this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I just finished Arkham night last night!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Love these posts.

Dont know if you have any statistics on your posts, but it could be pretty cool to see how many different games you played when/if you hit a year!

Keep it up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

I've thought about doing this every once and a while when i reach a milestone, but i still can't make up my mind. I'm thinking about it if i reach 1 year here this july-ish, but i'll have to see if i can finally make up my mind lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The Arkham games are absolutely perfect.

You should definitely go through Arkham Knight after City if you haven't already. It looks even better and holds up just as much if not a bit more. And don't listen to the haters about the Batmobile.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I think i've had it on here a few times. Sadly i just can't playthrough it. Idk if it's because i got all the way to the Knight drill fight on my Xbox before losing my save or what, but every attempt i make to pick it up i just end up dropping it again. I do genuinely love how well it the graphics hold up though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I wonder what Steam was on with those updates

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Not really sure. The issue persisted after i played Arkham and I ended up having to go to the download cache and clear it before signing back in and that fixed it. One of the games kept throwing a "Downloaded File Missing" error, so my guess would be it had something to do with that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Arkham City is great! Plays well, sounds dope, looks still pretty darn good. The artstyle is still a nice balance between realistic and stylistic, which doesn't age as hard as realistic, imo.

Got to ask, FSR really needed? Shouldn't this run at 4k even at fairly modest/toaster-ish pc now? Or does FSR provide better antialiasing results than whatever the game does without it?

Once upon a time I did 100%'d Arkham Asylum, but bailed out of that plan on Arkham City - the amount of collectibles, challenges and secrets was just too much. (And then Arkham Knight came along and turned it way past 11, didn't bother to finish the game because screw those Joker races.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I used the benchmark at 4K and was getting around 30 FPS average. I'm fine with 30 FPS to be honest, but if i have the option of scaling down to 1440p and getting 60 i'd much rather take that. The FSR was honestly just personal preference though. I looked at it compared to Steam OS's linear scaling and went "I like how this looks more" and that was my rationale.

I was planning on 100% City, it's my favorite, and i had fun 100% Asylum, but i saw the number of collectibles and decided maybe that's better saved for when i can allot time to it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

oh I wasn't going to go on a rampage about fake pixels or anything, honest question about performance. Kinda wild it tanks that hard beyond 1440p. There's few games where I run DLSS even if performance-wise it isn't neede - just because it does better job with antialiasing than whatever TXAA/TAA/FXAA/whatever postprocess AA there usually is. A lot less crawling pixel edges in fine details etc.

Also, just heads up if you ever intend to go for Arkham Knight - IIRC the good ending requires finishing all joker stuff (incl. the collectible trophies). I got no time for that nonsense so just watched the ending on youtube after getting bad ending. :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're fine lol. I will say i do use FSR to upscale UI specifically on old games where the UI wasn't made with 1440p or higher in mind so it's fuzzy and jagged (Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Rogue are the two main examples). I'm not really sure what the performance is all about though. My GPU is a RX 7600 XT 16 GB at 2.47 GHz clock speed, so i feel like that should be enough for City at 4k, maybe not though.

I wasn't aware there was a good ending in Knight though. I knew about the Nightmare difficulty changes but i had always assumed the ending was the exact same regardless of 100% status due to the older games

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

are you using some app to use fsr in older games, or is that just baked into the amd drivers/software now?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I’m using Bazzite which is like a modified version of SteamOS 3 (The one on Steam Deck) to apply FSR (It has FSR Scaling built in on a OS level)