Batman-ier, Arkham-ier

 

Batman: Arkham City has a lot of things that one can say about it, which is something in its favor. I tend to despise the generic much more than the awful, because at least the awful has something to revile or despise or to laugh at, whereas the latest edition of Middle-Aged Scruffy White Dude Shoots the Foreigners is so self-explanatory that there's nothing to say about it at all. The trouble with what you can say about Batman: Arkham City is that most of the dialogue concerning it can be split into two categories: why it's like Batman: Arkham Asylum, and why it's not. Which is one of the major problems with making sequels, and information concerning the fact that your new crappy Silent Hill game is going to be inevitably compared to the original Silent Hill games and will almost always come up short is a fortune cookie I would dearly love to shoot at the current Team Silent at extreme velocity these days. We all know (including the writers and makers of the sequel itself) that a sequel is going to be compared to the original and on some level I think some of us were expecting Arkham City to be the Dark Knight to the Begins of this series. And as far as sequels go, Arkham City is a pretty decent one, though it suffers that Portal 2 problem of trying to crack the "code" of what made the original so good and trying to give us that but that-ier. Unfortunately at that point the whole formula just falls to pieces because art is weird and unfathomable like why we exist as individual beings in this vast unending universe, and it does mean that it definitely lost a lot of its charm. City definitely tried to be Batman-ier, Arkham-ier, and thus of course, along the line, got frustrating-ier. Er. More frustrating.

There are spoilers, though if you haven't heard them then congratulations! That is an accomplishment.

You are Uninvited to Arkham City

I think, after all these years, I understand what the Maleficent and every incarnation of "my brother/sister/king didn't invite me to their daughter's christening" there ever was. It must have been hard to see basically everyone go, including any assortment of peasants and farm animals, and yet you're the single person that they decided not to invite. This is where personally I'd depart from the comparison because I probably wouldn't throw any curse about spindle pricking a baby on her finger. If I had the ability to do such a thing, I'd throw a curse about spindle pricking the gigantic douchebag who didn't invite me to the party on his dick, but the basic principle of being annoyed at not being invited is the same.