Alright, all right. Man, whoever's writing these level objectives sure is pushy.



And so the final level begins, and it's a long and boring one. You've got to make your way up the Cathedral to face off with The Joker once and for all, and take note, folks, we get Batrope Use #2 in the early part of this level. What we also get are more hilariously bad ledge glitches- indeed, you get both the 'I'm going to fall and pose like an idiot' glitch and the 'I'm going to freeze in place for no discernible reason' glitch in one place. As a bonus, if a guy walks off the ledge, a few seconds later, they'll try to jump back up and fail miserably. Good work, The Numega Team, your quality assurance department must've been the bomb. The majority of the stage is just plodding through, really, occasionally using the Batrope to get up quicker.



Is this the final battle between the bat-brained caped crusader and the funny man of the year? Who knows? The Joker adds a few new tricks to his arsenal for this battle- in addition to his magic knives and flower squirter, he'll also throw sets of teeth at you and use his ridiculously long pistol (which, we'll note, was earlier used to destroy the Bat Wing) against you. It's the same basic thing, though, as you just need to keep pushing him until an undefined point. Maybe now he gets his comeuppance?



Naturally, he escapes, and you've got to find him. Again.



Keep climbing, Batsy! Keep climbing because Atari Games told you to.

Again, the over-abundance of screenshots may be a mistake, but I'm a chronicler of video games. Even the boring and crappy ones.



And now you fight The Joker once more. And he's still practically the same, although, as the screenshots clearly show, he now utilises fabulous fighting poses during the battle, and also throws those silly poison balloons at you. In addition, he puts on some laser-firing glasses, but I refuse to acknowledge them with a screenshot. This is due to the fact that every single bloody time he uses them, you hear Jack Nicholson cackle, "YOU WOULDN'T HIT A GUY WITH GLASSES ON, HUH? WOULD YA?" and it's incredibly annoying. More-so because the voices are really loud and hard to ignore. So there. Keep punching him in the face, and maybe this time he'll die?



Ohoho, you wish. The Joker escapes once more, and so the most irritating part of the game begins. In this horrible gauntlet, you'll have to make your way past several falling bells, jump over tiny pits with utmost precision otherwise The Batman will fall to his death, deal with purple thugs who gang up on you mercilessly, and- yes- deal with ninjas. Near-indestructible ninjas. Two near-indestructible ninjas who have absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Even better, the purple thugs will repeatedly push you into the holes in the floor, forcing you to start this bit again and again and again. This is totally my idea of fun, you guys! Please kill me.



Fortunately, this is the last time. Honest. I didn't even dignify this last battle with more than one screenshot, because I'd had enough, and I'm willing to bet that you have too. The Joker uses all the weapons he's used up to this point- the long gun, the balloons, the clacking teeth, the glasses, all of 'em- in one final attempt to defeat The Dark Knight. He's still beaten in the same manner, just keep pummelling away at that forever-smiling face, while avoiding the occasional thug who appears from behind. However, this time, the whole "just-keep-pushing-the-enemy" shtick actually makes sense if you remember the movie, as The Joker is finally taken out...



... By mankind's greatest foe: Gravity. Complete with horrible screaming.



And there you have it, there's your ending. Two badly-digitised pictures from the end of the film, while the familiar Batman theme plays and your final score gets counted up. No credits, no 'Game Over' or anything like that at all. Oh well, I guess it's that time, yet again...

HIGH SCORE TABLE TIME!!!






You may still be wondering why I wasted 57 minutes of my life playing this game, and then taking the time to write about it. Hell, even I'm not sure, but I think it stems from the fact that the game is so close to being decent. I know, I've knocked it a lot over the course of these four pages, but deep down, it had a good chance of turning out great. On the first page, I described it as a tragic case, and that's exactly what it is; It's got a killer license (I mean, really, who doesn't dig Batman?), it's got an appropriate art style (except for the goofy-as-hell enemy art), it's got the potential for being an entertaining game, and although the music sounds like rejected songs from the Spider-Man Cartoon Maker, it uses all the familiar musical motifs from Elfman's film score. It's got the moxie, it's got the heart, it should have been a nice little Batman-related diversion.

However, the sloppiness of the execution, the floaty controls and the shocking amount of glitches stop it from being anything more than a missed opportunity. With a little more time working on all of these problems, you could've had a great game here... It doesn't make sense, if I'm honest- to me, arcade games have always seemed the type of game where developers can take as long as they need, unlike home games. That's why so many arcade games undergo location testing, so the developers can get a sense of what works, what doesn't, and what needs to be scrapped, like the unreleased Chimera Beast and Cloud 9, among other games. With Batman, though, it seems like Atari wanted the game out as fast as possible...

Strangely enough, I've yet to find any other games credited to The Numega Team, so this may have been their only product... That said, it shares a lot of similarities with the equally-awful ThunderJaws, also by Atari Games- maybe they were made by the same team? Since Batman has no staff scroll, we'll never know. Apparently, it was only released as a conversion kit (that is to say, arcade operators were only given the art and whatnot to convert an old game into Batman, rather than a dedicated machine) and that only 1000 units were made. Given what we've seen here, I can see why that is. Of course. How utterly proper.


And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!


Batman Sound Pack

As demonstrated throughout this article, the game uses sound clips from the film at certain points, and for the purposes of completeness, I ripped all of them and put them in this handy ZIP file. There's something really weird about them, though, as the quality and clarity of the voice samples are all over the place- some are crystal-clear, others are quiet and muffled, and it comes off as, well, rather jarring. You wouldn't notice this during the game, but when you're trying to rip them from the sound test, it's slightly more obvious.

I'm really not sure why I bothered with this, you know. You could probably find better-quality rips straight from the film, but if you're weird and prefer the video game versions... Oh, and I threw in the chime that plays every time you pick up an extra life- it's oddly familiar, for some reason...


So, the streets of Gotham CityTM are safe... For now. The Batman will return in, uh, Batman Returns. Coming to cinemas in Summer '92!

Shall we dance back to the index?