common: Batman is the main character, it ends with a showdown against the Joker and there are a few random cut scenes in the game from the movie (though with no other similar events, it’s just disjointed and random). Other than that; nothing. This game honestly looks more like someone came up with their own game, made all the enemies, level design, etc… then at the last moment, slapped a Batman license so it would sell better. This doesn’t hinder the game play, but they could have definitely made a creative way to feature more things from the movie in game.
I have a lot of thoughts about the game play. The first thing you will notice is that this game can feel a little stiff. First off, Batman seems to move slow, but if you watch the movie, he’s not exactly speedy in that either; he mostly just walked slowly up to enemies, freaking them out, then take em out. This game should also be approached with a similar sense of confidence. The second reason it might feel stiff is because of the jumping. Unlike most platformers, like Mario, Sonic or Earthworm Jim, you have very little control of Batman while he’s in the air. From what I understand, developer and producer Sunsoft were going for a more “realistic” type of jumping in their games at that time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it takes some getting used to. Remember: look before you leap.
Speaking of jumping, this game also gives you the ability to wall jump (usually compared to the same way Ryu from Ninja Gaiden also does that). Simply put, jump, hit against a wall, you bounce off in the other direction. It’s a simple game mechanic found in a hand full of game (including Buster’s Hidden Treasure) that’s often used in some pretty unique ways. In this game, the wall jump was pretty easy for me to master, but there are a lot of points where you will need to be very precise so you’ll still need to be careful.
The last worthwhile ability that Batman has is the ranged weapons. Instead of just punching, you can use Baterangs, a gun or a triple shuriken. To use these, you need to pick up ammo that enemies drop. This is both good and bad. Good, because if you use less than 10 ammo to kill a bad guy and he drops a pack, since each are worth 10, it becomes really worth it (with the alternative being losing health). This is bad, because it means you can run out of ammo (which doesn’t make sense for the baterangs since they come back to you). In short, you’ll have to use your own good judgment to know when to use a ranged attack.
However, switching to ranged weapons is something interesting, which gets me to my final point: the button layout. To rotate your ranged weapon, you press start. Now, get what I mean here: you don’t pause the game to switch weapons, pressing start goes to the next one and select pauses the game. At first, I thought this should be reversed, until my roommate pointed something out to me; the start button is on the right hand side. This makes it easier to quickly get your weapon out without stopping the action. The problem comes though when you want a weapon three presses away while enemies are close by: that’s when I would like a weapon select menu. Also, I always get fooled when I go to pause. Anyways, that’s the game play in a nutshell, all coming together to make something fun and interesting, like the dark knight himself.
I’ve said it a couple of times in this review, but this game is interesting. It has near nothing to do with the movie or character it’s based on, but it’s still pretty fun. It’s a pretty tough game and feels a little stiff, but in a way, that just adds to how bad ass Batman can seem. The music is pretty cool and the game has this dark cartoon style (it gives the same feel as the movie, but does so while looking differently). All and all, I would recommend this game to any fan of platforming games, but reluctantly so to people who are just fans of Batman. I give Batman for the Nintendo Entertainment System 8 levels out of 10.
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