The rumor for a good long minute has been that the first Ben Affleck Batman movie would take place in Arkham Asylum. This sounded wonderful, since it caged the movie in the warm bosom of a favorite video game (Batman: Arkham Asylum, uh, obviously) and would riff on two favorite action movies (Dredd, The Raid). Well, the newest rumor has the movie doing a lot more than hanging around the Asylum. Fine, fine!

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New rumor time, for the upcoming Batfleck Flick! Apparently, the movie is going to take place in Arkham Asylum. This rumor seems plausible when considered in conjunction with prior rumors, which had the movie starring what was described as a “fuck load” of Batman villains.

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I deplore the design of Harley Quinn in Arkham City  and Arkham Asylum. Whatever sort of menace and charm she has in regular old Bats canon is replaced with a slutty Juggalo vibe. The trailer for Ms. Quinn’s upcoming DLC doesn’t do anything to dissuade me of my feelings, but rather just reminds me of what a whorish Hot Topic clown would look like.

Judge for yourself.

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I like keeping it real with ya’ll. When I’m running on raw emotion, I’ll admit it. And so for full disclosure, I’ve bought both of the games I’m about to discuss.

The very same day that I report that Arkham Asylum has sold TWO MILLION ZOMG copies, EA CEO admits that Madden sales are dropping:

Via Kotaku:

Madden NFL 10 leads the NPD Group’s top ten with 928,000 units sold on the Xbox 360. That’s a drop from last year’s cool million. And while Madden sales were up year-over-year on the PlayStation 3, the game suffered on the PlayStation 2 and Wii, with the sports game moving less than half of what it did on the PS2 from the same period last year.

All told, Madden NFL 10 managed to move 1.9 million copies across all platforms in August, down from the 2.2 million-plus Madden NFL 09 managed last year.

Now listen, that’s still an insane amount of copies. But I’ve always looked at Madden as something primarily for frat boys and jocks. And not cool frat boys and cool jocks. There, I covered myself. So to see it getting outsold by a comic book character‘s video game makes me swell with glee. It’s juvenile, but I cackled a little bit to myself. Sorry EA! Sorry your recycled money-machine that really doesn’t change much every year isn’t printing out the cash like it usually does.

C’est la vie, blowhards!

Arkham Asylum sells two million copies in two weeks. Good god damn! Pay attention, gaming companies! Usually comic book/movie video games eat raw ass. Tons of it. Gobble them out. And maybe the titles, while craptacular will sell to a few mouth-breathing fans and diehards. But spend some time on a comic book game, and what happens? Shit blows up! Arkham Asylum is one of the highest rated games of the year. It’s selling a million copies a week. And more importantly, Eidos has just established a franchise. Churn out crap, and maybe you’ll trick people into buying a title. But blow their god damn heads off, and you’ve gotten repeat customers.

Seriously, anything that follows this game up will be automatically bought by many, including me, because it’s the sequel to Arkham Asylum.

It’s simple, you can churn out slop and hope some tardholes pick it up. Or you can be the rare company that doesn’t rush out a comic book or video game movie, and reap the rewards.

I think I’m starting to develop some problems. First, I can’t get god damn Jihl Nabaat from Final Fantasy XIII out of my head. And now here rolls up Poison Ivy from Arkham Asylum. When I went nuts fawning over her a couple of days ago, I had no idea she was going to be involved in some odd alien tentacle fetish shit. Prior to the point where you fight Ivy – which just so happens to be the only boss battle that doesn’t suck in Arkham – tentacles all slither and shit up her glistening body. The tentacles, giant slithering green dicks, then feed her into the ultimate yonic symbol – a rose. Seriously, Freud? Lacan? Anyone? Help?

Now, I know I’m perverted. And I probably take things to be erotic that probably aren’t. As an example, I’m always strangely turned on by the mother oinking like a pig in A Christmas Story. I don’t know, it’s just hot. But I can’t be wrong about this one. There’s no way a hot, buxom woman in a low-cut red shirt and green underwear isn’t intended to titillate nerd balls. And there’s definitely no way that big slithering phalluses coiling their way around her ample busom and buttocks isn’t supposed to get my adult glands working. Or yours for that matter.

I knew that Arkham was supposed to appeal to a lot of gamers, but I didn’t think they were aiming to corner the Tentacle Rape genre. You think you’re getting Batman and all of a sudden you’re getting La Gotham Girl and shit. Weird.

So I’m playing Arkham Asylum, and the craziest shit starts happening. At one point Joker lets all of the fucking inmates out of their cage. Which is cool, and whatever. However, these inmates aren’t regular Joker thugs. They’re just guys who happen to be fucking raving insane. The whole mechanic seems like a way for Eidos to have Batman fight zombies. You see, they murmur and drool like zombies. They sound exactly like the bad guys from Left 4 Dead. But I’ll continue.

So anyways, these people are not villains. They just happen to be suffering from psychological problems and are upset by the madness around them.

What does Batman do?

He beats the living shit out of them. Seriously. Poor confused inmates who have been brought into a riot. They can’t defend themselves, and they’re just looking for a way out.

They run at Batman in confusion, and what’s he do? He throws them over his head and punches them in the fucking mouth. I sat there watching my Batman throw these retards around without a care in the world. I realize they’re running at him, but can’t the guy have some fucking empathy? They don’t even fight back!

I mean, what are the moral implications of this? Sure, Batman doesn’t kill! But you know what he WILL do? He’ll kick the living shit out of defenseless schizophrenics! They don’t get up! They just lay there with the shit kicked out of them. There’s got to be some ethical code that prohibits the ass-whuppings of crazy people, isn’t there?

Listen, don’t get all sensitive on me. I’ve been locked up for three days at a crazy ward. In the clink, as they say. And what happened if the Joker showed up there and let us out? What if I was just walking across the lawn, taking a stroll without my annoying fifteen minute check-ins? I mean, half the retards I’ve kicked the shit out of with Batman are people who aren’t suspecting me! I sneak up and clobber the crap out of them! What if it was me, strolling McLean’s, and then Batman snuck up on my ass and whupped me?

The dude is deranged, and I can’t believe that some group like PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF BIPOLAR MADMEN (me) haven’t been like

WAI CAN BATMEN WHUP THE SHIT OUT OF INVALIDS?!

I’m just waiting for the uproar to start. I can hear it now.

But to answer the question, why can he?

He’s Batman, bitches.

I have found myself continuously confused while playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. It had to do with that annoying twat Harley Quinn. I know that there’s a lot of dudegeeks out there who absolutely fawn over Joker’s spermbank. But I don’t get it. Won’t get it. Refuse to try. Normally Quinn is   just an annoying rascally bitch. But in Arkham Asylum, she enters a whole new world of suck.You see, in Arkham she’s an annoying bitch who looks like she’s going to an Insane Clown Posse concert. No, seriously:

Quinn’s new outfit for Arkham must have been redesigned by a fucking Juggalo. Holy shit. I just know dorks are beating off at her “totally hawt” cleavage “and super sploogey” nurse outfit.

Thankfully, the lords at Eidos gave us something unexpected. They made Poison Ivy gorgeous. Somehow, they did it. Even while she’s all like, chlorophyll infested and green and shit. It’s been a good year for green-skinned babes. First there was that weird green chick that Captain Kirk was boning in Star Trek, and now Poison Ivy. Behold! Viva la Green Babes.

File this under: Jealousy inspired rage.

It’s commonly known throughout intellectual circles that Spin Magazine is a pile of slop churned onto former trees. It’s for emo kids with swoopy haircuts and thick glasses and tight pants to find the newest esoteric band to worship. Doubly ironic of course because these same bands are being churned through a corporate magazine. Anyways, that’s not what I want to talk about. Through some weird circumstances, my Dad began receiving Spin after his subscription to something ran out. And so whenever I’m trying to blast out a turd, I pick it up and flip through.

That’s when I found this retarded review of Batman: Arkham Asylum today. I must preface my forthcoming rage with this – I can’t believe this douchebag, Dan Ackerman, gets to play video games ahead of time and get paid for it. It’s a nerdy rage that stems from the fact that I’m an unemployed poor quasi-academic who would kill someone to play review copies of games for free, while this hack gets to do it.

Let’s look at Dan’s brilliant review describing why Batman video games have failed:

Most comic book tales follow the ebb and flow of traditional fiction narrative

Ah, already brilliant Spin pretension. How about you write like a human being in a pop magazine, please. This isn’t the New Yorker. (Or my Derrida Superman post, shut the fuck up.)

…with character driven story arcs that build to a climax, punctuated by superhero throwdowns.

Really? Character driven story arcs? Most slop out there is generally just operating as a means to get to that superfight. Pick up a comic book, bro. As far as “Traditional fiction narrative”, what the fuck do you mean? Do you feel like defining traditional? And what venue of fiction? Would you argue that Comic Book Fiction is a beast unto itself? Surely it has tropes and consistent constructions (oh shit I’m going all Ackerman in my prose) that deviate from the standards of the usual Grisham novel.

In contrast, video game storytelling generally serves as a mere background for setting up the basic mode of play

An obvious statement. The line Dan seems to be drawing is that Batman games have failed because they haven’t focused on character development and “Traditional fiction narrative”. What I’d like to posit is that they could have been fulfilling if they hadn’t been half-cooked pieces of shit thrown out there to agree with Bat Movie X. Most of the time.

Also, I’m not really sure if I agree with Dan. Most video game story lines serve as the basic mode of play? Really? Does Half-Life 2’s storyline determine that it’s a first person shooter? Not so much. As well, it seems to imply that video games are typically unsuited for a strong traditional narrative. Or maybe I’m reading it wrong. Is he suggesting that the medium (video games) has been misused? Or that it is simply ill-fitting?

I’m going to give Dan the benefit of the doubt, and assume he just means that they’ve been misused. Even still, Arkham Asylum isn’t groundbreaking in that regard. Maybe he means groundbreaking for a Batman game. Or maybe nothing at all, he never uses that work.

The entire review is opaque though. I know that there are word limits, and you have to squeeze as much as you can into as little as space. And perhaps that’s my problem with this article – you need to get the fuck over yourself, dude. Don’t try and argue a thesis for the differentiation between the “traditional fiction narrative” and the narratives used in video games in some shitty three-hundred word review. And then I begin to wonder how much of the game the guy has played:

After Dan discusses the aspects similar to God of War, he goes on to say:

But you’ll need ample brainpower to follow a suspect’s DNA trail or find the many hidden clues

Really? Ample brainpower? What an ugly sentence for starters. And then, how much of the game did you play, dude? There’s hyper-exposition by the character Batman in the game that constantly keeps the gamer on his path. If anything, from what I’ve played, the game seems surprisingly dumb and linear. Not to say it isn’t fun, but brainpower? I mean, surely with your phrases like “traditional fictional narrative” and “reconciles these two formats’ disparate aesthetics”, you must have excelled. Seriously. What a bunch of pretentious garbage.

I know that at Spin the writers seem to fashion themselves as cool hunters and reject anything that doesn’t sound like a shitty thesis paper for any sort of article, but it just seems absurd. A half-baked review that is more interested with textual wankage than actually serving a good review. Listen, the mouthbreathing assfucks who are reading the magazine in their Extra Small t-shirts and their black jeans that cut off circulation are two things. Fucking dumb, and hyper impressionable. Not only are they going to not understand your crap, but they’re going to start thinking this kind of awful prose is acceptable.

And oh yeah, you have that job and I don’t.

I’m playing through Arkham Asylum like any diehard Batman fanboy should be right now. It’s a pretty tight, but I’ll save my impressions for the review I’m working on over for Mishka Bloglin. What I wanted to comment on though, is how fucking jacked Commissioner Gordon looks in the game. No, seriously. The dude looks like a sixty year-old pile of muscles. Just stare at the dude. There isn’t a doorway on Earth that the guy could fit through. He looks like he’s training with Brock Lesnar and eating whole cows for dinner.

What the fuck is going on here?

It’s not confusing for any egghead who knows the engine the game is running on. Eidos is using the Unreal Engine 3. You may recognize it as the engine that brought the world the anatomical impossibility that is Marcus Fenix and the rest of the Gears of Wars cast. The engine is renown for building the enormous, Vin Diesel, HGH-popping body type; and then using it as the default shape of any male in the game.

I just didn’t think it would be used to craft Jim Gordon into the dude who not only runs the police force for Gotham, but probably also can fuck your mother while carrying her up a flight of stairs.

Bravo, Unreal Engine 3!