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The Rampage Online

The News Site of Fresno City College

The Rampage Online

The News Site of Fresno City College

The Rampage Online

Dark Knight Raises Bar

For those impatiently waiting for the upcoming Batman movie, the latest game featuring The Dark Knight will certainly quench your thirst. If it’s safe to assume that Batman- Arkham Asylum was the Batman Begins of the video game industry, then the much anticipated sequel, released on Oct. 18, is The Dark Knight.
The first game took the character of Batman and put him in a place he never thought he would have to survive in, which is the prison Arkham Asylum. In this story Batman’s arch-enemy, The Joker, has taken control of the prison and helped break out the thousands of inmates and super villains to make his own personal army. Many of these super villains and henchmen were put in Arkham Asylum by Batman himself.
Now the sequel reveals that Arkham Asylum was closed down due to the massive breakout that Batman faced in the first game. In its place Professor Hugo Strange has built a mega prison out of the slums of Gotham City with a 200 foot wall surrounding the vast area where gang warfare, led by some very famous super villains, like Two-Face and Penguin occurs. This takes a page out of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York where the island of Manhattan has become a prison.
Now the game starts out with a news conference where billionaire Bruce Wayne is asking for the shutdown of Arkham City because of the gang violence.
Long Story short, Bruce Wayne gets arrested and thrown into Arkham City at the hands of Hugo Strange. This is the main bad guy because he has something up his sleeve, so it’s up to Wayne’s alternate ego, Batman, to find out what’s going on and stop him.
In the game you get to see classic villains from the comics. We see Two- Face, Peguin, the Riddler, and even an Appearance by Mr. Freeze.
The environment in the game is for the most part a free-world, meaning you don’t have to follow a linear plot. You can do side missions and other things that don’t affect the main story. Like the Riddler’s challenges which are hidden all over Arkham City.
Much like the first game, the design of the city is very much post-modern and vert gothic. It gives one the feeling of being in Tim Burton’s (not Joel Schumacer’s) vision of how Gotham City is portrayed.
The characters and gadgets that are featured are very much grounded in reality. For example the character of Oswald Cobbelpot aka The Penguin, isn’t deformed. He’s characterized as a short, fat, and elegantly dressed guy, who has thugs do his bidding. It gives a feel of how Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are, especially when it comes to the look of Harvey Two-Face.
His left side of his body, not just his face, is burnt leaving it looking red and charred. Now taking a page out of Nolan’s book, the left side of Two-Face’s suit is burnt and charred, much like how it looked in The Dark Knight. The “normal” side of the suit is white, kind of how it was in the Batman cartoon.
The game makers sure knew what kind of level they needed to bring in order to top the level that the first game set. And they took that level and raised it even higher.

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