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PhoenixInferno Blog

Arkham City Ending (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

In case you missed the spoiler warning in the title - MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD

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I just finished Batman: Arkham City - I'd would LOVE to commend Rocksteady for creating a superlative follow-up to Arkham Asylum. As I watched the in-engine cinematic of Batman gently carrying Joker's dead body out of Arkham City and laying it on a GCPD squad car, you can really get a sense of the strange, pathological relationship between the two.

And then you cut to Catwoman trying to get her l3wtz. WTF?

Right until that point, the game was incredible. With this ridiculous and abrupt switch in perspective, the players are taken out of that moment and into something almost meaningless since we just spent the last several, INTENSE, minutes (or hours) with Batman. I can't comprehend the rationale for this cut. Narratively, we probably would have been better served cutting sometime between the moment Hugo Strange enacts Protocol 11 (blowing up Wonder Tower) and the moment when you see Joker on the citywide PA system (my personal pick would be just after you see Ra's al Ghul's corpse being impaled on the gates of Arkham City). Leaving Batman's fate unresolved would have been delicious tension while playing through the final Catwoman sequence, while leaving the players with Batman in the end.

Even worse, the Catwoman sequence isn't all that interesting, compared to the main story we just experienced from the "betrayal" by Talia to the confrontation with Strange to the Final Act. Catwoman's sequence of "get my stuff back from Two-Face" just isn't compelling. Sad that such a great game would leave such a sour taste as it ended. I don't need a cinematic to explain why I can keep playing Arkham City after the stories are finished.

Hell, Its About Time

So this game called Starcraft II is coming out. According to the developer's Q&A, they said the were working on it since they wrapped up The Frozen Throne. To be honest, it looks as if they just reskinned the Warcraft 3 engine, changed the camera angle, and called it a day. I was hoping for something a little more innovative in terms of gameplay and graphics. The transition from Warcraft II - The Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal to Warcraft III - Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne was tremendous - it introduced 2 new factions, hero-type units and RPG-like elements into the RTS genre, their first fully 3D game engine, an enhanced Battle.net, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting. I was looking for something similar to occur with Starcraft II, but I'm not seeing the revolutionary game that I've come to expect from the Blizzard team. Hopefully, there are things that they have yet to announce about the game.