Fame is a fickle bitch: here today, gone tomorrow. Strike while the iron is hot and the faithless mob will love you for a month and a day and risk your once core supporters becoming your main detractors. Like anything worth (consumer’s) money the loudest bang, the brightest flash, and most importantly the fastest reward will sell the most; lodge itself in the collective conscious like a meme bullet.

This brings us to the meat of the argument for ‘Best Game of 2009’, and why the conclusion of that argument is Batman: Arkham Asylum. It may not seem apparent, but the above paragraph will illustrate this reasoning better than simply stating ‘Batman is the best game of 2009, let alone this generation!’ until my throat is bleeding and raw.

This is not a fluff piece written to get you to buy the game. If you don’t already own it, then I hope to whatever deity you believe in that you asked for it as a Christmas gift. This is genuine heartfelt praise for a piece of art that exemplifies its medium, exceeds the confines of ‘digital entertainment’ and should be used as a paradigm for all the folly attempts at re-creation to follow.

I will not humor you in discussing the bare essentials of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Unaware of the game though you may be, I find the concept impossible. This article is not for you. What I will do however, is attempt to stem the tide of an ever-growing wave I see coming in the weeks to follow: that any game other than ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’ will be voted as ‘Best Game of 2009’ from a myriad of sources both professional and amateur. I say to these future proclamations: you are wrong.

A technical marvel; yes. The best written and acted game ever made; yes. Competent mechanics and a driving pace that keeps you interested in the game; yes. All of these things could describe either of the titles I’ve already mentioned, but I am referencing Uncharted 2. This game more than any other this year is poised to sit atop many a ‘Best of 2009’ list of gaming-dom. Undoubtedly gorgeous, polished in script, and tuned to perfection with performances from non-actors that outclass many ‘top-tier’ thespians living and breathing in Hollywood, Uncharted 2 is however fleeting in its enjoyment.

Nathan Drake’s adventures rely heavily upon the game establishing a base sense of realism, both with its graphics and the majority of its content. This goal is admirable, to recreate ‘the real’ inside the ‘virtual’; this very task has been taken up over the course of human history, not just in the digital age alone. The experience however, seems determined to distance itself from being a videogame: there is no appreciable on-screen HUD to speak of, no life bar, no waypoint markers, no game over screens, no map, no information outside of what you as the player can assess from the game world.

Again, this effort is not to be under-estimated however this is the exact point where Uncharted 2 ceases to be a ‘virtual reality’ and starts being ‘a videogame’. Inherently it is my belief these two concepts will never be in perfect harmony. The very definition of a videogame and schema of the concept does not allow for many conventional gaming devices and any game designed around the notion would not be very fun for very long. In short, Uncharted 2 frequently and flagrantly breaks the suspension of disbelief necessary toward the creation of a great videogame.

‘Batman’ contains none of this ridiculous “it’s so realistic until you get to the parts that aren’t!” design. It never tries to be anything more than a videogame; icons, markers, on-screen button prompts, safe rooms, impossible physics, etc. It is in many ways the “gamey-est” game that has ever existed. It does not seek to deliver the most ‘realistic’ Batman experience to be had, and in ignoring this goal the game achieves exactly that. Owing to the caveats of being an ‘interactive experience’ there is not a single moment in ‘Arkham’ where the player is not instructed in some manner on what he/she is expected to accomplish or confused on how to proceed. There is no confusion, because unlike Nathan Drake who ‘appears’ to be a competent Adventurer, Batman does not make appearances,he simply is the Batman (detective, master of logic, martial artist, etc).

In short, there is never a point in the 12+ hour experience of playing Batman: Arkham Asylum wherein I felt compelled to stop playing; I only did so to avail myself of things like eating and sleeping. The boss fights were both challenging and fair. A few them even required some unconventional thinking and tested my simple simian brain. The story, saddled with the tired scenarios and heavy-handedness its comic book origins carry, is written well and acted at worst competently; at best magnificently.

Architecture in the game is simultaneously, like the controls, built around the aspect of you being Batman (and not just looking like him) and also appropriate to fit the aesthetics of the Batman universe. Small contrivances like a proliferation of gargoyles around the interiors of Arkham Island (to allow Batman to perch upon) are quickly dismissed due to their oddly fitting presence in a locale that looks ripped from the pages of some 1930s Gothic horror novella. The base level here is not to establish “the real world” but instead to establish “Batman’s world”.

The pacing of ‘Arkham Asylum’ is largely dependent upon the player and their choices. You can decide to bowl through the story proper and leave the secondary goals for after the finale or play each in tandem. This prolongs the overall experience and in the end you feel like you’ve not only saved the day, but walked a mile in another man’s shoes: a man who just happens to be Batman. Nathan Drake on the other hand often feels like your clumsy puppet, and often you will chastise him as though he exists apart from you.

You’ll also be watching Nathan Drake do this in roughly the same span of time as everyone else, lest you go well out of your way to find treasures that add little to extend or add to the experience. ‘Arkham’ features a large collection of Riddler Challenges that not only come in a variety of shapes and sizes but their collection is an extension of the core game you’re already playing: you have to be Batman in order to retrieve many of them.

This may seem like ‘Arkham’ is a game that is superficially inflated to make it seem longer, distracting the player from finishing the game. However finding these items helps to reinforce “Hey I’m really Batman!” and as a side bonus allows the player to experience challenge levels that boil the game down to its most core components: stealth and combat. Other titles this year like Uncharted 2 or Assassin’s Creed 2, offer little in the way of incentive for pursuing their needless snatch-and-grab collection mechanics outside of production art or the introduction of game items that do little to enhance the overall experience.

Batman: Arkham Asylum ignores the fact that in the last 10 years many game developers have struggled with how to make games look less like ‘games’ and more like something non-gamers could appreciate; in effect, the ‘real’ world. Rocksteady doesn’t care that ‘Arkham’ is just some ‘game’. They revel in this fact. They use it to build a world wherein the player is incapableof not feeling like a part of it. Every nuance, every facet of the experience ties into selling the participant on “this is Batman’s world and you are the Batman”. Other games this or any year previous seem less engaging by comparison.

Both sequels in the Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed franchises, two of the most positively reviewed games this year, have seemingly garnered the public’s eye because of how they turned ‘good’ concepts into ‘great’ games. ‘Arkham’ does not have such a luxury; to be able to astound and impress because of “how much better it is than the first one”. I am not blind to the amount of praise the game received when it was released, however much of that fervor seems to have been replaced with a short-sightedness that seems tunneled into the ‘Holiday Season’ of gaming. Did we all forget that Batman: Arkham Asylum is not only the best Batman game ever made, but that it accomplished this in its first iteration?

Developer Rocksteady seems to have built their entire game around “What if we made a game where you were Batman?” whereas Naughty Dog or Ubisoft may have started their pitch with “What if we made a game that looked like a movie?” or “What if the player could pretend to be an assassin?”. The ideas here are similar yet miles apart intellectually. One strives to perfect the mere appearance of thing, but at its core remains something entirely different. The other is more pure, more direct, and as a result, is infinitely the superior.

Batman: Arkham Asylum – The Best Game of 2009, Best Game of This Generation