I Am The Night, I Am. . . Aw, You Know The Rest

Sad news, the keyboard-spider eluded me. It slipped out while I was trying to open up the keyboard in an attempt to clean it out. It escaped under the desk and up the wall. This is clearly a lesson about why you shouldn't eat while at your computer. Crumbs attract wildlife.

I think today may be the final flashback to the Game Gear, which is a little sad given I had 29 games for that thing. It's not that I hated everything else, it's just that in a lot of cases there wasn't anything memorable enough about the games I liked to merit a post. I mean, I'm sure I could do a lengthy post about how NBA Jam: Tournament Edition is responsible for me breaking my first Game Gear, but I don't know that anyone wants to hear about that. So today we turn to Batman Returns.

I think one thing that stuck with about this game is the idea of choices. There were only five levels, but the first four each offered two paths to take. I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it was always my impression that one path was heavier on the combat, and the other was more of a platformer, testing your jumping, timing, and reflexes. And depending on how you like to handle the bosses, one path might have more of the "super attacks" available than another. "Super attacks" were when you called in the Batmobile, or that Batboat he used through the sewers in the movie, and it launched some sort of explosive attack at your enemies. That was handy.

For the most part, you beat up clowns, you jump over pits in the road (like Batman can't survive falling down a big pothole) or flames (naturally). Fight the boss, beat the boss, move to the next level. You could switch between Batarangs when you wanted to, though the only difference was in how far they could be thrown, and how much damage they did (more distance = less damage).

The other thing that stuck with me was that in between Levels 2 and 4, which both had Catwoman as the boss, you had Level 3 where you fought a twenty-foot tall robot. Actually, it might have been a twenty-foot tall stone statue. It looked like it was made of boulders. That's one of those fights where it pays to keep calling in the Batmobile to blow the thing up. It's smarter than letting it slide across the screen and punch your entire body, and as we know, Batman is all about the smart.

So it was a little weird, but kind of fun, and well, that's all I've got.