- Rise of the Indies

The most notable trend this year was that indie was ascendant. There were ways this has been in the cards for a while. The Experimental Gameplay Workshop has been a perennial best-attended session at GDC, and the Indie Games Summit has been a big draw for a while, but this year marked a high-water line for the presence of smaller, independent games. Indie games swept the Choice Awards and small game speakers got some of the best attended sessions. There was in fact a whole unconference in Yerba Buena Park hosted by a bunch of great people that was completely indie focused. Anna Anthropy spoke about a hundred times in different rants and microtalks. Jason Rohrer won the final Game Design Challenge with his phenomenal board game for the End of Humanity, beating industry veterans such as Will Wright and Steve Meretzky. Independent development pervaded everything.

Maybe Andy Schwatz of Pocketwatch Games (Monaco, famous indie game) put it best while hosting the IGF award show when he said that indies were no longer the Clash — they had become Green Day. This got a laugh from the audience, because I think they thought he was joking that indies had sold out a little. Here’s the thing — Green Day have made a number of decisions of questionable taste in the last couple of years and have made a ton of money, but they have also funneled lots of money back into the punk scene and supported a number of newer bands while still making the same kinds of music they always have. If you like old Green Day, you like new Green Day, and the opposite.

The Green Day story is complex: a very good pop-punk outfit makes it big time, and struggles to figure out how to stay true to itself while cashing in on well-deserved success. Is that the indie scene? Maybe. Or maybe it’s Fugazi, making its living by very dedicatedly and publicly never going mainstream. I see a bunch of current indies in that mold. Or maybe it’s Titus Andronicus — making aggressive intellectual statements — or Wild Flag — veterans in new and varied creative explosions –  or Neutral Milk Hotel — making weird little creations of beauty — or tUnE-yArDs — marking out a bold unique voice. You know which designers I’m talking about, right? Or maybe it’s just Wavves — overly ironic jerks who are just talented enough that they can’t be ignored. There are definitely some of those too.

It’s punk and it’s crazy and that’s beautiful and I love it. Indies are now on everyone’s radar, and that energy is going to reshape the whole medium for better and worse and and both and neither. Whatever. All my best friends are metalheads anyway.

- Free-to-Play Has Won! (Right? Right???)

The other big thing at GDC was the Free-to-Play summit. The ambivalence in the air there was so thick you could see it floating in the TWO HUGE ROOMS it took up in the summit. On one hand, there was success story after success story of how much money people were making. Did you know that Puzzles and Dragons made something like $75M a MONTH in Japan?!? That’s INCREDIBLE. The summit was basically a big business conference of how to optimize the earnings you could make from players, and real-money games were at the tips of everyone’s tongues as the next cash cow. There was an ambition there that was impressive in its boldness.

On the other hand, there was an unspoken layer of fear I couldn’t help notice. Everyone knew that Facebook was now completely locked up and that Zynga was hurting from an old formula that no longer worked, see Cityville 2 and other news. Everyone knew that mobile was getting more competitive. My talk this year was on why we should be innovating in free-to-play, and when I told the story of the demise of casual, I could see many in the room nodding. I think people are getting worried the easy money is gone and they are not as certain of the business model longevity as they once were.

Kudos to Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, and Juan Gril for their great year summary where they captured this complex spirit perfectly, and for all the speakers who reminded everyone that respect for players was paramount and that the disdain Zynga expressed for game design years ago was as stupid as everyone always knew it was.

- Where was AAA?

Both of these trends added up to one other factor: triple-A was very weak. Some of that was big news of course, both before and after the conference, but you could feel it at the conference too. Compared to previous years, there were very few design talks about big titles, despite several talks about Walking Dead and Candy Crush Saga. You didn’t really hear much about the PS4 or the WiiU. Console was around, but you could go the whole conference (as I did) without realizing it was there, and that is the first time I ever felt that at a GDC. It’s interesting that I attended many talks this year, but I didn’t sit for one talk that featured a large console title, and almost everyone I knew was out of that space and had no interest working in it. I personally think the reported death of console gaming is very premature, but it was certainly the kid at the party that no one wanted to dance with.

- Every one gets a voice

I think the single most important thing that happened to me at GDC was that I had several conversations about sexual harassment and heard many stories from women about how the industry had been unfair to them or needed to be better about inclusion. That was an excellent thing to witness. The #1 Reason to Be Panel was a breath of fresh air, and in particular Brenda Romero (superstar game designer) gave one of the best talks I have ever seen at a GDC about why E3 needs to stop having booth babes, which was a proxy for why games need to stop objectifying women. Not all of this conversation was particularly profound — there was a lot of cries for more women developers, which is the same cry I’ve heard since I entered the game industry — but it was just great to see women at the conference empowered to give their opinion about this issue that affects them directly. I hope that never stops.

And the inclusiveness didn’t stop there. There were lots of talks about queering games as well. I’ll admit I’m not totally sure what that means beyond the literal sense of having more gay developers and more non-heteronormal story in games, but I’m very happy that the industry is figuring out, in starts and fits, ways of having identity mean something. I’m looking forward to this continuing at the Different Games Conference later this April.

- Other Observations

• Journey and Cart Life winning in the awards ceremony was a sign that people want games to tackle more serious and artistic material. I have some issues with the awards, which I will discuss in a next blog post, but it’s interesting where the awards were pushing us and much congratulations to Journey, which continues to dominate the story of games in 2012.
• Spaceteam got lots of love. Collaborative games in general (hooray for my favorite Super Space ______) were very popular, as were more profound narrative experiences such as Kentucky Route Zero and Walking Dead, and gameplay stars such as Super Hexagon and FTL.
• My God the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Everything was so amazing. Where is Sound Dodger on the internets?!? Congratulations, Robin, for that panel and the other fifty awards Journey took.
• Parsons rocks the house yet again. Colleen Macklin was ranked one of the best speakers in 2012, Kaho Abe showed off Hit Me! and Ninja Shadow Warrior in the EGW, and Robert Yang ran Lost Levels. GO DT GAMES!!!! UPDATE: I also need to congratulate Andy Wallace and Jane Friedhoff as well as Kaho again and Ramsey Nasser for being finalists in the Sony Game Jam. Sorry, all. So much Parsons glory that I missed a couple.
• Thank you Food Court at the Mall behind Bloomingdale’s. I think I would have starved to death if not for your cornucopia of scrumptious lunch options.
• Lots more of the good people with the good projects and the good meetings. Always fun to catch up, and more fun to argue, which I got to do a lot this year. Stay tuned on the fallout of that with Clara.

So in summary, more people are loud and proud about making games, the independents are alive and well, business models are crazy, and the end of triple-A is nigh. That’s the word on the street — take it for what it’s worth.

What was your GDC like? Did you have a similar take?

I respawn back in battle, fighting my way down the hotel’s platforms. The music is great for this scene, by the way, and the fact that it’s supposed to actually be playing in the scene makes the moment very immersive. I start at the bottom of a set of stairs, right in front of an onslaught, and I die a couple of times relearning the controls. I realize that there is a turret in the back that’s taking my guys out, and I effectively use a grenade to take out a turret (that felt VERY sweet by the way) and then it’s cake. We move forward like ten feet to face another turret, and I have to flank it to keep moving. Flanking takes me all the way across the hotel as I run thrhttp://www.criticalsmack.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1123&action=editough neat makeshift housing with lots of colored curtains and crude bedding. As I come around a corner, someone is running at me and I’m about to shoot when I realize it’s a civilian woman. I don’t shoot her and instead pop the two soldiers behind her who I think are chasing her. That moment was crazy. It’s fascinating to think how easy it would have been to shoot her, and I feel very empowered that I almost did and stopped myself.

I complete the flank and get to a turret, shooting a bunch of guys to clear the way. I can now see that there are two turrets on a platform across the way from my guys pinning them down. More enemies keep coming to man the turrets and I spend some time killing them. I’m then told to go for a giant window behind the turrets to bring this to a close. I die shooting it when the turret overheats. I learn the second time that the turret always overheats, and the trick is to run back and forth from the turret to the window waiting for the turret to cool down. I finally blow out the window after several rounds of shooting the turret, and the level ends with a near tsunami of sand burying the entire space in front of us. We got to a CS of my soldiers gathering and discussing next steps. On the platform above us, we see the civilians from before gathering and complaining about something. Walker asks what they are saying, and Lugo says that they are grieving for their losses. Walker says they should leave them to do it and we fade out.

We cut to a new CS of the three soldiers walking through the desert. Adams says Walker is quiet. Walker says he realizes that the 33rd is fighting itself, and that the CIA is there to clean it up and is working with the civilians. Walker wants to make contact with CIA as a next step. As they walk, Lugo gets radio signal of someone interviewing Daniels. When Daniels reveals that he was there to help rescue survivors, his interrogators say they realize that he’s telling the truth and start torturing him. I get control and drop under some kind of canopy covered in sand. Oh, I’m on a skyscraper. THAT’S HOW HIGH THE SAND IS. There’s a beautiful shot of the sand covered city and a title of the chapter is revealed as The Edge. Lugo says that the radio signal is coming from way down below, and we have to find a way down there. Adams says it’s a trap, but Walker says he knows but he needs a way to find Walker. The broadcast of guy being tortured continues as we find a zipline and take it across to another building. We go down a flight of stairs and hear two guys talking downstairs. I take them out from a distance with a silenced rifle, and then run down the stairs into a new room full of opponents. I die once from grenade upon entering the room, but then fight my way through the next few rooms. I’m running very low on ammo. In a break between fights, the team realizes the radio guy is calling the shots and that’s why things are crazy. We get to another ledge and rappel down to a new floor. I find a sniper rifle and have to take out snipers on nearby buildings. I take out a bunch but then get popped by a random enemy. The second time, I take them out and we run across a beam to a new roof. There are a lot more guys over there hiding behind air conditioning machines and pipes.  The first time, I run out of ammo while running across rooftops and die. The second time I get to the other side cleanly and do more fighting,  but I die as my men advance too far. The third time, I win the battle with smart switching between the sniper rifle and assault rifle. We keep moving and we hear Daniels getting tortured more as we move through new hallways.  Adams doesn’t think Daniels has much time left. We work our way to a sand covered rooftop. Machine gun fire collapses the roof. I hang from a beam and take out two guys before dropping to floor below. There’s a new kind of opponent: a guy with a knife. I’m killed by the knife guy as I melee him, because knife guys can dodge gunfire apparently. In a game as gritty as this, that character just feels cheap. I get through the fight and as a gift to me, they comment on the crazy guy with the knife. Walker says they have to find Daniels before anyone decides he isn’t worth the trouble.

We zipline to a new building, and Walker reveals the radioman is a reporter from Kabul that Konrad trusted for some reason that Walker doesn’t know. We reach a double door exit. I kick open the door to beautiful hotel like room covered in sand and with polarized sunlight behind an angel statue. Goddamn, this game is pretty, and the whole building as a nice fun house style tilt. We get to an exit door and I kick it open. This starts a CS slide through building backwards and sand spills through the door. I CS slide backwards through the room and then fall out of the building to the ground below. This sequence is a long Uncharted-like fall through corridors. When Walker exits the building, he CS catches a beam as he falls, and clips on to the beam for a safe fall to the ground. I get control on the ground when Walkers realizes he can’t communicate with Adams or Lugo. This chapter is The Pit. I’m in an abandoned garage of cars, and I have to find a rifle as an enemy squad looks for me. I die once trying to find the rifle, and then die a second time as I find shotgun and lose focus when a second wave arrives. I feel like I’ve played enough for a night, so I’ll take the solo garage fight again next time.

So I heard this game was both good and short, and as good as Uncharted surely is, it is NOT short, so it’s Spec Ops time. I’m playing it on my PS3, and as always, it’s a long game data update. Does any game ever ship nowadays without a giant update? Ten minutes later, the game starts. There’s a set of quick, unadorned logos that lead to the title, just black screens with uneven fonts. The title screen has a rough electric guitar national anthem, and it shows an upside down flag in front of view of destroyed buried city. I hit start to start. There’s the standard autosave warning and I get the opportunity to adjust the game’s size, vertically and horizontally, to fit my TV. I’ve never seen that before, and someone recently mentioned it may be a way to deal with a bunch of different TVs in the market now. I choose the campaign mode and take the normal (combat op) difficulty of my three choices although I am NOT good at shooters. It makes me nervous, but what the hell? I’ll try to play this for real.

We come in from black, and a helicopter flies in being chased by another heli. This is a helicopter dog fight. One chopper goes down and oh, I’m on the helicopter that shot it. There’s a couple of us soldiers on this bird. I get control at a minigun (although there’s no noticeable screen change to indicate it) to shoot down more enemy helicopters. It takes me forever to realize it’s left button to activate minigun and right to fire, although I’m sure that’s a totally standard control scheme. I do a pitiful job shooting at these things, but I don’t think I can die in this scene. I shoot down two helis with some nice set pieces, but there are a LOT of them, and this scene is full of beautiful shots of us flying through a destroyed city. After several minutes of shooting, a flailing helicopter hits us and we go down. As it descends, we cut to a grey screen with a little bit of light, and the game autosaves.

We cut to a card telling us it’s earlier, and pan down to a bonsai on a desk in a hotel.  There’s a voiceover of a guy talking about Conrad (seriously, Conrad? You’re telling me this is Heart of Darkness already, game? Sigh.) as maybe the great soldier he ever worked with. The camera shows us photos around room, presumably of the speaker and Conrad along with medals and cut-out articles. The voiceover mentions of a sandstorm that buried Dubai. The US kept the 33rd infantry in the city to help. Conrad was leaving a caravan of survivors out of the city, but never made it out. Six months later, the US got a transmission from Conrad saying the evacuation was a failure. The final shot of the scene shows a character looking over the buried city from a tower.

We cut to three guys talking and walking through a mild sandstorm. Adams and a sergeant joking about the sand. They then look at Dubai which they describe as “still dead.” They are tracing a transmission 800 meters away. There’s good banter where Adams snarks about how the sergeant might know better than Intel about what’s going on, and the sergeant responds that if he wasn’t a hardened killing machine, he might have been hurt. It’s genuinely good dialogue. We cut to an upside down flag, and I get control behind the shoulder of one of the soldiers. I say (automatically — I have no control over the dialogue) that this was designated a no-man’s land. As we walk, I get some basic commands (X to sprint – don’t need to hold it, X for cover, O to jump, LT to aim) and we eventually find the remains of 33rd on a large rock outcropping. It’s an abandoned post with just jeeps and bodies. One of the guys find some ropes and we hit  X to rappel down.

When we reach the bottom, the banter starts again. The sergeant’s name is Lugo and he’s making jokes, and they are good dirty ones. I tell him to stay focused. We’re walking through lots of broken down vehicles, and there’s a radio we’re picking up in the distance somewhere. We find the signal at a distress beacon, but it’s not military. It’s built out of spare parts and the group has no idea who made it. Adams finds a body in a jeep.  The corpse was a member of the 33rd and he recently died. The camera pans back to show my group looking at the bodies as guerrilla-looking person rises up from the destroyed cars behind them.  The game pans back to me (lots of nice camera movement in this) as I duck behind cover to reveal three guerrillas above. I announce that I’m Captain Walker and we’re here to find them. They ask me why, and one of the guerrillas speaks Farsi. Lugo speaks Farsi too and he start talking to them.  It’s going badly and Adams suggests to me to shoot out the windows on a sand logged bus over them. I do so and then I’m in a fight. I hop from cover to cover shooting guys, and shockingly I’m not doing too bad at it. I get to a part where I’m supposed to give the team an order to throw a grenade. I miss that for a while because the interface for it is a very small font, but do it and take out some well-ensconced baddies. We keep moving to another encounter with a fighter shooting at us from a billboard, and I learn that Lugo can snipe people with some kind of explosive with r2. I fight my way through another wave of enemies and we enter an opening cargo trailer. As we exit, I take out final enemy with a melee attack (square), and I say that I thought this was going to be a rescue.

There’s an explosion in the distance (there is no separation between CS and play here – I just lose control sometimes – but it’s still pretty clean) and Lugo picks up a new distress call that says that Alpha patrol under attack by insurgents. Lugo says they are 100 yards away, and we start heading there. We run into another fight where the enemy has a shielded MG ahead, so I have to flank it to take them out. I sneak behind cover and do so, talking out the base from the side. Once those enemies are taken care of, there’s a shot of my group running into desert. Lugo is talking to Alpha, and learns that there are four of them there under attack. We’re almost there when we start to approach a downed plane. We fight our way on to the plane, and the walk up the plane to fight our way from seat to seat in to hostage situation. By this point, I’ve run out of ammo with my assault rifle (maybe I DO suck at this). As we sneak up to where the hostages are, we see one hostage killed, and we take out all the enemies in slow mo. We learn from remaining dying hostage that the rest of the Alpha patrol were taken somewhere called the nest. He dies before he can say anything about Conrad. As if the name didn’t give it away, I’m definitely getting a very big Heart of Darkness vibe here. Walker  has Lugo tag the bodies while Adams checks outside. They find tracks to the north and follow them.

Walking back in desert, Adams mentions they are out of mission parameters. Walker says the mission has changed and they have to save people. We arrive at the nest and exactly as Lugo says it is: post-apocalyptic. It’s a destroyed building covered with junk and the remains of combat. I get control and we have to fight our way into the base. I may have blown cover early rather than stealth killing my way through — again, I suck at these games. I find grenades and throw them to move my group forward. There’s western music playing in the space as we fight our way in, which is clearly diagetic and thus weird. We run inside where a broadcast says that the 33rd is announcing that the ceasefire with the insurgents is officially over and that any insurgents should surrender. This is all in a creepily jokey voice. I fight outside where I man a turret and take down insurgents in a hail of machinegun fire. I lose my team after that fight, and it takes me a minute to catch up to them on this long flat road that leads to a ruined tower.  I end up dying in that fight because I’m stuck behind far away cover from the rest of my team, and I’m shot as I try to approach. I respawn and stay close to my team. I hold out through the ambush this time, but as the enemies keep spilling out of the tower, a sandstorm kicks up and we collapse through the floor. I do kill two guys as I’m going down, so I feel badass.

The screen goes black, and the group comes to on the ground. We’re in a hotel covered in sand, in a big lobby area with lots of above the ground corridors. Everyone’s ok. We find exit but it’s locked and enemies begin to drop into the lobby from the ceiling down to the floor. It’s a huge ambush. We take cover on the corridor we’re on and start fighting. I die from a grenade I think in the middle of the wave and respawn. I die again from grenades for sure this time.  I am just not reading this grenade interface properly. The third time, I finally get through the ambush by watching for grenades and popping enemies coming up the stairs at me. I’m willing to admit there might have been some dynamic difficulty adjustment here. The enemies drop C4 into the room and so Adams breaks the lock on the exit he found and we run. Heading down the corridor, we go deeper into the hotel and we hide as two insurgents come in talking about dropping C4. They say that the soldier is downstairs. One of the insurgents is an American ordering the locals around. They spot us, which triggers more fighting, easy this time. We fight our way to an exit dealing with enemies as we keep moving. The exit leads outside into a sandstorm. We  have to go through sandstorm to get away, which leads to a powerful scene fighting through the truly blinding storm. It’s a really powerful moment of confusion. We re-enter the hotel after a few minutes, reload and rappel down an elevator to a basement. People have been living down here in a crude camp set-up. There’s a creepy figure painted in blood (like a western desperado) on the wall, and an equally creepy chime coming from swinging pipes. We go down further to a bigger camp area with tons of candles. Lugo mentions seeing silk curtains and a piano here. There’s another creepy picture of children on the wall with eyes blacked out, and a set of bodies show that a bunch of soldiers have been executed at that same wall.

We come down the hall and see a 33rd guy being tortured by another man as we creep up (I’m not in control). The torturer wants to know where the 33rd are. The 33rd guy blames the insurgents for stirring up the locals. The torturer says that he stirred up the locals on purpose and that the 33rd went rogue, explaining that the CIA doesn’t start what it can’t finish. My group makes ourselves known and the tortured guy grabs the pistol from the CIA guy and shoots him. My group and the now freed 33rd player threaten each other and then the guy says his name is McPherson. After some vaguely threatening discussion, McPherson runs and we don’t shoot — but it looked like I could have. I wonder if that was a choice I had. When Lugo asks what we should do, I say that we’ll follow him back to the 33rd. We rappel down on of this platform and find that this is a CIA base. The intel we find here says that there’s no way to radio from inside the storm wall, so all these groups were completely isolated. A bunch of guys ambush us. Adams goes down and I have to run over and heal him. I do so, but I stop paying attention when I’m done and die. In the replay, we realize that these guys shooting us were our own guys, American soldiers. Adams points this out but I say it was self-defense, that those guys were trying to kill us. Adams says that doesn’t make him feel any better and I say it’s not supposed to. This dialogue is just not flagging.

We keep moving and through a window, we see 33rd chasing down civilians but shooting in the air. I’m uncomfortable about this — the 33rd wasn’t killing those people, and I’m not sure how to read it. Those two notice us, and we kill them and jump out window to fight more.  The 33rd see us and assume we’re CIA. I say to shoot them because they are trying to kill us. While we’re ducking from cover to cover and popping soldiers, my team shouts that we’re not CIA and that this is friendly fire. They don’t listen. I die once because it’s a madhouse of gunfire with one of my guys down. I die again because I never seem to know how far away to get from a grenade. I finally fight my way through by dodging grenades. I enter an area that says no arms in the camp on a sign. We go down to a deeper part of the hotel. As we continue into the camp, I say the 33rd are rogue but that Conrad is going to be loyal. We come upon the 33rd rounding up civilians aggressively and assume that they are going to execute them.  I don’t know – the guy shot in the air before. The group aren’t going to let that happen. As we approach, an announcement says that the 33rd offered peace and it was broken and now everyone has to die. We fight our way down a long flight of spiral stairs. This is a giant open room with a huge open central column and lots of elevated platforms on which many enemies are perched. I die while moving from a bad cover choice, and then we fight further into the level. It basically a slog from one platform to another with enemies popping from cover above and below us. I die a lot more times getting through this part,until I finally go down another flight of stairs to a new level. This battle is going to be just as hard, so I decide to call it a night.

Mostly what I’ve heard about the ending of Lost is that it doesn’t explain the mysteries of the show. I don’t think that’s fair at all. The show actually does tie up most of the loose ends and I have a pretty good picture of what happened. The plot goes something like this:

• There’s an island hidden in spacetime that has a tremendous lifeforce style power on it. This causes electromagnetic effects and also grants people powers, one of which is that people heal quickly on the island.
• You can get on and off the island if you know how to navigate the tricky spacetime, or if the guardian lets you.
• The island has a guardian that determines how people come there. It’s not clear how the first guardian got there, but it’s implied that it’s handed down.
• One of these guardians was Jacob and the smoke monster’s “mother”. She brings a pregnant woman to the island because something about the island makes it so that woman die before they deliver babies if the babies are conceived on the island, and kills her to take her kids.
• N.B. Sun conceives on the island but gets off of it before she would die.
• Jacob throws his brother into the center of the island and this turns him into the smoke monster. This is apparently worse than death.
• The smoke monster can appear to be dead people. That’s where most of the dead people come from. The fact that the monster is stuck as John I think is because the guardian (Jacob) is dead.
• Other dead people are just people who died on the island. They can’t move on. These are the people that Hugo sees.
• Walt’s appearance doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context. I think that Walt was just actually there when people see him, but I may be making that up for myself. Maybe that one is just bullshit.
• The monster wants to leave the island. It thinks it can do this by harnessing the power of the island, which is wrong. It learns it needs to get rid of the island’s guardian, either by eliminating all of the candidates or by killing the island itself.
• The monster can’t kill Jacob directly or vice versa, due to the rules the guardian laid done.
• The monster kills Jacob (through Ben) and then kills the island to try to get off of it. This works, but it also deprives the monster of its powers and makes it so that the monster and the guardian (in this case, Jack) can kill each other. This permits Jack to kill the monster.
• Jacob made Richard immortal to help him.
• People always want to harvest the power of the island. The Dharma institute is just the latest of those.
• The Dharma Institute is where all of the weird animals and plants come from, as they were doing all sorts of research.
• The Institute accidentally tapped one of the electromagnetic wells, which is why they built the hatch to protect it. Pushing the button diverts the electromagnetic energy. When Desmond triggers the fail safe, he blows the whole pocket up rather than have it destroy the island. This is the same pocket the in the Initiative sees in the past.
• The show implies strongly that Desmond’s three years pushing the button gave him his electromagnetic resistance power as well as his psychic thing.
• Triggering an electromagnetic pulse on the island causes people to travel through spacetime by psuedoscientific logic.
• The Institute works with the smoke monster (unknowingly) at first. The hostile are others on the island working with Jacob. When Ben leads the hostiles to kill off the Dharma Institute people, they then work for both without really knowing anything about either.
• Jacob is a cryptic dick because he somehow thinks this is giving people a choice. (I swear, I am going to write a story someday where the protagonist curses out the mentor and blames them for everything that’s gone wrong because they couldn’t just SAY EXACTLY WHAT THEY NEEDED.)
• Jacob leads the Others to kidnap people because they are candidates and children because … I don’t know. They help in the fertility experiments? General research? To protect them from the monster? I think they are enough potential reasons that I don’t mind, although I really feel like Walt was a completely wasted plot.
• The kidnapping is yet another indication that Jacob is a complete idiot. Why wouldn’t you just INVITE the new people to safety? Would that have been so horrible? I really doubt that people who just stepped off of a PLANE CRASH would have been adverse to a safe life in a suburb. How many lives would have been saved if people on that island actually explained who they were and why they did what they did?
• Jacob brings everyone to the island because he knows the monster is going to kill him eventually and he needs a candidate to replace him. He’s picked people with shitty lives so that they won’t leave anything behind.

And that’s basically the big stuff. I mean, there are other little things, but it’s mostly explained.

But the show is still a -3 to me. The reason why is that Season 6 has this whole subplot about the characters meeting up when they are dead to go into the afterlife together. It’s part of the whole Live Together – Die Alone thing. But it has literally NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. I mean, nothing at all. It’s really nice that they wanted to say something clever about death and time and friendship, but you can’t just tack that on. The sad thing is that the show actually has a good last season when you cut all that crap out. It’s ruined because the writers get too clever and stuff the show when completely extraneous crap.

So my take: overall important and interesting show that has very good points and some dumb episodes. And half the last season should have been cut. It’s a -3. I still like Lost, but I would never watch another drop of that narrative again. That bridge got burned by the Ghost ending.

Thoughts?

You can always tell when you’ve been away from your console for a while. Updates galore, hardware and software. That fun ten minutes of my life gone, the game begins with a very swank Naughty Dog logo animation that leads to a simple title card of AK-47 sticking up in desert and the now familiar orchestrated music of Uncharted’s sweeping vistas. I pick campaign mode over multiplayer  and co-op(!)  at my standard normal difficulty. It’s like three clicks in confusing menus to save my data; not sure why they don’t have that interface streamlined. And then it’s a LOOOONNNGGG load. I mean, a few minutes of watching the ring in the right corner spin. I’m not sure why that hasn’t been streamlined either.

The game proper starts with a zoom in on a table covered with Indiana Jones style archeology stuff: gun, map, old things, etc., before the camera pans out to a street skyline. There’s a voiceover of Drake talking about dreams and night dreamers and day dreamers — day dreamers are dangerous because they can act out their dream. Turns out that’s a quote from Lawrence of Arabia. As we zoom over the city, we cut to a CS between two guys walking to a bar and the inside of the bar with  lots of close ups on pool players and patrons. The two enter, step up to bar briefly and then go to a back room followed by a thug. The two men are revealed to be Drake (our hero) and Sully (his mentor) as they enter back room and get searched by said thug. They walk to pool table and a guy in a suit named Talbot faces them from the other side.  Talbot brings forward a briefcase of money in exchange for an artifact that Drake got. Drake hands Talbot a silver ring from Francis Drake. Talbot wants to know how they got it, but Sully brushes the whole thing off with a dismissive gesture. Talbot verifies the ring is real, but Drake notices the money is fake. Drake says deal’s off and snatches the ring back. Talbot says they aren’t in a position to negotiate as thugs surround and… FIGHT!

The melee is the old square to hit, triangle to counter thing, but the fight scene feels more like a QTE with all of the button call outs and short CSes. It’s basically button press, button press, button press, CS involving Drake taking down a thug in a cool environmental moment. Standard Uncharted — cool to watch and experience, but not clear how much of this I’m doing or not doing. Case in point: we beat up the guys around the pool table and then a big guy comes in. There’s an interesting moment where Sully jumps on the guy’s back and then Drake CS picks up a stool. He stands there for a second but nothing happens and the guy changes forward and throws Drake through a stained glass window back into the bar below. I didn’t hit a button in that moment — did I miss an action there? Would it have changed me going through the window? I think not given what happens next. There’s a great looking shot of guys at table Drake broke looking down on him from Drake’s position and then Drake is CS thrown back into the middle of the bar. It’s Chapter 1: Another Round. I fight more with a new throw action (circle) and more cut moments. When we take out the little thugs, the big guy CS tackles me into a bathroom. It’s a VERY set-piece fight in the stalls with a couple of dodges and ends with a dodge/hit of the big guy in the face with a toilet lid. It’s a good looking fight overall, but again, not so gaming. More Drake and Sully banter as they walk into the kitchen, all pretty good if not stellar, and then we beat up more guys quickly in the kitchen on way out. They CS walk out into the alley where they notice they are surrounded by more guys. Drake is knocked down by the main thug they encountered inside right away, named Cutter. He says I’m all talk, which is funny since I just beat up like twelve guys. A car pulls up and then Talbot and an old woman with umbrella walk out. Sully recognizes the woman as Kate, and Drake knows her too. She gives some gloating villain dialogue and says that Drake gets off on cheating death. She takes the ring from Drake’s neck. Drake gets up to take the ring back, and Cuttor just shoots him and then Sully.  Didn’t see that coming. Kate is very upset that they’ve been shot, but Cutter gets a great line. “Aw, come on, they were a right pair of assholes.”   I liked that. Kate and Talbot drive off to leave Cutter looking at the bleeding bodies.

We fade out and cut to a bright city scene in Cartegena, Columbia. We pan down to the street to see Drake as a young teen twenty years earlier. He CS walks to Francis Drake museum. I get control inside for Chapter 2: Greatness from Small Things. The game tells me to look at my journal,  and I do to see notes on Francis Drake. I close the journal and then find a treasure on the ground (that’s a collectible — 100 things I am never going to chase.) I then start looking around at the exhibits in the museum. Drake wants to find something in particular. I go upstairs and find an exhibit case with the ring. The case is locked. Drake CS looks in his journal and takes down a code in the case. He then sees guy watching him — it’s a younger version of Sully. Drake walks back to see guy look at the display. The guy takes a quick mold of the lock  and walks away. A guard  then catches Drake and throws him out on street. Drake CS sees Sully on the street, and I get control to follow him and learn my stealth (circle) moves. I follow him through streets to a door, and press triangle to open it and continue following. Sully enters another building that I can’t enter, so I have to climb up the building instead. It’s standard Uncharted parkour, fun but not always clear what the next direction is. I successfully climb the building to CS see Sully get the key made. I have to go back down and climb around the outside of the buildings to go down to street using a big sign. Once on the ground, I follow Sully again as he meets Kate (Drake doesn’t know her yet). I follow them a little further until Drake CS steals Sully’s wallet to get the key. Drake starts to CS run away, but then the guy reappears in front of Drake and talks to him. Sully knows Drake lifted his wallet (he says Drake was broadcasting all of his moves), but Drake’s cocky and stand-offish even as a kid. They realize together that neither one of them wants to call the police. Drake eventually gives the wallet back and Sully leaves.

We cut to outside of the museum that night and Drake CS still has the key. It’s Chapter 3: Second Story Work. I die once trying to jump to interconnecting rope that I then catch the next time easily. Okay. I shimmy across to the museum and then have to find my way into the inside of exhibit. I die when I drop from too high a height and then die again- not sure how to get down off the roof. I finally find way across the roofs, and die once from a bad button push but manage to get to the second floor and enter the exhibit. Drake CS approaches the case and uses the key to open it. He takes the ring and a strange looking compass thing. Drake puts the ring on the compass, and it begins to unwind. But before it completes its unlocking, Kate and Sully enter with a team of thugs. They take the compass artifact, but Drake palms the ring. Kate hits him, and  he runs. This sets up a really nice chase scene across the roofs where I have to stay one step ahead of the guards. When I don’t know where I’m supposed to go next, I lose in a cheap way, but when I know where I’m going, it’s just awesome. At one point, Sully helps me by beating up a guard who jumps out in front of me. The scene ends with a CS of a guy with a gun approaching Drake. Drake picks up a gun from fallen thug and shakily aims it back. There’s a shot, and the thug falls, Sully standing behind him with a smoking gun. Sully helps Drake up, and we cut back to ta bar where Sully gets Drake some food and starts a conversation. Drake wants to know what Sully wants from him. Drake then reveals that the ring belongs in his family and that he thinks he’s Francis Drake’s illegitimate heir. Drake was in a boarding school before he started this quest.  Sully says it’s just a job and he’s just doing what he’s paid to do by getting the ring. Drake reveals that the compass was a decoding device. Francis Drake had five months of missing time when he was in the Indies, and Drake thinks that there are treasures that Francis has hidden there. Sully says he sees great things in their future together.

We cut back to the alley with Cutter. We look at the bodies for a beat and then CS Drake and Sully get up. They faked the shots, and Cutter is working with them. Drake says Cutter didn’t need to be so rough, and that becomes a running joke for the scene. Drake gave them a fake ring, and it turns out the whole thing was a set-up to draw Kate out to find the decoder. They need to get moving before the cops arrive, and that’s the start of Chapter 4: Run to Ground. I get control to start running with Sully and Cutter. We run and climb for a while, along the way learning that  Cutter is claustrophobic when we try to crawl through a tight alley. We then reach another climbing part, but as I start to climb, Cutter just muscles his way through the door I’m avoiding  — nice irony there. We get to a rendezvous point where there’s a van waiting, and surprise surprise Chloe (from the previous game) is here. Huh, what happened to the blond that Drake ended up with last game? Anyway, there’s some witty banter about beating up Drake before Chloe reveals that she saw the building that Kate drove into. They are going to sneak in to get decoder, but they arm up with guns anyway. Drake wants to be stealthy, but Cutter and Chloe don’t want to take chances. I get control to walk down the alley with the crew. Drake’s head tracking as we walk down the alley is annoying — he keeps looking around, making me think I’m missing something on the ground when there’s nothing there. The team doesn’t want to go in blazing, so Drake volunteers to go in first to check it out. I get control to start climbing – monkey that I am. Halfway up the pipe, it comes loose and I have to make a jump to another pipe, and I die once going up because the game doesn’t register my command. I get inside the building from an open window and it’s completely empty. I die from a drop when I don’t know where to go to get back to the ground floor, but then I do it successfully. I open the garage door to let the team in and they CS start looking around to figure out where the car went. I get control to search and I find some pressure spots on the ground  near a wall. It turns out there are four pressure points (one for each tire) and Drake has everyone stand on one. Nothing happens and I get control back to figure out what we have to do. Regaining control, I shine my flashlight and see a glimmer on the wall. It turns out we have to shine our flashlights on the light sensors on wall, and when we CS do it, it opens a fake wall to reveal a large tunnel. The team CS confers and they decide that Chloe is going back to get the van as the rest  go in.

I get control to run through the tunnel. We eventually find a locked door which I get to shoot the lock off of. We enter into a narrow room, and there’s a weird moment where Drake says they have to slip through a narrow passage, but I’m not sure what to do. I try every button until I  push forward and that leads Drake and company to slowly make their way through the passage. As they go, the three guys make a Macduff joke where Sully gets the quote wrong and Drake doesn’t even know who he is — interesting moment of establishing their characters. We wander around more tunnels and shoot four guys who appear in front of us. We then climb down long shaft, jumping from pipe to pipe and finding another treasure. When we get to the bottom, we enter another corridor and shoot a couple of guys. I’m kind of crapping up this shooting (L1 to aim and R1 to fire) but I’m getting better as we go.  We climb up the inside of dome to open a passageway, and  wander the passageway to a dead end. We double back to enter earthen tunnel and start Chapter 5: London Underground. The earthen tunnel leads to some old underground room. The gate is shut on a door out, but the counterweight is stuck. Drake has to climb to loosen it. I climb around the room to do so and get to the weight.  They lift the gate and go through as I climb over the gate and start running along the rafters in the giant stone room we enter next. As I do, Drake sees guards and shouts down a warning to Cutter and Sully. They take the guards out as I continue to move forward. Rounding a corner on the rafters, Drake sees the car and Cutter says no more guns. I jump across some chandeliers and start climbing down as a guard spots Sully and Cutter coming up on the ground. I stealth behind the guard and take him out with a stealth attack (circle) move. We’re now in some kind of Francis Drake tribute room. We stealth take out a couple of guards and enter a tutor era room. At this point, they now asked who these people are about fifty times. I get it guys; the tunnels are weird. We then go up some stairs to a set of archeological displays. The game cuts to a CS of them looking down on Kate and Talbot talking in a huge library. Kate puts the ring in the decoder and realizes it’s a fake. They figure out that Drake switched the ring and that Cutter is a traitor. Kate says to find them and get the ring, and the group scatters. I get control to stealth take out the two remaining guards. In CS, Drake, Sully, and Cutter approach the table with the decoder. Drake goes through a journal of Lawrence of Arabia on the desk. Cutter and Drake argue about how Lawrence died before Sully reminds Drake he’s been waiting twenty years to find the decoder again. Drake puts the ring in decoder and decodes the message. The message is”long hidden” which is an anagram for the Golden Hind, Francis Drake’s ship. Drake realizes that they have to search room for the ship exhibit to find the next clue, but that’s enough for me and I call it a night.

I begin again in the tunnels, and wandering quickly gets me back to a predation scene in a subway terminus with another radio guy blocking something or other. I honestly cannot remember what these guys do, but I know I have to talk him down first. I creep up to the radio guy in a subway car and take him out silently in a very nice crawling stealth move. From there, it’s clean takedowns of the other five or so guys. I walk further down the tunnels and take out some shield guys in a fist fight. You have to do a special move to disarm the shield guys, which is annoying in a big fight but not a big deal. I keep going and kill a few more joker teeth; it’s really good to have those as a path to know where I’m heading. I navigate ducking and sliding through the tunnel to then enter a grating that leads underneath a big group of thugs waiting for guns to arrive. I jump out to takedown the leader and then beat the rest in a decently handled fistfight. When I finish the fight, I get a radio message that the Mayor has been arrested and brought to Arkham City. WTF? What kind of sense does that make? How did he get here? Why does Strange have that authority? Why for that matter is this the first time I’ve ever even HEARD about the mayor. Well, at least Oracle and Batman also talk about how weird it is.

My next mission is changed from getting back to Freeze with the cure to having to go save the mayor. I run around the world until I get to the objective marker. There are a bunch of thugs there, including a couple with guns, but I fist fight them all down. Once all the thugs are done, I hear the mayor talking to me,  but I’m at the spot I’m supposed to be and I can’t see him. I end up coming in and out of this area about fifteen times looking for my target and hearing Batman say that I shouldn’t leave. Oh, he was on the ground. That’s great — make him look exactly like a thug I just beat up. That’s clear feedback for you. I hit the button to pick him up, and we cut to a CS of Mayor Sharp hanging upside as Batman interrogates him. Sharp tells Batman that he let Strange take charge of Arkham City in exchange for campaign money to get votes. Wow, this might have been meaningful if the game had started with any logical sense of what Arkham City was. Batman lets the mayor go and wants to find out who Strange used to make the donations, but Oracle tells him he has to get cured first. The new mission is to go to where Freeze is and I do. A bunch of Joker’s men are trying to get into the frozen over building and I have to take them out. I die in the fistfight the first time because I’m sloppy and there are three different kinds of enemies (normal, big guys, and shields) in the battle. I die several times more; it’s a hard fist fight for me to be this sloppy in. I finally win when I use tactics intelligently to take out all the normal guys first, and I’ll give the game credit for a very interesting fight. As soon as I’m done, a payphone rings and I have to go get another Zsazs phone. This one is very far away and I get there with literally 1 second to spare. It’s a nice emergent moment. I play the tracking mini-game and get about halfway to catching him.

I go back, zap icy door open and go inside. This immediately cuts to a CS of Freeze. Freeze takes the blood I have and then centrifuges a cure. (I know, I know. Don’t ask — if you really wanted to pick on science in Batman, comic book narratives are not for you.) Freeze puts some of the cure in a safe, but then shatters the other vial in his hand. He tells Batman he wants Batman to retrieve his wife from the Joker first. When did the Joker get Freeze’s wife? When was that plot introduced? Forget it. Asking for consistency at this point is almost unfair to this dumb story. Anyway, it’s fight time. Oracle says that Freeze is too powerful to fight directly, but she gets the suit telemetry whatever that means which shows me in a small interface whether Freeze sees me or not. I have no idea what to do in this fight and die once, but then I realize  I have to hide and take him down with traps. When he falls for a trap, he’s vulnerable for a quick beatup before he attacks again. He then destroys that trap so you have to do a new type. I die once because I can’t remember the explosive commands. I die again because I can’t find anymore traps in the room. This fight is annoying. A lot of the traps are one-shot, so if you get them wrong they are wasted, and it’s a little silly to see Freeze just stumbled stupidly following my warm footsteps into really simple traps.  I’m calling it a night.

I start where I left off: following the blood trail from the assassin that happened to be in the museum. I like that I’m doing this using detective mode, but it’s kind of annoying because whenever it gets to a ledge or jump, it’s impossible to find the trail again without a long search. I finally  see the assassin when I get to the end of the blood trail and now I have to chase her. Eh — the chase is mediocre. The rubber band is pretty obvious, in that whenever I slow down a little bit, I see her waiting for me around a corner. The dynamic difficulty adjustment here is failing the way too obvious test. It makes the chase scenes in Assassin’s Creed seem that much better. I catch her and then dodge a knife attack to put a tracer on her as we fight. She takes me down CS and the scene ends with her over me with sword ready. Then Robin shows up, ready to fight. Batman tells him to stand down and he does. The assassin says Batman’s only alive because Ghul wants him to be, and they leave. Robin says that Alfred sent him to help Batman. Batman tells him to go back to Gotham and get the blood of the people in Gotham tested to see if they are poisoned. Robin says he’ll come back. Batman says Robin’s needed in Gotham and just about tells him to get lost. Wow, Batman was kind of a dick to Robin there. I guess that’s consistent character. Still, you can’t help but see the homoerotic between them. There’s a tension I think you can’t miss. Anyway, as Robin leaves, I get a new line launcher tool from the last game that lets me zipline across spaces.

Back to assassin hunting. I follow the tracer in circles having several good fights with random thugs. When I get close to the target, I die because I don’t see that one group of thugs has two guns instead of one. I do it again to beat them and then enter an underground tunnel. I contact Oracle to make sure my signal stays good, and she comments on my fading health. More fighting and then I die in a fist fight where I can’t find the rhythm right. I take them down the second time. Apparently, Joker’s men are rounding up Penguin’s now that he’s down. And there’s the return of the chattering teeth. There’s another big fight that I take out smoothly, and then, oh hey, I’m back where I took out the last disruptor in the Penguin plot. That’s pretty interesting. I traverse more tunnels and as I do, there’s a CS where Batman collapses from the poison and then recovers. I walk into another fight in which I get a nice takedown where I use smoke bomb smartly, and then a predation scene with some kind of jammer that disrupts my ability to track which enemy is which. I die because I don’t know what to do with the jamming guy, but then the second time I take him out and predate them in a really sloppy set of punch and run moments.

Winning the predation scene has me save a nurse, and talking to her reveals that the Joker isn’t stealing the weapons – Strange is giving them to the Joker. I blow up a Titan container that’s nearby before I go. There’s another CS of Batman coughing as I approach a closed door. It’s an electric door and when I use my tool to open it, I see a room full of strung up thugs. There’s a series of corridors behind doors which end with a large room filled with small amusement park size buildings and a number of deactivated robots. I get a Riddler trophy inside crevice and then I suddenly teleport outside for a CS. Batman sees a long sealed door and then says I should scan the robots for video memory of another way in. When I start scanning the first one, its head explodes so I have to scan multiple robots to get what I need. In the middle of the scanning, I fight two ninja in a quick fist fight. I find all the robots and learn about a secret door off to the side. It’s got a keyhole that looks like it needs a scimitar to open it. And, lucky me, a guard shows up on cue. I beat up the guard to use sword to unlock the door.

I run around through more tunnels until I reach a ladder to climb up ladder. When I get to the top, Batman CS collapses. There’s a very cool CS of Bruce’s parents calling to him from a bright beam of light. I can’t do anything but feebly walk forward so I do. Then in CS, guards suddenly appear and Talya, daughter of Ghul, stops Batman. She tempts him, and he does his no-nonsense Batman thing. She tells him that to get the blood he needs, he has to do the assassin’s trial. She says as part of the trial, he’ll have to take a life. They walk down a staircase to the trial together, and as they walk, she warns him that many have tried and failed the trial. He says he won’t. He then asks if she’s trying to dissuade him, and she says no hesitantly. Finally, they arrive at the door to the trial and he enters.

Ras al Ghul is speaking in a voice over throughout this scene, and he says the first trial is to drink from the chalice in the small room I enter. This causes the walls to crumble to reveal a new colorful desert world of high platform with huge chasms between them. I then have to glide along a path without touching the ground or any other objects. I basically have to dive bomb then climb to make it to an unknown destination. It’s kind of unfairly hard because it is impossible to judge distance from this perspective. After several deaths, I finally realize that I just have to make it to a blue platform, and as soon as I realize that, I do it right away. I glide a second time to get to a next tower, and when I land, I have to beat up two guards. After beating them,  I glide a third time to go through portal to a slightly different weird desert world. The next glide is hard because I can’t judge depth, and I fail many times trying to weave through a lattice. When I land on the next platform, there’s another fight and a glide to enter a final portal.

I reappear in the tunnels, and I’m told that I passed the gauntlet of ninja. I talk to Talya, and see Ras in CS who says Batman must kill him to get the blood. Batman says he won’t kill. Ras dives back in his Lazarus pool and comes out regenerated. This triggers a stupid boss battle against Ras. I beat him in the room, and then teleport to a fight in desert with multiple and a giant sandstorm Ras. Why when Batman does everything else so well does it always fall down on the bosses? I beat this dumb desert scene pretty easily and then cut to a CS of Batman with a sword at Ghul’s throat. Talya says Batman has to kill him, and Batman says no. Tayla says Ghul has to die and then we cut back to the desert. There, we literally repeat the whole desert battle. Sigh. I beat him again and we return to the room. Ghul takes Talya hostage and says that if Batman won’t kill, he will. The scene is resolved with a cheap shit win with new tool  I receive at this moment (reverse batarang). That’s nice — beating a villain with a tool that I didn’t have until this moment. Batman then uses a syringe to take some of Ghul’s blood. Newly freed, Talya says that she thinks they both betrayed them. Ras says he’s gone mad from continued resurrection and Batman tells him he has to kick the Lazarus pit. I leave back to go back to the street. Man, was that subplot filled with stupid turns and obvious crap. I beat up guys with shields and CS tell Oracle that the trial has cured the poison for me. I find my way out of the Ghul area, but I’m not out yet because I can’t remember this maze. I’ve been playing a while so I call it a night.

I start again with the stupid fuse box thing again, and what’s the best thing about it is I have to do the whole batarang the button behind the electrified fence again. Another ten minutes of my life gone forever. I am pretty much ready to give up on this puzzle, and despite how much I HATE doing it, I am almost looking it up online to see what the solution is. However, I decide give it one last go and realize that the Riddler trophy I found was under an elevator. I this time get in the elevator and take it up. There’s a explodable ceiling above the elevator, so I blow through it and then another wall to a balcony over the room I was trapped in. I turn off the electrical fences, but I don’t go back. I just continue moving on this new floor. There’s one more wall to explode, and doing so cuts to a CS of Batman walking into a room and getting his arm frozen to a wall. I see the Penguin with Freeze’s ice gun, saying he’ll kick Batman’s ass again. He then freezes a cop who is running away and runs out of the room. I get control when Penguin leaves.

I’m in room with a large half frozen lake in the middle. I  have to walk slowly on the ice to not break it. The frozen cop is calling for help, so I head to him first and hit A to save him. I thus save the first guy and he CS tells me that there are two more cops in here. I get control to go back to my search. About halfway through the room, the ice stops and it’s just water and I can’t enter it. To traverse the lake, I have to batclaw down a pallet, jump on the makeshift raft,  and then use my batclaw to grab hooks on the wall to pull my raft around the room. Penguin over the intercom points out that’s there a big shark in the water which then briefly appears near my raft. I raft over to a platform and  save two more cops. In CS, one of them tells me there are more deeper inside. I stat rafting toward an exit to the room, but I die once because I stupidly drop into the water. When I respawn, I get up to a ledge.  I hear down a hallway to a new room, outer ring of a hallway with open walls facing into some pillar in the room center. On the pillar, I see Penguin on a central pillar with freeze gun. I can’t reach him because he’s constantly strafing at me with the freeze gun. Since I can’t take Penguin yet, I go back out and across the ice room to another exit. In that doorway, I beat up a few guards in a pitifully handled fight. I then find Freeze in a museum display case. He’s alive so I need to find a way to free him. Looking around, I notice a wall I can blow up wall. I spray the wall with my gel and then in CS a big guy grabs Batman and throws him into the room. Said big guy and thugs enter the room to fight. I die once because of my low health from the previous pitiful fight, but then I win, taking out the big guy with multiple feedback-less beatdowns. I free Freeze and he and Batman have a CS conversation. The Freeze model is awesome, by the way. Batman threatens Freeze about how to stop the ice gun Penguin has, but he won’t talk because he doesn’t want to give batman ways to hurt him in the future. Batman becomes a complete dick in this scene, first threatening Freeze’s comatose wife and then pulling the cold gel thing (presumably keeping his temperature low) out of Freeze’s chest, effectively torturing him. This gets Freeze to say that there’s an override chip in Freeze’s suit. Batman gives Freeze the cold thing back and goes to get the chip. I get control to leave, pausing to ponder (to no avail) how to get a Riddler trophy that blocked by a steam pipe.

I head back to the ice room and sail on my batclaw powered raft across the room to a new area where the suit is. At the door to this area, I talk to two cops who say they gave info to penguin under torture. I move on to listen to penguin torture a guy as I go across the room to see a room filled with guards. This is a predation room, but the twist is that there are thugs with thermal vision and bombs so can’t hide on gargoyles. I die once in this scene because I don’t remember what those thermal things do. To win, I have to run around the level, crouching and hiding in tunnels. Right, THIS is Batman fun. I stealth takeout one guy, jump two more when I roll out behind a pillar and use a smoke bomb to stop their shots, I glide kick out one, invert snag one from a gargoyle, and finally sneak up behind the last guy as he holds a hostage. Oh that is so very fun. The room is clear. I level up and get thermal protection to keep me invisible from that vision in the future. I talk to the cop hostages, and then find the freeze suit. Batman CS takes a cold cell out of the suit and tells a cop to give it to Freeze. Batman then takes something out of suit and make Freeze override device. There is a very Mass Effect style audio reward track for the new tool back.

Now ready to take down Penguin, I head back to the center room. It turns out the ice is beginning to thaw. I pull my raft across the room when the shark attacks. I have to qte beat it up, and I do so easily with some simple attacks and get across the room. Back in the room with Penguin, I don’t know what do with this disruptor. It’s not in range when I try it but I can’t seem to get closer to the Penguin. After a couple of minutes running in circles and experimenting, I finally find a corridor to Penguin. I get close to him with a well timed dodge and use the disruptor. As the Penguin wonders what happened to the weapon, Batman CS knocks Penguin to the ground. They taunt each other for a spell, and then Penguin blows up the ice pillar Batman is on. Batman falls into pit with giant giant guy. Penguin shocks him awake in a long CS of shocks. Turns out it’s Solomon Grundy. He’s nice and scary as a villain. FIGHT! I have no idea what I’m supposed to do at first, but oh a tip tells me. Grundy is periodically shocked by three power cells in the ground that recharge his health. The key is to blow up the generators with gel. It takes a few tries, but I do take him down without dying, blowing up all three cells and then punching the crap out of him.  I have to go finish him off with one more blow before I can leave the room, but of course he wakes up again and I have to use the set of explosives all over again. It’s a boss fight, and it’s kind of dumb that way all these game bosses are. I do beat Grundy and then charge an armed Penguin to take him down.

We cut to a CS of Freeze beating up Penguin and then throwing him into a glass case. Freeze tells Batman that the cure for the disease he has is too unstable. Any vaccine needs an enzyme to bond it to DNA. Batman thinks of Rash Al-Ghul (AND WE HAVE A WINNER – VILLAIN # 10!!!!) because his longevity shows that he has enzymes to keep things stable. At this point, a servant of Al-Ghul (who happens to be hanging out in the museum — sure, whatever) runs away from the space, with an insult for Batman and warning him that Al-Ghul will be waiting. Batman can follow the blood trail from the agent breaking out of the case. I see the blood trail in detective vision and CS contact Oracle. Oracle brings up that Batman had some history with Al Ghul daughter — that’s just want a Batman game needs, romance. I head outside to start the game, but it’s late call it a night.

So something didn’t work when my game crashed last time, so I have to do whole Catwoman fight over again. Sigh. I win again and go back to Batman. He CS recovers on a roof. He gets up and the Joker talks to him through a PDA taped to his chest. Turns out the Joker poisoned Batman, and he only person working on a cure is Mr. Freeze. Sigh — what villain is that again? Eight? So I have to find Freeze. There’s no clear location where Freeze is, but I can follow a temperature gauge to find the coldest part of Arkham City. I start heading there, and I hear a phone ringing. I answer the phone and it’s again Zsazs.  I guess that’s the role of payphone’s here — to have a psychopath talk to me. When I get on the phone, there’s a scanning animation to look for Zsazs’s phone. He hangs up before the trace completes, but he tells me that I have to find the next payphone he rings or he’s going to kill someone. It’s a race across the city against a clock. I do it with almost a minute to spare,  just as a thug comes on me. When I pick up, there’s another scan as Zsazs talks about his parents and his psychosis, and oh, there’s a mini-game here where I have to follow Zsazs’s cellphone marker with my reticule to slowly complete the trace. Then the phone hangs up. I start heading back to Freeze, but there’s another side quest on my map, so I get distracted and go to it instead. I find political prisoner there who tells me that Dr. Strange had him setting up things around the city. The prisoner suddenly gets shot and killed. I have to set up a crime scene to find out what happened. I scan to reveal the line of the shot and then I follow to a ledge where I find a bullet casing. I scan the casing and GOOD GOD ANOTHER VILLAIN?!? Ok Dead Shot fired the shot. Fine. Can I PLEASE get back to the plot now?

I keep following Freeze by temperature, having to restart once because of an unclean disc. When I get to where Freeze is supposed to be, I have to predate some guys who are camped out here. I die once because I don’t remember the button commands, but then I take them down easily the second time.Once they are down, I find my first Titan container and blow it up with my explosive gel. I then waste a lot of time trying to find another one in the Steel Mill before I give up. I answer another Zsazs call, and race successfully to the next phone in time. Right after I complete the second call, I die in a fist fight because I’m sloppy. I go back to Freeze and finally head inside the building where he’s supposed to be. I find my first Riddler trophy here under some stairs. I see a gate I can power up, and then I slide under the partially open door to get to the main room. (And thanks for the reminder about sliding, Greg.) From a fallen guard, I get a radio signal for Penguin. I get to a main room where I find five thugs that I have to predate, which I do handily. I interrogate the last one and find out that the Penguin has Freeze for some reason I frankly don’t pay any attention to, because really, how could this possibly make sense? Joker poisoned me to get a cure from Freeze who was kidnapped by Penguin? Oh this is such a dumb story.

I try to go back outside to find Penguin, but Penguin locks me in this building. I have to use my detective mode to trace wires then use my cryptographic device to unlock the door. It’s a little confusing to do, as you have to rotate the L and R sticks until you fill vibration, but I get it. I work my way back to the museum where the Penguin is. I get to the museum, beat up the guards outside, and creep in. Inside are a couple of guys with knives. There’s some command to dodge the knife that makes no sense to me, so I take my cuts and just beat them up. I find a motion sensor that locks a door I need to go through as soon as I walk through an archway. There’s a terminal to hack to turn the motion sensor off,  but the Penguin is blocking my cryptographic device’s signal. I need to find the disruptors to stop the Penguin’s hack. I go back outside to find them. I find the first one quickly, and after a fist fight to take out some guards, I then punch my way through the three monitors on the disruptor to destroy it. I find the second one after quick predation, but there’s a third one being quickly set up in a subway.  I find an entrance to the underground and I fight way through a bunch of guards, finding a couple more Riddler trophies on the way. I predate my way to the last jammer and take it out.  That sequence was pretty fun.

I head back to the museum and beat up more guards outside. I get inside and deactivate the motion detector. As I head deeper into the museum, I beat up more guys inside (including a guy in body armor that I have to do some weird beat down command sequence to defeat) who are threatening a hostage. When the thugs are down, I talk to Officer Jones who is held hostage. Jones knows a code to convince me he’s actually a cop. He tells me that there’s more of his team inside. I continue on through some hallways to be blocked by a gate. I have to use stupid remote batarang to get past gate (by hitting a button behind the gate) and it takes me like twenty tries to get right. Your camera follows the batarang and it’s impossible to tell where you are at first. I finally get the gate open and keep going. I arrive in a new room to see a CS of Penguin killing one of the cop hostages. I see more of the cops held hostage. Penguin and Batman CS trade credible and decently written threats. When that conversation is over,  the Penguin lets loose a hoard of initiate gang members on me and I take them all down easily. The Penguin then lets loose a big Titan-drugged guy along with some new thugs. I beat up the big guy, jumping on his back to charge him into the other thugs, and pretty easily take them all down. Penguin leaves and locks the doors. So, to keep going, I have to do ANOTHER FUCKING REMOTE BATARANG to hit the button to get past the electrical fences. The great part of this is the place where the batarang has to go, the SCREEN IS TOO DARK TO SEE. FUCK YOU GAME!!!!!!  I finally get the button, but past the one gate that opens, it’s nothing but a Riddler trophy. It turns out that to actually proceed after the Penguin, I have to disable fuse box from behind the main gate. I try hitting it with batarang and it doesn’t seem to work. I can’t get anything through the gate that I can tell.  FUCK YOU GAME. I’m done for the night.

I start off back in the chimney. It’s more crawling through tunnels. There’s more steam blocking Batman from walking. Steam is kind of weird as a set piece blocker. There is fire in this game; isn’t that a more threatening danger? To turn the steam off, I have to use my batarang to turn off some switches. Not the most interesting gameplay, that. As I continue, I overhear Harley talking to huge room full of guards about how the doctor failed and as I approach a window on the room, she (standing on a ledge high above the room) throws the doctor into the mob in a CREEPY moment. A lone tied up woman in front of a room full of male thugs — the imagination goes horrible places. But then Harley changes her mind and tells them to try to get more info out of the doctor first. It’s a set piece and I can’t get into the room to interrupt it. Another steam blocker forces me to backtrack to turn off a series of switches with my batarang. I finally end up in the room for a big fist fight I handle passably well. When the fight is finished, there’s a CS of Harley up on her ledge whining that I should be dead,  but then says she’s locking me in this room to burn before exiting through a closed door. It’s a nicely acted scene.

I wander around to find a new way to get to Harley. I end up in another room where I predate (my short hand for the stealthy predator scenes) out three guys. This is feeling more like the Batman I love. As if answering my prayers, the game follows this with  another longer predation scene that is quite good. You can hear the doctor screaming for help throughout and it’s very nicely creepy. Thugs defeated, I rescue the doctor, and she says that the Titan in Joker’s blood is killing him. It turns out that Harley is listening to them remotely and has some thugs seal them in the room. Batman CS says he has to get back to Joker. He then pulls something random off of some machinery to make a new tool. It makes no sense, but whatever. I basically get a new tool to remotely control electronics. The controls for it are a little confusing, in that the button you push to shoot the remote also controls what the remote does, so you have to guess which of the two buttons you need to hit to do what you want the electronics to do. For now, it involves opening and closing doors.

I return back to where Harley was, and after some experimentation, I use my new tool to throw a hook on a chain up to the door on the ledge where Harley disappeared. Once the hook is up there, I pull it down to rip the door open. I grapple up there, but then Batman is CS kicked off the ledge by a big sub-boss with a hammer. He comes out with a bunch of thugs. I kill the thugs quickly, but the big guy does seem to react to my beatings. The tips tell me that I need to use shock to kill the hammer guy, but when I shock him, he just seems to spin and I can’t figure out how to knock him down. I die once trying. The second time, I waste a lot of time causing the hammer guy to spin only to realize that I just have to beat him up enough to take him down. Wow some feedback on that would have been nice. Anyway, I grapple up to the ledge and enter a new room. I see a CS of Harley crying over the Joker’s dead body. I’m suspicious and some is Batman. He CS scans and it is a dead body, but then the Joker jumps him from behind with some kind of gas mask. Batman throws him off but succumbs to the gas as Harley knocks him out.

We cut to Catwoman talking on a ledge, deciding if she’s going to help Batman or rob Strange. She decides to rob Strange and says she needs Poison Ivy’s help to do it. I now get to play as Catwoman. It has got some nice new mechanics as she more jumps around more than she grapples. To climb a building, she jumps up in steps and use a whip to swing to other ledges. It’s a nice change of pace. I’m first going back to her apartment to get some stuff and on the way, I fight as her — she’s quicker but weaker, and otherwise combat is the same. I run around city to get back to apartment, fighting two groups of guards. Climbing in the apartment, I get caltrops and bolos. I go back to Ivy’s place (hello villain#8) and Ivy’s goons are all around it. I get in another fight on the way and I’m finally remembering how to fight in Batman, jumping from opponent to opponent with some grace. I find way into Ivy’s base, but as I approach it, I don’t realize that I walk into predation scene and get shot to death something quick. Predation is much harder out here without Batman’s grappling hook to make quick getaways. I take these thugs down and level up, buying Batman a bunch of new armor.  I go inside to a CS of Catwoman entering Ivy’s lair and Ivy saying she’s upset about some flowers that Cat killed. Boy, Poison Ivy is a stupid villain. Anyway, Ivy wants me dead, so I have to fight a series of guards on a set of different levels going up, having to jump up to the next level each time I defeat one group to avoid a poison gas. I beat these guys handily and get up to see Ivy. We cut to a CS when I do where Ivy captures Cat. We cut back to the Batman story, but the game crashes so I call it a night.