You might have noticed just how often we are covering games from licence-toting Manchester publisher Ocean, especially once you consider all the Imagine ones are them too. We are well into the hubris section of their story at this point.
I don’t know if it was the only version of this game, but I’ve seen a version packaged in a black box with nothing but two huge logos on the front in yellow-gold: the Batman one, and the Ocean one. There is almost everything you need to know right there. The first level gives you Batman, moving around a chemical factory with brown-grey backgrounds focused on something approximating realism. He throws things at men who shoot at him. They die and fall down the screen. We’re in Robocop territory once again, a world of glossy movie adaptations which focus on the gloss and (action-focused) adaptation at the expense of all else, a world where imagination goes to die.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Indiana Jones offered at least a slight twist on the same thing. We’ve already seen Ocean themselves publish a very different Batman game which reached the top of the charts in 1986. Drummond and Ritman’s Batman didn’t have any film to hew close to, and took after other games at least as much as the Batman TV series they had in mind. Yet in realising their vision of a Dark Knight Lore, they captured far more of the essence of the character and his world.
Batman the Movie the Amiga Game has its own solution of sorts to that, one which would be seen across other games of movies and which Ocean had previously used for Platoon. It represents the movie not through a set of levels of the same gameplay, but through a series of very different levels for different aspects of the film. Through its course it demands very different things of its player, and as such in theory conveys something of the multifaceted nature of being the Batman. This means that as well as the shooty action bits there is a bizarre puzzle section, a flying bit, and a level with the Batmobile.
In other words, instead of just getting to play a slightly less deathly dull version of Robocop, you also get to play a scaled down take on OutRun. On the plus side, novelty value. On the minus side, it has nothing like the depth or even style of OutRun, which is a bit poor for a character who has style so far up on their list of attributes. On the plus side a second time, there are bits where you have to sharply turn corners with the aid of grappling hooks. It doesn’t really offer much in the way of extra challenge or complexity, but it is nonetheless a great deal of fun to do. And more importantly, it shows that somewhere there is still a sense of the thrill of the possibilities of the medium. Even if people carry on wanting to play games with names they recognise, maybe we don’t have to go through the same joyless trudge every time.
