A gamer's got to know their limitations. · 3:39pm Dec 31st, 2015
I've wanted to play Arkham Asylum for a long time.
I never had access to the necessary console. I didn't have a system which could run the PC version. All I had was the reviews. Reviews which said it was the game of the year. That it brought the player closer to being the bat than anything ever had. Which honestly wasn't exactly a positive: I've made it fairly clear that my general impression of said bat starts with "jerk" and goes downhill from there. But... this was Kevin Conroy's bat. The best of them, period. And now I had the upgrade, Steam had a $4.99 sale, the gift card was in my account, and...
Years of waiting, ended with a click.
It wasn't easy, with a keyboard. The space bar has to do ninety percent of the work: it's jump and evade and glide and, if you don't hit it at just the right moment, die. Batarangs are mostly there for show. The only way you recover health is through winning fights, so lose just once and things start to go downhill fast. But I pushed on.
The voice acting, as expected, was beautiful. I was starting to see the plot unfolding. Found a trophy here and there. Managed to complete a stealth section, historically the bane of my gaming existence...
...which brought me to the actual Bane. The first major boss battle of the run.
There's an arena. Bane, pumped up on Venom, charging me. Spectators who'll jump in after you land your first hit and start pummeling you to provide a further distraction. And a pattern, as there is to all boss battles. In this case, the pattern was very simple. I got hit once. Then I would get hit four more times. And then the game ended.
After each loss, the game gave me hints. Throw a batarang at Bane in mid-charge to stun him. I tried that. Not only did it not work, but throwing the thing meant I gave up any time I would have had to dodge and got trampled. It wasn't much of a loss, because dodging failed ninety percent of the time anyway. But it led to more deaths.
Direct combat. He hits me five times, I die. How does he hit me? I get close enough to hit him.
Wait until he's stunned, then close in and tear out his Venom power lines. I caught him in a stunned state a couple of times, mostly because he'd tried to charge me and gone into a wall. As soon as I got a single line out, the spectators jumped into the arena and started hitting me. If I took them out, Bane got me from behind. If I focused on Bane, they clobbered me. If I tried to switch focus, everyone got in on the action. And in trying to switch focus, the camera would lose someone, who would kill me.
I tried standing near walls in the hopes that he'd charge me, I'd somehow get my 10% dodge to hit, and he'd stun himself. He tore boulders out of the scenery and threw them at me. (See 10% dodge success rate.)
I watched videos of other people's playthroughs. This helped. It's always nice to see that other people are more capable than you are. It didn't do anything for my own play, but at least the rest of the gaming world got past that point.
From the release date to the time I got to sit down with a copy: six years.
Gameplay to reach Bane: three hours.
Time spent trying to advance: five hours.
Hard drive space cleared through game deletion: 7.3 GB.
*shrug*
It's a very good game, really, from what I saw of it. Deserved all the awards. And between the six-year delay and the sale? My total failure cost me $45.00 less than it would have at release...
However, I picked up Arkham City and Arkham Origins at the same time. Total savings on games I will now never play: $30.00!
ETA: Part of what's bothering me here is the digital nature of the purchase. When I get skunked with a physical game, movie, or piece of music, I sigh, then either sell it or give it away to someone who could get some benefit from it. What I have from my one-time Steam bath are three entries in a personal library which can't be returned, sold, or transferred. A permanent record of personal svck.
At least when all else fails, you can break a disc in half.
Ugh, I hate it when that happens. I was stuck fro three consecutive years on Metroid Fusion.
Spiders are the devil.
3653708
No kidding.
For me, it was Ultimate Spider-Man, the Green Goblin chase scene. I have never passed it. I never will pass it. Apparently if you're going to pretend at being Peter, you'd better be packing Peter's reflexes. However, never having been bitten by a radioactive arachnid, I got five Manhattan blocks while Gobby went twenty, and Game Overed the disc into a permanent place on the shelf, where it collects dust and occasionally giggles to itself. For years, it was That Game, and seemed likely to remain so.
My one true regret from this is that I can't put a pile of binary code on a shelf. Giggling always sounds better in stereo.
*looks at steam library of 300+ games, two-thirds of which I've yet to install or play*
3653708 The funny thing is, I know exactly which boss you're talking about. Having played Metroid Fusion for years now, I can genuinely say that it gets easier. And that there's harder later in the game
And that's exactly why piracy is good. You download game from torrent, try it, maybe play it through once. If you like it - you buy it for real, license and all, and play official release with all patches, if you don't like it - Recycle Bin -> Empty, and forget about it. No money lost.
3653767
I'm at 654 right now.
EDIT: As for the actual topic: I really enjoyed the Arkham games. I'm sorry you got stuck on Bane.
Though, uh, you might want to invest in an XBox 360 controller if you are interested in games. They're like, $20?
Though admittedly I was one of those weirdos who actually played the Arkham games with keyboard + mouse.
Well, you could always hide the entries from your immediate view like so. But they're always still there, lurking, waiting to be made visible again.
I am incredibly frustrated by "Brutal Legend" in this same way. I've always loved Tim Schafer's writing, and I can dig the heavy metal aesthetic, but the first vehicle combat section, literally less than ten minutes into the game, is completely impenetrable to me. Maybe I just need another go at it.
Can you not take advantage of the refund scheme? 30 days or 20 hours or somesuch?
Honestly think you gave up a little too easily there. When I get stuck on a section of a game, I usually walk away from it, do something else for a little while, then come back at it when I'm less frustrated and more limber, mentally and physically.
(Take this advice with a grain of salt, as I gave up on Resident Evil 2 after thirty minutes of getting killed on the first screen, and never finished Metal Gear Solid. But then, those games are pretty far outside of my comfort zone to begin with.)
I'm sorry you got stuck because Arkham Asylum really is an awesome game (and I 100% agree with you about Kevin Conroy). Of course I'm an actual Batman fan so that helps motivate me to power through it, as I recall both Bane and Freeze gave me a tough time.
To me, Arkham City was just okay. Adding more of everything—especially plot—didn't actually make for a better game.
3653821
I'll second this. Mouse and keyboard is sufficient or superior in most cases, but third person action games are almost universally better played with a pad.
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Arkham Asylum was the best of them because it was the tightest (and because it featured the Scarecrow, who is awesome).
I haven't played Arkham Knight yet, though.
3653872 Yeah, playing Dark Souls II on the PC was a nightmare with a mouse and keyboard due to the lag and non-intuitive control scheme.
I still beat the game of course, but I had to cheese my way through it using cheap tactics -- none of the elegant stuff that gets thousands of views on let's plays.
I would assume you attempted to drop the difficult level (assuming - and yes, this may be a niave assumption - that Arkham Asylum actually has a difficutly setting)? Or it might be one of those games you don't really want to play without a controller or joystick (e.g. TIE Fighter).
Otherwise - this is why I don't play first/third person shooter-type games (though yes, ME did screw into that territory; and I did manage to complete Voyager Elite Force that once). I am also crap reflexively, and much better when given stuff like isometic RPGs (BG, Pillars of Eternity) or whatnot.
Slightly better at flying, though it's taken over a year to work through TIE Fighter at 2-3 hours a week (as I did a textual let's play in my local forum) on Hard. (And if TIE wasn't one of my top three Best Games Of All Time... And honestly, I don't think I'll ever try playing it on Hard again...!) If I had a desire to play Arkham, I'd probably manage with the joystick (it worked for Ulitmate Alliance and Ghosbusters).
But look at it this way. At $5 even if you only got three hours out of it: well, that's lesso f the cost of going to see a movie, isn't it? Bet it cost you more to see F4 (I extrapolate you saw it because of the blog post you made about it) and I would hazard you regret that time sunk more...! So to some extent, Imyself work on the basis, if I pay a fiver or so for a game and it keeps me occupied for a few hours, it's earned it's keep even if I never play it again. And sometimes, you can pay a fiver for a game that lasts you hundrfeds of hours or even years (TIE Fighter, for example!) Othertimes, you pay full price for a game that's complete and utter crap. (Perimeter or Star Trek New Worlds.)
3653821
Please allow me to second the recommendation of the esteemed Mr. Dragon.
Either an XBox or DualShock equivalent-gamepad is, in my opinion, necessary for a lot of PC games. I'm trying to imagine playing Arkham Asylum (which I full cleared) on the PC with a mouse and keyboard, and what I'm thinking is "fuck me, not only would I not have been able to beat Bane, I wouldn't have cleared the first stealth sequence."
More specifically, with regard to Bane, what a gamepad would do is give you a far greater chance of landing a stun batarang (the window is tiny) and, critically, let you move the camera around more easily while fighting. The latter is key, because it lets you angle your field of view to keep an eye on the big guy while clearing out his goons, so that when he comes for you you can actually dodge him.
There's a dirty little secret to the Arkham games; people will say they're predicated on you needing to be able to set up precise chain combos and use your tools well at split-second notice. And they are, because when you manage to do that you feel like a god among men. However, some of us are complete shit at doing that once a fight involved more than four or five goons, some of whom are carrying special equipment that renders them immune to your arsenal.
And in that case there's kind of a secret. There isn't a mook fight, even ones in tight, cramped quarters with a giant boss wandering around at the same time, that can't be won with the basic moveset. Even that fucking elevator ambush when you're going after Ra's al-Ghul in Arkham City. It takes forever, but you can always clear out a room of guys by constantly dodging away from them until one of them separates out a little bit, hitting him some, and then continuing to dodge. Eventually you'll whittle them down.
Fair warning, though; the boss fights in the Arkham games are hard. Even the ones that look like straightforward slugfests involve a lot of thinking and precise movement and tactics, because the logic is that you're playing Batman and Batman doesn't just punch his way to victory.
(One of the things I love from a design perspective is the way goons scale in power relative to how many there are. It's like... if there's just one? Okay, you're fucking Batman, and this guy is some nameless hench. The game won't even bother to properly enter a combat sequence, you just walk up and one-shot him. If there's two? Well, that's a bit trickier, but still pretty easy, the system doesn't bother with much of a fight even if one of them has a knife or armor or something. A whole pack of them? At that point they all have their full health bars and won't be taken down with a single punch, because even though you're Batman you're still just a man, which means five armed men spreading out to surround you actually requires you exert yourself. That's wonderful design; it makes you feel like a badass vigilante while still hammering home the fact that you are far from invincible.)
Heh, I got all the Batman games in that series free recently after picking up a new graphics card a while back and getting Arkham Knight with it, not that I needed more games.
I can empathize. Metroid Prime 3 was full of interesting uses of the Wiimote and more actual characters than any Metroid I'd played before. Then I got to the first Ripley fight. Falling to my doom against a cyborg space dragon. My doom, specifically, because given how I was flailing, it was clearly me in that suit and not Samus Aran.
That being said, I'm going to echo the people who are saying to look into getting a controller. If nothing else, it seems a shame to get so little return... though that may be the sunk cost fallacy talking.
If you won't touch the later games unless you can you finish the first one, you can simply return them and get your money back, so at least that part should not be a problem.
I felt that Arkham Asylum was... manageable with mouse and keyboard, but it was very, very obvious that it was designed specifically around a controller, and they only expended the absolute minimum of effort to get it playable with M+K. I can definitely see getting stuck at one point or another, due to this, as a big possibility.
If, even after leaving it be for a while and approaching it again with a fresh perspective, you still can't get past Bane – have you considered cheating? Since it's on a PC, you can just download a trainer, turn yourself temporarily invulnerable to get past the sticking point, then continue the game after the boss fight as normal. By the end of the game you may very well be so used to the fighting and controls that you can take down Bane easily.
I don't usually have to resort to that at sticking points, because the strategy of letting it rest, forgetting about the frustration, and returning fresh a day or two later has almost always worked for me. But in Arkham City I had some trouble getting through the prolonged stealth section with Deadshot, for some reason. When I had finally made it through on the fifth try and had Deadshot on the ropes, I threw the last punch and he went, "Haha, nope! I will now get up in the middle of the punch animation and phase straight through your body like a ghost, because the script says I get free and walk to the hostage, and you are in the way. Then, because the script says I kill the hostage if you get too close, and our fight took place within that radius, I instantly pull the trigger while you're still punching empty air. Game over! Prepare to be taunted for your failure, before you're allowed to reload."
To this I replied, "No, actually, fuck you." I downloaded the trainer and walked through that damned stealth section invisibly, because I was not going to put up with that bullshit again, just because the developers screwed up. For €59,90 I'm not prepared to put up with a lot of nonsense of this kind.
3653904 The Scarecrow platforming sections freaked me out the first time I ran into it. It did sell the mood very well though.
I remember the annoyance of that first boss fight very well. I'll second everyone who said not to give up just yet, as you haven't really played Arkham Asylum until you get to the Scarecrow.
Same thing happened to me w Dungeon Keeper 2. Could never get past the level where you have to stop the party from crossing the dungeon to the other exit without a joystick.
Still, as Buddy Hackett once said "In America it's not what you spend, it's what you save that counts"
I remember that Bane fight even now as being insanely difficult. As someone who has played through all 3 games, I can tell you the most recent one doesn't have nearly the same focus on boss fights that are (pull off 5 complicated moves in quick succession, then get the quick-time event right) that the first two had. If you already have the most recent game, I'd give it a try. Some people hate the batmobile, some people love it, but you'll know if you like this game within a few hours of trying it.
I *always* have played all of the Batman games on the keyboard, and find it easier that way. Bane took a while, I'll admit, and I still want to kill whoever put together the Deadshot sequence. Quickkeys rule. I just love using the quick batarangs. It's the remote control ones that drove me bonkers. Darned inverted up/down.
3653821
At some point, I realized it was probably cheaper to just buy games when I was actually going to sit down and play them, regardless of sales.
3654018
Not trying to hijack the discussion, of course, but are you saying there's a new version of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter for current versions of Windows?
I'm an old flight sim nerd who still has a USB HOTAS system around here somewhere. I especially love WWII era prop fighter combat flight sims. It can be fun to outclimb your enemies in an F14 or F15, and dispatch a flurry of AIM120s or AIM54s to slay your foes beyond visual range--but there is also something to be said for the old prop-driven fighters that had no radar, no missiles, no beyond-visual-range weaponry, just machine guns and your wits and situational awareness and awareness of how to make the most of your craft's strengths against your foe's weaknesses. Or you could just try diving out of the sun, dakka dakka dakka dakka.
3659810
Nope. Playing the original CD version, off my CD on my XP drive[1]. (There are a large number of guides on how to get those games to work on modern machines.) I have XWA installed on my Win 7 drive (with the Ultimae Craft pack) which is a significant graphical upgrade, so it feels like a new version.
(Also, you can get all the old SW flight sims on GoG, the TIE Fighter version which finally does ship with the Collector's CD edition (i.e. the best one, since despite the graphics, it has the iMUSE music plus all the vocie acting and expansions and whatnot. What I don't know is whether or not this new GoG release actually handles the joystick better - I have a devil of a time calibrating it, but I'm so close now to actually being done it wasn't worth buying it for the sake of it.))
[1[ I've done a lot of that in the last two or three years, in between waiting for the kickstarters for the sort of games I actually want to play (i.e. not FPS or multiplayer), came out... And half the games that weren't ye olde games were modernised rereleases of ye olde games (i.e. Age of Mythology...)
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3653872
What controller would you recommend at the $20-30 level? I've been trying to shop around, and I haven't been having much luck at that price point. Once you get past material strength, controllers are a near-ultimate YMMV item for feel, and I'm not in love with the Official Steam Pad at $50.00. I'd prefer to buy off Amazon so I can burn surveys, but if there's a better off-site piece out there...
3653870
Kevin Conroy is Batman. I accept a few substitutes, but acknowledge them as exactly that.
I like a fair number of stories centered around the character. I just hate the way most people write him.
3654018
I was playing on normal difficulty, which is where I go into most games. I haven't tried dropping it because as the line goes, Problem Exists Between Brain And Hands.
Here's the issue. I need the mouse and Q button to aim the batarang at Bane's head. Assuming I get that off in time and hit, I have fractions of a second to switch my finger positions to the space bar and either the left or right arrow key, which my typing "skills" insist means moving a hand off the mouse. I can't switch fast enough, and even trying to do so means losing the camera, which the mouse was controlling. So best-case, I missed, I didn't dodge in time, and I'm completely misoriented, which means I have no chance to get out of the way on the next attack. And yes, that's the best case. Worst is having the other party people already in the arena and pounding on me while I'm still trying to get refocused.
Limit of skills, period. Changing the difficulty of the game doesn't affect what I'm able to do within it. It just makes the defeats take longer.
3654046
I'm not saying the first stealth section (against Harley & goons) was easy...
Until I hit the wall (and the pieces Bane kept throwing hit me), my main frustration was with the bat having shown up with an empty utility belt. I kept looking at the available game mechanics and shaking my head. Electric barriers. So suddenly he doesn't know how to short those out. Walls. I'm sorry, but no one thought to bring climbing gear today? There are gargoyles inside the asylum and I'm not capable of dropping a grapple down in silence and stringing up -- oh, wait: that one's available as an upgrade.
But it still feels like all things considered, he came stunningly unequipped for a visit to the Least Happy Place On Earth.
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3655988
Download... trainer...
I understand both those words, but not how you're putting them together.
(And if you don't want to kill Deadshot at least once during any encounter, it means he's out of character.)
Incidentally, I just got a recharge to my Steam total, courtesy of MCR bringing back the full-price rewards just before Steam's sale ended. So I have a little money back in there now, and about eight hours to pick something out.
Recommendations welcome. If, y'know, those recommendations don't require me to be certified with the reflexes of a fighter pilot.
ETA: Huh. Well, I'm very wrong. When they said the sale ended on the 4th, apparently that didn't mean running through midnight in my time zone. So all prices are back to normal, and that means all shopping is off.
*shrug*
They'll have another sale eventually, and the credit won't expire. It just means sitting back for a while.
3664234
Everyone's recommending 360 controllers because they've been the de facto standard for PCs for years now. Amazon carries them for 30 bucks.
I'm quite fond of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
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3664283
FYI, the one Sciz linked to is the controller I've had for like, four years now. It works just fine and dandy.
3664234
Right. So yeah, basically, sounds like that in practise, it's a game you really need a controller or joystick to play, then; I doubt I'd be any better at it than you with mouse and keyboard.
(I mean, you can play TIE Fighter with the mouse - bloody good look with that, though, since it's about ten times harder and TIE can be pretty DAMN hard in the latter missions.)
3664234
If you mean that you are unfamiliar with the concept of game "trainers", in a nutshell they are small programs designed to run alongside the actual game and muck about in the code of the game to grant you cheating effects such as infinite energy, weakened enemies, infinite time, etc. at the press of various buttons – it all depends on what the game's mechanics and challenges are.
A great starting point is gamecopyworld, which has a huge library of such trainers for just about every game there is. From the start page, you have to click through the mirror selection, then the game index (A-E), then the game's page, where you'll find trainers for all the different versions of the game in existence. Trainers are version-specific, since they alter the game's code, and the memory addresses they have to alter are different in every version. In your case, I presume you need a trainer for the GOTY 1.0 version.
Make very sure you have a good ad-blocker, before visiting those pages. Malicious "advertisers" love to trick people into downloading their spyware by disguising their ads as fake "download" buttons.
Once you have downloaded and unpacked the trainer, you should have a small .exe file (often 1mb or less), which has to be started with administrator rights (right-click, then "Run as administrator") otherwise it won't be able to alter the game. Be prepared for the program to start blaring old chiptunes at obnoxious volume levels – most of them seem to do that. There should be either a readme file alongside the .exe and/or an on-screen display cataloguing all the key-presses that activate/deactivate the cheats, and usually there is an indication whether the game is currently running or not.
If you now start the game, the trainer should notice this (and stop playing its chiptune) and get ready to interfere with the game code, whenever you press one of the cheat keys.
Trainers can sometimes trigger false positives in anti-virus programs, since the kind of things a trainer does (mucking about in the executable code of another program) is very similar to the kind of things viruses do. If an anti-virus's heuristic algorithm is a bit too sensitive, it might say, "Okay, so this program doesn't match any known virus signature, but it's behaving very suspiciously, so I'd better stop it."
Wait, what?
I haven't played any of the batman games in a while, but I'm pretty sure that dodging did not require you to move your hand from the "WASD" keys (or the mouse) to the arrow keys. Someone correct me, if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just "move left/right and double-tap space" to dodge?
As for hitting Bane with the batarang, I suspect that the game neglected to introduce the "quickfire" gadgets before the Bane fight. All the gadgets for which this makes any sense (e.g. batarang, explosive gel, claw) can be "quickfired" by double-tapping the number key associated with them (at least that's how I remember it). In the case of the batarang, it auto-fires a projectile, based on where you're currently looking and target priority.
So the basic strategy for the Bane fight is to keep the minor mooks from stunning you (counter and dodge, as appropriate, attack only if you're absolutely sure) while keeping Bane in your field of view. When he starts throwing shit, dodge – he will likely take care of several mooks for you that way. When he starts to charge, quickfire a batarang or two to blind him, then dodge out of his path, wait for him to ram the wall and start beating on him while he's stunned.
Rinse. Repeat way too often, until he's finally down and the cutscene starts.
3664693
I can now safely say that in game context, double-tapping the 1 key does nothing. I both tried it and checked the control list. For a fast batarang, it's Q or nothing.
I did check your suggested site for trainers and found one, but didn't download. Given my usual luck... actually, that's probably all I need to say.
3664919
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I misremembered the keys for the quickfire gadgets. It's been quite a while since I played the game.