As a comic book writer with the name Batman in his bibliography, Walker says he has every right to assert this belief. He says he found the game "lacking" because Batman's methods for dealing with the gun-toting henchmen in Arkham was to run up and punch them.
ETA: Mr. Walker has emailed clarifications on his article: it's the violence he found lacking, not the game; and he recognizes that the style of fighting was a choice his play companion made rather than one the game forced on the player. I apologize for misinterpreting his remarks.

There was practically zero sneaking. Almost no subtlety or grace. He would just run up and punch the bad guy, usually taking a few machine gun shots to the face, and then zip away to a magical gargoyle that would render him invisible while his Bat-health recharged. Then he would repeat the process until there was nothing left to punch.

It was effective, I will grant that much. But to me, it kinda missed the point of Batman.

In addition to his complaints about Batman's style of fighting, he also has a beef with violence in video games. Namely, there isn't enough of it — or at least not enough realism in it.

I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is after hearing a simple bullet crack past your ear. That's what games should be. So real that I just have to put down the controller for a minute because some part of my lizard brain is shaking in disbelief over the scenario I somehow managed to survive.

I think Walker's arguments about the violence are more interesting than his assertions about Batman. But feel free to dissect the hell out of both in the comments here or head on over to Elder-Geek and let Walker know what you think yourself.

Video Game Violence: What Do Gamers Really Want? [Elder-Geek via GamePolitics]

This past week Kotaku recapped the year that was in video games, on subjects both naughty and nice. And before we know it, seven days will have passed, and we'll all begin working on another 365-chapter story of video games, how they're made, and who plays them.

For now, we invite you to revisit these retrospectives. And we thank you for choosing to spend a part of this holiday with Kotaku. From all of us, happy holidays, and a very merry Christmas to you.

2009 in Review
The Controversies
The Shows That Were
The Sports Video Game Report
The Disappointments
The Year, NSFW
The Trailers

Featured Stories
One Man's Year Making Assassin's Creed II
The Man Who Never Wanted To Make 'The Citizen Kane of Games'
The Batman-Maker Who Didn't Know The Meaning Of GOTY
Motion-Control Gaming Grabs The Spotlight

Feedback about Arkham Asylum has been illuminating and, yes, even educational for Hill in 2009. This was the year he and the rest of the British underdog team at the little-known Rocksteady Studios developed and released one of the leading contenders for Game Of The Year.

Feedback was helpful, but it also was a little weird.

Imagine the beginning of Hill's 2009. The development of Batman: Arkham Asylum, an adventure featuring Batman's one terrible night trapped on an island prison/asylum overtaken by the Joker and the Dark Knight's worst foes, was more than a year under way, yet almost no eyes aside from Rocksteady's and its publishers' were on the project. The public didn't have the game on its radar, nor did much of the gaming press. "I think we felt at the start of the year that a lot of people didn't know much about the game," Hill told Kotaku in a telephone interview. People in the studio thought the game was shaping up. But who could be sure they weren't fooling themselves? "When you're working on something for so long it's quite weird," Hill noted. "You're sort of isolated from the outside world and you sort of lose quite a lot of perspective."

So for Hill one of the most important moments of his 2009 — "a nerve-wracking time" — were the few days in March that Arkham Asylum was made playable for the gaming press during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Rocksteady and publishers Eidos and Warner Brothers let game reporters try some of the challenge rooms, the contained areas in the game, one made for Batman brawling against thugs, the other built for "predator" criminal-frightening stealth.

"We sort of decided to go with a slightly different approach, showing the challenge rooms rather than the story because we were confident in the story we had but we didn't want to approach it in a way to show off flash cutscenes or cinematics to try and sell the game. We thought: Let's show people there's real substance to the gameplay."

Hill stayed back in the Rocksteady offices in England during GDC, plugging away on the game with his team. An Eidos representative e-mailed him feedback. Slight problem, though: "Games journalists can be a bit cagey. Sometimes you guys like to be too cool for school. So you can never be 100% sure." This unwashed horde of gaming reporters playing through the demo (a group that may or may not have included the author of this story) may not have been able to verbalize feedback that would be useful intelligence for Rocksteady, but the way the demo was played was good feedback enough.

"One of the things we were really happy with, with the initial feedback, is that a lot of the journalists played it and then played it again and tried to do it in different ways," Hill said. "One of the design philosophies [of the game] was to sort of create your own Batman stories: You did something a particular way and saw these cool things. It was really great to get that particular feedback to come through."

In theory, the game would then be released a little later, but Arkham Asylum, originally slated for a June was delayed until late summer before it showed up at E3 in Los Angeles. For E3, Hill crossed the Atlantic and dared to get some feedback first-hand. The good news was that he was bumping into developers at E3 and getting the insights of people from Naughty Dog, whose single-player balance of action and story in Uncharted was comparable to the design of Arkham Asylum, as well as from Ubisoft folks, whose Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell series were, like Batman, exploring the gameplay of aggressive stealth. "Developers tend to be more generous with feedback because making any game is really hard — even bad games," Hill explained. They know the way things work, and they can relate to the struggle of making this stuff. "You put your life and soul into them."

Oh, but for Hill there was also sort of something bad — or uncomfortable — about being at E3 to get that firsthand feedback. "To be honest, I hate watching people play the game," he said. "It's watching your baby. It's nerve-wracking. I would kind of watch but I could only watch for a certain amount of time and then I would walk away. But it's nice because you can watch in anonymity and see where they're enjoying it and also where they're struggling."

Hill flew back to work in England and then back to California in the summer for Comic-Con. Also in the summer, the demo came out, the one that inspired people on the Internet to start using that term GOTY. Hill wasn't sure what kind of feedback the demo would get, because he was aware of the awkward fact that this demo, a thing theoretically made to sell a game, was, well, inferior to the game it was selling.

"I think we all felt the game was better than the demo," Hill said. "It's a hard game to do a demo of because it's a journey rather than a staccato experience. The story is important. The characters are important. Sometimes that can be hard to get across in a demo. We were really a little bit worried when it went out... So when people really enjoyed the demo, we felt, well if you like the demo, you'll definitely like the game, because it's a lot better."

Batman: Arkham Asylum was released in late August. Hill had just crammed three weeks of vacation into his August, days banked to take off as soon as the game disc went gold and was out of Rocksteady's hands. He was back in the country the day the game was released. Reviews were out, another odd sort of feedback. "It's such a weird experience making games because you kind of go two years with almost no feedback," he said. "And then suddenly you get all this feedback on what you've done for the last two years in one mad hail of comments. And then nothing again for two years."

He remembers about 40 reviews hitting the Internet almost all at once. He was on his laptop, not back in the office yet. He was calling in, and the team was "shouting the review scores to each other. It was really exciting and really crazy."

But the time warp would continue. As the fall arrived and people were playing the game, many gamers were saying, yes, this is the Game of the Year. They were in the mode of showering praise and awarding rhetorical trophies. Rocksteady was in a different mode. "We're sort of trying our best to enjoy it," Hill said, "But obviously by the time the game comes out we're already a couple of months into the next thing we're doing." Hill's interview was conducted before the announcement of Rocksteady's "next thing," but today we know what that is: Arkham Asylum 2.

"Hopefully whatever we do next," he had said, "People will be excited about as well."

And so the feedback from Rocksteady will abate. Hill and his team are now working on something that no marginally helpful reporter, no more generous developer, no eager demo players will likely be able to provide some feedback on for a while. But maybe, it would be nice to let Hill offer some feedback of his own. What did we think of the game? After all, we've told him in many ways. It's his turn:

Why did he think Arkham Asylum was a special game, a special super-hero game?

"One of the things the team did that was successful was make a game that was uniquely a Batman game," he said. "It wasn't another genre that just happened to have a character with a cape in it. It was uniquely Batman in terms of the gadgets, the detective mode, the predator aspects and the combat. All those elements were built, designed and created to reflect Batman himself.

"Not just with super-hero products, but with licensed products, I think what tends to happen is you get a genre rather than a license and you kind of shoehorn the license into the genre. And you don't get the best of the license.

"I think Batman is quite challenging in some ways. There are some things he obviously can't do. He doesn't kill people. He never uses a gun. And there's a lot of genre conventions which you have to approach in a slightly different way. Your options are to embrace that or not. And if you embrace it, it means you have to come up with more interesting answers. I'd like to think that's what people responded to as well. If you can't kill people, what can you do? [We presented] this whole element of creating the fear and changing the way people behave because of this character and this persona he's created.

"If you can get those elements into the game, I think it's really going to resonate with people. And I think that's what happened. "

That seems on target.

Concluded Hill: "We wanted to make a great game, but also a great Batman game. … Thanks everyone for the great feedback."

EA LA and DICE's new Medal of Honor may look somewhat familiar, but with higher clarity, in its debut trailer. At the very least, it looks impressively cinematic, with more suicide bombers than competitor Modern Warfare 2 brings to the table. And the beards! So glorious!

Less expected, for those of us who didn't chat up Mark Hamill on the red carpet, was Rocksteady and Eidos' reveal of the sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum.

I guess we're calling this Batman: Arkham Asylum 2? That's despite the vigilante on mental institutionalized bad guy action apparently spilling onto the streets of Gotham City itself, the confines of Arkham seemingly incapable of containing Batman's rogues gallery.

The official site for the next Batman game appears to have gone live in a barebones state, hopefully offering more concrete information soon. For now, enjoy tonight's recently revealed trailers for two of next year's biggest games.

That really didn't take long. The show opened with the announcement of Batman: Arkham Asylum 2. A url for the game: Arkhamhasmoved.com was given, but as of 6 p.m. Mountain Time I was still getting 404 errors for it.

Steam kicks off the sale with a slightly longer one-day event, running from now until Friday morning at 8AM Pacific. They've got Dragon Age: Origins for 25% off; Batman: Arkham Aslyum for 50% off; Grid for %75 off, and several other interesting deals. On Friday they shift to a 24-hour schedule, with a new one-day sale kicking off every day until Monday.

On top of the game deals, they'll be running bundle specials for the length of the event, with 15 THQ games or 16 LucasArts titles on sale for $49.99 per pack. The prices are insane!

Keep an eye on Steam all weekend long for more wondrous deals.

Odd choice. Batman has already had a Lego head.

Thanks to reader Davis who spotted this in Brooklyn's High Street station.

Lego Batman [Flickr]

Some of you keep starting your pumpkin emails with "Mine's terrible, but..." Seriously, guys, it doesn't matter. You want to see how bad my pumpkin skillz are? Check out the last image. It's supposed to be Bubs from Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (which is really just a Bubs stencil from Homestarrunner.com) — but it kind of looks like a retarded Popple. Or Gary Busey, depending on whether or not it's lit up.

So, don't be shy! Send me your gaming pumpkins!

One of the joys of PC gaming is the ability to screw with stuff, like Batman's costume skin in Arkham Asylum. Over at the official game forums they've got a fan-made skin collection going, complete with apps and instructions on how to implement them in your own game. If Arkham can have gargoyles on the inside, then I see no reason why Batman can't dress as Nightwing, or the Green Lantern, or yes - Captain America. I particularly like the Batman Of Zur En Arrh outfit, which mimics the bat-suit Batman wore when he went bat-s*** insane.

UPDATE: EternalStar let us know that, thanks to SecuROM's DRM, the skins only work in the demo version of the game. On the plus side, it's free?

Batman Arkham Asylum Modded Costume thread!! [Official Forums - Thanks Stancis!]

Well, Batman: Arkham Asylum slips into the top 20 at least, taking a respectable number 16 position. The two MMO titles more or less storm the charts, with Cryptic's Champions Online snagging number 3, and Aion pulling a double as the normal version rocks number 1 and the limited edition takes the 5-spot. This means near domination of the top 5 for MMOs this month, with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King at number 4 while The Sims 3 slips down to 2.

Not a bad start for two of the most eagerly anticipated MMO titles of the season. Check out the full chart below to see if your favorite made the cut this month.

Some of the scariest experiences I've had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you're supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theater could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don't distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can't predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you're experiencing instead of rationalizing it away as "just a game."

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here's how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you're a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it's no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. "In a horror game, when you're walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game," he says. "You look at the world a lot more intently because you don't know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there's a lot for the light to play across."

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You're walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the gray steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man's torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don't realize what's happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the gray wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It's beyond scary to me — it's flat-out disturbing.

"Scary is the result of lot of things," Milham says. "The first thing you've got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game]."

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character – even though you're able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. "One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,'" says Milham. "If you're too fantastic with something, you don't really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away."

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here's another game that can freak you out, even though it's not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you're following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. Okay, fine, that's canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn't just playing with Batman's head. It's playing with yours.

"During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they're constantly just inches from the Scarecrow's grasp," explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. "We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety."

But unlike a slasher flick where you're yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call 9-1-1, you're the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he's been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you're walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can't be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

"[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn't have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context," says Whitworth. "The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player's confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up."

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that's similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player... like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That's probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

"A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what's coming next, that sort of endless tension," Milham says. "You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don't [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn't.' And then... OH MY GOD!"

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

According to GameInformer, the combat went through several variations: "The first one being a full rhythm action game! The second one was prototyped in 2D, which popped up whenever you got into a fight, and involved colored circles bashing into each other. This actually formed the basis of the final system."

Rhythm...action...game? THANK YOU FOR NOT USING THAT COMBAT SYSTEM. More factoids and tidbits in the link below.

Tidbits: What You Didn't Know About Batman: Arkham Asylum [GameInformer via Joystiq]

The map actually is live on the UK's Xbox Live servers as we speak, so if you're there and home from work/school, check it out now. Maybe it'll hit U.S. servers in the evening hours, too.

Update: This content is exclusive to the PS3 in North America and so it will not be coming to the 360 in the U.S. You may read more about it at Eidos' official forums or in the official news release.

More Batman Free DLC Today [Eurogamer]

Eidos celebrates the "must-have game of Summer 2009" today, announcing some rather large shipping numbers for the first Batman game in a long while to not outwardly suck. Citing numerous awards, including the dubious Guinness World Record the game earned for highest-rated comic book game, Warner Bros. gives credit where credit is due.

"The tremendous critical and commercial success of Batman: Arkham Asylum sets a new benchmark for superhero games," said Martin Tremblay, President, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. "Rocksteady Studios created an excellent game and the sales numbers demonstrate how a powerful franchise fused with high-quality production resonates with consumers."

As for how many of those 2.5 million copies shipped have sold since we reported on the 2 million sales, it would take a master detective armed with figures I don't have on hand to work out that figure. To the batcave!

We knew the Insane Night DLC was coming to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC this week, and now we know what it is. Insane Night consists of two maps, one focusing on FreeFlow Combat and the other on the Invisible Predator aspects of Arkham Asylum gameplay.

The "Totally Insane" FreeFlow Combat map sounds almost like Batman's Horde mode, with the Dark Knight tasked with taking down waves of inmates as they attempt to escape through the asylum's secure records room, while in the "Nocturnal Predator" Invisible Hunter Map the player must use stealth to take out an army of the worst the Joker has to offer.

And there you have it. It isn't much, but it's free, and it's only the first of two free downloadable content packs, with Prey in the Darkness due out on October 24th.

The figure was disclosed as part of an LA Times report on some restructuring going on at DC Comics, and we'll presume was provided by Warner Bros., who as a publisher can get hold of timely sales data without too much hassle. We'll also presume that the figures are worldwide sales, and not just for North America.

Nice to see a DC Comics game not only get it right, but be rewarded for doing so.

Warner shakes up DC Comics to compete with Marvel [LA Times]

Cheshirec_the_cat posted a thread on September 4th in the official Eidos forums for Batman: Arkham Asylum, requesting help with a peculiar problem with the PC version of the game.

I've got a problem when it's time to use Batman's glide in the game. When I hold , like it's said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there.

As another forum poster points out, the game isn't out until the 15th, so the question is a bit suspect right off the bat, no pun intended.

Eidos admin Keir responded to the thread before closing it, explaining that the glitch wasn't so much of a glitch.

The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.

It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code.

Ouch. Brilliantly done, Rocksteady! Applause all 'round!

Eidos plays trick on Batman: Arkham Asylum pirates [Afterdawn.com]

Insane Night will hit the Playstation Network (and apparently Xbox Live and PC) on Sept. 17, while Prey In The Darkness will hit on Sept. 24, according to Mike Kebby, with the Playstation Store Team at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Contacted for comment earlier this week, Warner Bros. Interactive would only say that more details would be forthcoming.

Earlier this week Batman: Arkham Asylum's in-game ticker alerted gamers to incoming new content that would be free.

Heads-Up - Comments [Playstation Blog EU, via Eidos]

An Eidos forum admin said simply, "I'm happy to inform you, it will arrive at the same time," when asked if the DLC would coincide with the PCs Sept. 15 release and be available for the 360 as well. You can read it here. So, it's a three platform simultaneous release. No other word what the DLC drop contains yet.

New DLC - PC? [Eidos Forums via Shacknews]