The problem with licensed games in general, and games based on comic books
in particular, is that in average they tend to range from mediocre to really
horrible pieces of crap (Superman 64 being probably the quintessential
example).

  Games developed alongside movies tend to suffer from rushed deadlines,
making them often very unpolished. Also their storylines and playability
usually suffers from being tied to a movie: Trying to follow a movie tends
to limit what the game can offer in terms of gameplay and story.

  It's not surprising that most of the best licensed games are those which
are *not* tied to a specific movie nor its publication deadlines, but are
completely independent works just belonging to the same franchise or the
same fictional universe.

  Games based on comic books tend to fall into this latter category for
rather obvious reasons. However, unlike games based on movie franchises,
comic book games have always had a history of poor quality regardless of
the lack of deadline pressure and more freedom of creativity. One reason
for this might be that most game developers have a mentality of "anything
will sell as long as it has a name like 'Superman' or 'Batman' attached
to it". These games often end up being only very loosely based on their
source material, are often not very faithful, lack the depth of the story
writing of the comics, and even on the gameplay side tend to be uninspired.
Often they feel more like "let's get some quick buck from this license and
move on to other more interesting projects".

  So I was curious about this new game called "Batman: Arkham Asylum", as
it has received tons of praise from critics all over, even to the point of
getting into the Guinness World Records for "Most Critically Acclaimed
Superhero Game".

  This game is indeed different. The developers made many things just right:
Rather than going with the typical "anything with the name 'Batman' in it
will sell" mentality, they actually hired a professional Batman comics writer
to create the story, as well as hiring several voice actors from the DC
animated universe. In other words, rather than doing yet another half-assed
attempt at a game based on a comic book, they went and hired some veteran
professionals of the source material.

  Also, this really feels like the Batman from the comics (rather than the
buffoon in the Batman movies). The Joker feels like the Joker from the comics
(no offence to either Nicholson or Ledger, but they just aren't, even though
they are good in their own way). Same goes for all the other characters.
This really *is* a game based on the comic books, not a half-ass adaptation
with needless "corrections" to the franchise.

  In most comic book superhero videogames the protagonist goes from one
villain to the next in a sequence of more or less disconnected stories,
like you were playing a half dozen stories instead of one. In this game,
however, having to fight many of Batman's archenemies is a natural part
of one contiguous story, made clear by the very premise (which I won't
spoil, even though it isn't really such a big spoiler).

  The developers also did things right technically. This game goes to show
that you *can* still make a game using completely state-of-art graphics while
not requiring a 64-bit dual-core monster computer with the latest graphics
hardware. Even an older single-core computer with a relatively recent but
cheap graphics card (in my case a 3.4GHz P4 with a Radeon HD 3850) was enough
to get pretty decent framerates with most graphical settings set to maximum
(the game's own benchmark clocked an average of about 40 frames per second
on my computer, which to my standards is more than enough).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Trying to follow a movie tends
> to limit what the game can offer in terms of gameplay and story.

Except TRON. ;-)

>   So I was curious about this new game called "Batman: Arkham Asylum", as
> it has received tons of praise from critics all over, 

Even Yahtzee likes it.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/926-Batman-Arkham-Asylum


I downloaded the free demo to the XBox, which takes you thru some 
hand-to-hand, some pounce, and some 
sneak-around-knock-off-thugs-in-the-darkness parts. Seems like lots of fun. 
Definitely in my queue to purchase. I hope they explain in the full game 
what the indicators around the screen mean. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Even Yahtzee likes it.

>
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/926-Batman-Arkham-Asylum

  Note that that review contains quite many spoilers. (Not that half of it
makes sense without having played the game, but still... You might appreciate
*not* having heard about it before playing the game.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> The problem with licensed games in general, and games based on comic books
> in particular, is that in average they tend to range from mediocre to really
> horrible pieces of crap (Superman 64 being probably the quintessential
> example).

yes, indeed.

>   This game is indeed different. The developers made many things just right:
> Rather than going with the typical "anything with the name 'Batman' in it
> will sell" mentality, they actually hired a professional Batman comics writer
> to create the story, as well as hiring several voice actors from the DC
> animated universe. In other words, rather than doing yet another half-assed
> attempt at a game based on a comic book, they went and hired some veteran
> professionals of the source material.

Keep in mind the videogame industry matured a lot since Superman 64.  Sony and
Microsoft are developing home consoles themselves and the industry is just plain
much larger and richer to be able to be a bit more professional and not only
hire renowned voice actors, but also movie stars and writers.  Spielberg itself
has devised quite a few games himself (though not at all with the same success
as his movies).

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Even Yahtzee likes it.
> 
>>
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/926-Batman-Arkham-Asylum
> 
>   Note that that review contains quite many spoilers. 


Sorry. I didn't think to mention that. My bad. Thanks, Warp.

I guess I'm just used to assuming everything has spoilers unless it's marked 
otherwise. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Did you play the game on the PC or Xbox? What is the PC version's 
control scheme like?

Mike

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Warp wrote:

>   The developers also did things right technically. This game goes to show
> that you *can* still make a game using completely state-of-art graphics
> while not requiring a 64-bit dual-core monster computer with the latest
> graphics hardware. Even an older single-core computer with a relatively
> recent but cheap graphics card (in my case a 3.4GHz P4 with a Radeon HD
> 3850) was enough to get pretty decent framerates with most graphical
> settings set to maximum (the game's own benchmark clocked an average of
> about 40 frames per second on my computer, which to my standards is more
> than enough).
 
Hmm I've often wondered how much control the game developer has over that,
even on the PC. (On consoles I'm guessing you're even more "locked in" to a
set of tools...)

I. e. he is sitting atop a dense set of layers that consists, as far as I
know of

- A game engine graphics API inside
- Whatever game engine he's using to code the game inside
- Windows inside of which is
- the Nvidia / ATI 3D driver which has got
- its own internal function core and layers which
- eventually gets to hardware for rendering which eventually goes to
- some kind of framebuffer which
- gets displayed.

What I'm getting at is how much of a game's graphical performance CAN be
optimized by somebody who's already behind several dozen libraries? There's
probably only -so- many ways to do something, and only such and such a new
optimized version of those libraries.

Is this type of good performance down to a good core developer, or just the
toolkit / library set he happened to pick for the project?

Since most games these days seem to run with at least two threads on two
cores (erm... one for keeping the graphics pipeline fed with data, one for
logic?) can it maybe be that the logic thread is the bottleneck, and this
is where a good developer can improve performance?
-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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SharkD <mik### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Did you play the game on the PC or Xbox? What is the PC version's 
> control scheme like?

  On the PC (if you can deduce that from the hardware specs I posted).

  I don't know about the mouse/keyboard controls because I used a
Rumblepad 2 gamepad to play the game, so it's basically the same as
with the xbox.

  (The game expects an xbox360 gamepad, and those are, probably intentionally,
configured a bit differently than regular Windows gamepads. Some buttons have
a different mapping, and the y axis of the left thumbstick is reversed.
However, there exists an emulation dll which you simply copy to the folder
of the game executable and which remaps the regular Windows gamepad controls
to the xbox360 gamepad equivalents, and the game is fooled into thinking you
have an xbox360 gamepad, and it works perfectly.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Stefan Viljoen <spa### [at] polardcom> wrote:
> Hmm I've often wondered how much control the game developer has over that,
> even on the PC. (On consoles I'm guessing you're even more "locked in" to a
> set of tools...)

  The things that most affect the rendering speed of a game is the amount
of visual effects and details.

  Game developers, graphic artists and level designers always have to make
compromises between visual quality and performance. In an optimal world
every model would consist of millions of triangles, every texture, bump map
and light map would have a humongous resolution, every pixel would be
post-processed with the most advanced shaders which give the best visual
quality, every single piece of geometry would exhibit subpixel-detailed
fully dynamic soft shadows, all reflections would depict the entire reflected
scene in full quality, and the game would render the entire world in full
detail regardless of distance.

  Of course if you do that, you will have to start counting seconds per
frame instead of frames per second.

  So the vast majority of performance optimization happens at the design
and modeling stage: How much can polygon models be reduced without them
starting to look crappy? How much can texture resolutions be reduced?
Can complex shaders be replaced with simpler and faster ones, but which
give virtually the same result? In general, can complicated visual effects
be replaced with simpler and faster ones without noticeable degradation in
visual quality?

  The graphics engine (which in the vast majority of cases, including this
one, means Unreal Engine 3) is also at a key position for performance. While
most developers probably won't be touching the engine itself, the engine
probably has a huge bunch of control knobs that the developers can fine-tune
to reach an optimal compromise between visual quality and speed.

  Of course non-rendering issues can also affect performance, most
importantly the physics engine. You probably don't want to have a couple
million of tiny physics objects in your field of view at the same time,
unless you want to again start counting seconds per frame, so levels need
to be designed so that you don't end up in such situations.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 11/6/2009 4:41 PM, Warp wrote:
> (The game expects an xbox360 gamepad, and those are, probably intentionally,
> configured a bit differently than regular Windows gamepads.

Is that kind of like how WMA Pro is supported on the Zune, but not on 
"Plays For Sure" devices?

Mike

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