Of course, the game starts off with the Joker breaking free from imprisonment.

... and then you get to try out some free-flowing action!

... followed by some sneaky sleuthing.

... stealthily putting some inmates out of commission.

... and here's where the demo ends, right where it starts to get interesting...

Batman: Arkham Asylum launches on September 15 on PC, and August 25 on 360 and PS3.

Annoyance #1: Incredibly Overbearing Battle System

For starters, the game begins with a cutscene in which your character blindly thrusts himself into an all-out war in hopes that a girl he just saw could be his long-lost sister, Irina.  They didn’t name this main character “Rush” for nothing.  A few brief instructions attempt to prepare you for what is about to most likely become the most hectic turn-based battle you’ve ever experienced.  Sure, the pop-up messages provide you with a decent overview of the controls you’ll be needing in this onslaught, but that’s just not enough.  Sure, games like Final Fantasy II and such have started with a turn-based battle against unsurmountable odds, but nothing like this.  Here’s a tip: all the fighting going on in the background is just for show.  The only time you’ll lose HP or inflict damage on your opponent is through the highly stylized and intensely fast-paced battle sequences.  When a menu’s on-screen, you’re fine to take your own precious time decided whether to attack, use combat arts, use magic, or just sit back and watch other people attack.  After the crazy opening battle, you’ll spend about an hour or so of the game walking around battling alongside two of the four generals under the Marquis of Athlum’s command.  Eventually you’ll get to set out on your own and recruit your own allies, but it takes a while.  The battles start to calm down and make sense after you choose your own pals, but it’s a long haul before then.

Annoyance #2: Dialogue is LAME LAME LAME

Ever played one of those games where there’s a cutscene and a character attempts to use modern language (slang) and completely fails?  Yeah, I thought so.  Well, this game’s CHOCK-FULL of it!  That’s why I, being the genius that I am, changed the spoken dialogue setting to “Japanese”.  It grates on your ears a little less when you’re only reading the slang that no one’s ever used in real life, and not listening to it, too.  But wait, there’s more!  Not only does the game come with an awful vocabulary, it also comes with a delay between characters’ lines that’s just long enough to drive you insane.  Don’t you love it when people take fifteen seconds just to say “Oh really?”?

Annoyance #3: Menu’s are Confusing

It seems to me that this game can get pretty deep, so the menus were based around this profound depth that clearly doesn’t come until you’ve got a HUGE party of characters and enough equipment to break an elephant’s back.  There are so many aspects of the menu that the game designers forgot to explain, like the Union menu, for instance.  You have to figure out on your own that the game developers came up with the worst possible control scheme for allowing you to customize the formation that your different unions of characters use in battle!  You do get used to it after a while, but it’s still a lot more confusing than it needs to be, and a lack of mouse support when navigating menus really makes me think that the developers were just trying to port it from XBox 360 to PC just to make a few extra bucks, not to present a PC-gamer with the enriching fantasy RPG he/she was looking for.

Having listed the three major annoyances I’ve found so far in the game, tomorrow I’m going to be talking about the pro’s (it might take me a few days to list them all).  Just so you know, despite having a few major flaws, they are all technical, and the game as a whole is still a very enriching experience that makes me keep coming back for more.  So, until tomorrow, here’s a screenshot of a fairly intense enemy doing something fairly intense (Click for full resolution… it’s widescreen).

Also: Top 10 of the first half of 2009 COMING SOON!

At first, it sounds like you’re just listening to you’re average loud metal cd, but then it changes it up with a very soft section towards the middle of the opening track, “Cold Cash and Colder Hearts”.  Soon after experiencing the opener, you come to realize that these guys really know what they’re doing and how to make a great album.  After a few tracks go by, you think you understand how the rest of the cd is going to go, and then it changes up with my favorite song off the cd, “Stare at the Sun”, a very melodic song that could almost be classified as a “ballad” by Thrice standards.  That song will stay with you for a while.  It’s got a very nice moving bassline which transfers over to guitar during the melody and the vocals, in my opinion, are spot-on.

Soon after “Stare at the Sun”, you’re slapped in the face by “Paper Tigers”, the most aggressive song on the cd.  Just because it’s so much more aggressive than any of the previous songs doesn’t mean it’s any less musically astounding.  On the contrary, “Paper Tigers” shows off the versatility of all the members of Thrice by completely changing the musical formula that they had set at the beginning of the cd.  After “Paper Tigers” is over and you realize how great Thrice is as a whole, the epic progressive metal song known as “Hoods on Peregrine” pops up, and you’re in for a ride with this one.  It starts off with a very nice drum/bass intro that gradually adds guitars and then it gets softer when the vocals come in, which makes you wonder what’s going to happen next.  Then you realize it’s the calm before the storm, and boom!  You’re hit with one of the most diverse yet unified songs I’ve ever heard.

The cd continues in this fashion until you get to the title song, “The Artist in the Ambulance”, another “soft” song like “Stare at the Sun”, but with a different atmosphere to it.  In my opinion, it’s a very good song, but not as good as it could have been.  Don’t get me wrong, I still like the song a lot, it just didn’t seem as full of energy and passion as the other songs on the cd.  The cd finishes up with another slap in the face (“The Abolition of Man”), and a very nice, very progressive closer, entitled “Don’t Tell and We Won’t Ask”.

All in all, if you like anything along the lines of Haste the Day, Thursday, or maybe even Chiodos, this is a must-have addition to your music collection.