Playing every PS1 game - Batman games

Here’s a fun fact for you - I haven’t seen a single Batman film. Be it the campy Adam West turn in the 60s, the (just as campy looking) foursome in the late 80s and 90s, the trio of Dark Knight Christopher Nolan entries, or the more recent Robert Pattinson iteration that I didn’t even know existed until two minutes ago, the Caped Crusader is part of a media juggernaut I’ve never really cared about. [I don’t care for superhero movies more generally, but that’s a whole separate topic]

Beyond movies, comic books and cartoons, though, the Bat Man franchise includes an absolute mountain of videogames, with a suprisingly lean stable of four on the PlayStation.

Batman & Robin

Famously the worst of the Batman films, the Official Only Game Where You Can Play As George Clooney also sometimes gets thrown up as one of the worst games on the PlayStation. It’s an unfortunate label that comes not entirely without merit, but I actually think Batman & Robin is an interesting curiosity from the 5th console generation which I daresay is a bit misunderstood.

GTA3 back before it was even a twinkle in DMA Design’s eye.

Let’s get it out of the way early, though - Batman & Robin is not a good game. It ticks every box on the checklist of common PS1 game design mistakes - bad controls, janky camera, frustrating combat, lack of instruction, ridiculous difficulty spikes, glitchy rendering, and an incoherent narrative to name a few, but it’s safe to say that if it had actually pulled off half of what it was attempting to do then it would have ended up a well-considered game - definitely ahead of its time - rather than discarded and forgotten. Such is the case with many games, though.

The Gall-Peters projection!? In the Batcave!?

Unlike the typical formula for cheap movie-tie-in quick cash games of the era, where you might play as Batman, Robin and Batgirl on some dull 3D platforming levels, collecting some coins, jumping on heads, negotiating some jank controls and calling it a day, Batman & Robin attempts to be an open world action-adventure with elements of melee combat, third person shooting, driving, platforming, swimming (!) and freeform puzzling (‘detective’ work). The scope is very broad.

Examining the clues and working out the bad guys’ plans is probably the most fun part of the game.

It gets very little of it right, but I have to respect the attempt. The premise thrust upon you is that, playing as Batman, Robin, or Batgirl, you must thwart the diamond-thieving plans of the evil Mr. Freeze and his cronies by scouring a fully 3D Gotham City for clues as to where the evildoers will strike next, put them together using a bit of inductive reasoning, then get to that location, investigate and snatch the diamonds before they do.

The ‘feel’ of the mean streets of Gotham at night-time is pretty much spot on.

All you get to start you on this journey are two short dialog blurbs at the very start of the game, which once closed with the X button are gone forever. It doesn’t explain appropriately that the whole core mechanic of this game is that you’re on a timer, which is always ticking. You begin in the Batcave at 7PM, with a couple of clues to start you off, and the first ‘level’, which the game does actually guide you to (a museum in the city that’s about to get robbed) starts in about 15 minutes.

Sometimes you should just stop and take in the city. That window on the left is actually semi-transparent, meaning you can probably enter the room behind if you can find a way in.

But what you’ll probably actually do in that time is faff about in the Batcave, jankily muddling your way through the platforming tutorial in Wayne Manor, jankily figuring out how the combat works in the practice area, and jankily working out how to use the Batcomputer to read clues. It’s not made clear to the player that if you don’t turn up to the museum (or any later level) on time, the jewels get stolen and the later boss will become basically invincible. You can even just miss the level entirely if you spend too long arseing about.

Save this poor civilian from a beat down to earn a clue. Or don’t; you can always just drive past.

What you’re supposed to do in Batman & Robin is drive around Gotham (which is actually pretty huge - definitely larger than what Grand Theft Auto III would manage four years later on newer hardware), happen across curious events (like a police car pulled up at a broken-in shop, or a thug beating up a pedestrian), investigate, and be rewarded with a ‘clue’ pickup. You can then use these clues at a nearby Batcomputer to try and work out where your next target location is.

It doesn’t tell you at all that you can do this, but many shops you can just bash the door into and go inside.

If you do it properly, you will end up at the place that’s getting burgled before the baddies do, and as such there may be fewer enemies. If you turn up way too early, the place will still be locked up and you have to manually use a ‘pass time’ function to fast forward. Once you do lock horns with the enemy, though, it all starts to go Pete Tong.

Combat is rubbish.

For reasons unclear to man nor beast, the game uses tank controls to direct your character. With the camera swishing all over the place between a behind-the-player view and fixed camera positions a la Resident Evil (and with such an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat), it works terribly. The already-awkward platforming sections become a sequence of missing a jump, taking damage, working your way all the way back, then missing the jump again.

The game has no voice acting, or any dialogue at all, which gives everything a rather strange, fever-dream mood.

The list of things it tries to do and gets wrong goes on. When driving around Gotham, you are constantly battered by enemy vehicles which try and ram you off the road and blow you up. They keep coming forever, so shooting them only provides limited relief. Health pickups are very sparse. There are loads of different types of weapon or gadget, from ‘batmarang’ to jet boots to an inexplicable digital camera (that works but has no apparent use I could work out), but it’s never clear how or when you’re supposed to use them, and doing so is too complicated with all the different buttons you have to press. Possibly worst of all, if you die (which is a feat managed with supreme ease), you go all the way back to the main menu and have to reload your game. It’s turgid stuff.

This game certainly did not call for a swimming mechanic. But it has it anyway. In one, tiny room in a single level.

I got up to about half way through the second ‘day’ (maybe half way through the game) before suddenly out of nowhere I was scrapping against zombies (just like in the comic book) who numbered in the dozens and could kill me in a few hits. I dispute that more than a dozen people globally have ever made it to the end of the game (I would say 95% never completed the first level) without cheating. I certainly caved and activated an invincibility cheat to carry me to the end.

Toward the end of the game, the city is frozen solid and everything is given a spooky, icy sheen.

Despite everything, I still like the ambition of what it was trying to do. It just did it so badly that nobody ever figured any of it out. I certainly can’t think of any other game from the period, on this hardware, that was quite like Batman & Robin.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 4/10

Batman: Gotham City Racer

Something is up, here. Much like with 007 Racing, I got taken in by the ‘Racer’ moniker and assumed this was a racing game, only to find out that it wasn’t. It’s actually another ‘drive around to complete objectives’ game, a bit like the parts of GTA missions where you have to drive from A to B while also ensuring you meet requirement C (be it a time limit, shaking off enemies, chasing enemies or the like).

Interest in this game certainly dissolves after a short time.

Knowing that, what doesn’t make any sense is how much of the internet seems to indicate that this is actually a racing game. Even the Wikipedia page refers to this being a racing game with a ‘variety of different race types’. If that’s a game mode, I missed it during my short time playing Gotham City Racer.

The draw distance hasn’t improved since Batman & Robin.

The thing which struck me the most when playing for the first time was just how rubbish everything looked visually compared to Batman & Robin, despite Gotham City Racer being released four years later. I guess they were going for the ‘comic book’ look, but it’s just drab, blocky and unpolished.

Here’s your fully 3D Gotham City to race around in, bro.

Neither is the driving gameplay much good. Your vehicle moves over the landscape more like a hovercraft than a car, with no real difference between driving on the road, pavement, or solid-untextured-ground-polygon (grass?). Swinging the car around 90 degree bends at 100mph is performed with all the ease of turning into your driveway. Enemies float across the environment in a similar way, along on-rails fixed paths.

One of the reasons the 3D space might look like such a load of untextured ass could be because of the amount of CD space needed for all the cartoon show clips.

Much of the plot happens in FMVs between levels, presumably taken from various episodes of the cartoon. It results in rather farcical notices where you’re proudly congratulated on defeating the big bad guy and given a pat on the back, despite said battle occuring in a 30 second clip from the show moments earlier, and all you did was drive to the polygon representing the battle arena.

I…I did what?

There’s a splitscreen mode and a few set piece modes where you can chase down endless baddies in your car Crazy Taxi style. Not much of it makes much sense, and it doesn’t look like much effort was put into things. Pass.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Batman Forever: The Arcade Game

The problem with arcade conversions to console is that they just ‘aren’t the same’. The only genre where I think it really works is fighting games, likely due to them being able to carry enough complexity to suit a longer, solo process of honing one’s skill at the game, along with their ability to remain a quick pick-up-and-play experience regardless.

Admit it: you didn’t spot Batman at first.

I guess you could technically say the same about a game like Batman Forever, which is more or less a Streets of Rage clone with comic-book superhero characteristics. It’s still just not the same playing it on PS1, at home, with infinite continues, rather than at a noisy arcade, with a joystick and some sticky buttons, and maybe two £1 coins to play with.

Occasionally unleash a powerful special move, but I’m not sure how much control you have over when it happens.

I haven’t played the arcade version, but I expect it didn’t look as terrible as its console conversion which is really quite ugly. It also retains your typical arcade intense difficulty from the off, as its main aim is to burn through your coins as quickly as possible. Not so fun when playing at home, though.

More button-mashing tedium.

I think I got to level three or four, before losing to a boss and concluding this wasn’t for me.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Batman of the Future: Return of the Joker

I booted this up and started the first level, and a tiny bell rang in the back of my head which indicated that I had seen this game before, maybe in a magazine review or online screenshot.

The way forward? Just part of the scenery? Who knows.

It’s another Streets of Rage knockoff. Or at least, I think it’s supposed to be. It’s hard to tell in truth because SoR is a good game, and Return of the Joker is very, very, very bad. It’s so offensively, painfully bad that at more than one point on just the first level I couldn’t even work out what I was supposed to even be doing; whether this door I was stuck in front of was part of the route I was supposed to take or whether it was just a random wall texture.

As far as I could tell, the game couldn’t handle more than two enemies on screen at once.

You’re supposed to smack down on enemies in a slick and dynamic beat-em-up by making use of weapons, powerups and combos. Instead, Batman and his foes move with the agility of a quadriplegic under sedation; jankily poking limbs at each other (but in most cases, poking the thin air that exists either side of each other due to terrible targeting) in a bid to end each other’s suffering.

You have to punch this guy repeatedly for about a minute to continue. He doesn’t fight back. That’s it.

After a while, I started to wonder, “Is this one of the worst games I’ve ever played?”. I pressed the pause button and headed to Google. Once again, the Wikipedia page surprised me, this time not in its factual accuracy, but its sheer amount of words dedicated to a 25 year old PlayStation game that barely anyone played. It dutifully reports that yes, this game was that bad, and more than one contemporary review panned it as amongst the worst on the console. My Spider Bat-sense was right.

No 👍

It was so bad, in fact, that Official UK PlayStation Magazine dedicated a whole feature toward photographically documenting the box+disc’s destruction by means of a baseball bat.

I ceased playing, lest I be consumed by its evil.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 1/10