Games

Today's game is Arkham City. I was originally going to playthrough more AC Shadows, or maybe drag a friend out for a multiplayer game. But Steam just decided it wanted to update all my games except this and Halo Infinite with 10 gb updates, and as you can see below one of them was even 20 GB.

This left me deciding to play Arkham City which i had installed to play at some point later down the line (and to help debug for a friend who was having issues with it).

Arkham City is probably my favorite Arkham Game next to Origins. I like it's ambience and it expands on the gameplay in a fun way. The story is fun too. I like how it takes the basics Asylum did with it's Serious House on Serious Earth inspired story and runs with it to create something mostly new (as far as i'm aware at least). A fun fact about this game is that it was the game that Red Ringed my Childhood Master Chief Xbox 360. So it gets to be very memorable for that (still love it though).

One thing i stopped to do was visit Bane's mission, which i never did on previous runs as far as i know. If i end up continuing with this anytime soon (maybe after Shadows) one of my goals is to finally play through that, and hopefully 100% this game like i did Asylum.

One thing i noticed is that the Game's graphics hold up really well for it's age (bears are relevant to this because it's the best example of what i mean). A lot of games from this era struggle with kind of looking dated when you look at the finer details (like the meshes and terrain). They look great for the context, but compare them to something newer and they struggle a little. Granted, i am playing Arkham on Max at 1440p and using FSR 2 to upscale it too 4K. A lot of 2011 games look pretty good though now that i think about it (Portal 2 and Uncharted 3 are two others that spring to mind), so maybe it was just when things started to turn (along with developers getting a full grasp of the PS3/Xbox 360's hardware).

This game also gets bonus points from me for including cats, which i'll now use as a segue to talk about how much i like having a second character to play as. Catwoman i feel like is a fun enough mixup from Batman while still not deviating from the normal predator + combat formula. It's an interesting choice to go with her over say, Nightwing, but i'm guessing it was for narrative or gameplay reasons.

Finally, i wanted to point out whoever made this sign (in universe) needs to possibly seek a career outside of sign making because enudes sounds like it's trying to sell me on a mathematical concept rather than what it's intended purpose is.