Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo: schizophrenic?

Posted on:September 23 2009

When I tried the Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo, I liked the game. But what I didn't like was the demo itself. It seems the developers packaged it quite a bit under stress because of all the bugs in it. Not in the game itself but in the menu, installer and intro:

After I had installed the game, there was no game starting shortcut. There was the readme shortcut, a link to the website of Eidos, and a shortcut for technical support. But no link for starting the game. Hm. So I had to start it from C:\ProgramData\Eidos\Batman\Bin myself. Don't know if the average windows user likes this.
When starting the game, you are shown some movie sequences where a lot of people are talking and explaining the player what is happening now. But for me, they didn't. The characters were there, the movie was played and even nice background music could be heard, but no speech reached the speakers of my PC. Which left me a bit in the dark what the game is all about.
But the best part was this: No way to exit the game. Pressing Escape in the Main menu started a promotional video which after it finished went to the main menu again. Then, after thinking and clicking around a bit, I tried ALT-F4, the standard windows combination that even still some C++ developers don't know (trust me), a 'Do you really want to exit the game' menu appeared. Didn't they want people to exit their wonderful game? Strange.

Maybe I've overlooked something, but this was a weired experience. Making it hard to start the game and after you finally managed to start it anyway making it hard to exit it again appears a bit schizophrenic to me. But at least it fits the setting of that game :)

Comments:

no surprise - it is a game for game consoles... most of the "also released for pc" games totally suck

bifel

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2009-09-23 17:42:00

Weird. I just downloaded the demo and didn't suffer from any of those problems.. shortcuts were created just fine to start menu (at least), speech was ok (incl. subtitles from menu), and the main menu had "exit to desktop" selection after the click to start -splash... which went to some kind of movie but I was able to skip it with ESC. I did have some nasty weirdness/flickering/pause bug going on in the ingame though, but I think it might be because I'm using synergy+ and forgot to put the "lock to this screen" mode on before playing.

Maybe I just got an updated build of the demo then. :) Straight from the game website..

tonic

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2009-09-23 22:35:00

Uh. Just noticed your blog actually adds comment adders email addresses as clear visible mailto: links.

Pretty please with cherry on top: remove the email link from my previous post. And maybe update your blog software not to show the email addresses of users?

Spammers tend to harvest any emails from web pages, so it's not nice to post anybodys email address in the web.

tonic

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2009-09-23 22:36:00

maybe it's a vista problem, who knows. Or I had an older demo. btw: mail adresses are hidden by javascript for bots, but I removed your adress.

niko

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2009-09-24 11:32:00

Yes probably a Vista problem, Far Cry 2 also does not makes shortcut on Vista - the full game.

kinjalkishor

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2009-09-26 16:53:00