Batman: Arkham Knight

He's definitely trying to intimidate Bruce, but that's not the voice an intelligent man puts on when he wants to intimidate a guy as rich and influential as Bruce Wayne over the phone. Lex, use a tone that won't be incriminating in court.

Yes, Luthor should be many things at once. This article I really enjoy (but haven't read in a long time) touches on that: http://mightygodking.com/2008/08/18/on-luthor/

edited 30th Jun '15 3:14:12 PM by KarmaMeter

To be honest, I actually don't care a great deal for Businessman!Lex. Neil Gaiman famously called that version a "skinny Kingpin" and that version of Luthor as this businessman Overlord comes in the 80s after Miller's run on Daredevil.

In the DCAU, Lex Luthor became genuinely exciting and impressive as a villain the moment the Justice League yanked him to prison and he became the super master-criminal of the Silver Age. Before that, in the Superman cartoons, Luthor was more like the guy who invents other Superman villains than someone genuinely impressive on his own, it was Joker, Brainiac and Darkseid who were the real threats to Superman. I think the comics would work immeasurably if they go back to that version of the character.

... They use that version of him all the time too, after Di Dio's rise to power.

I never really accepted Luthor (well not corporate!Lex anyway) as Superman's Arch-Enemy. But then I don't think Superman is the kind of guy who needs an Arch-Enemy. His best stories are always about his relationship with his supporting cast (Lois, Jimmy, Perry White, the folks at Smallville, Supergirl) who are as famous, if not more famous, than Luthor and other Rogues. That's why with two exceptions, his rogues are not compelling. Those exceptions however are Brainiac and Mxyzptlk, especially the latter in his very best story. Brainiac always struck me as an improved version of Luthor.

Rocksteady said that its an almost impossible to do a Superman game and one of the factors is that you need to find a real threat and challenge for Superman.

I think that Luthor works best if he starts out as a businessman, then goes more into mad scientist territory overtime. Which...is basically what the DCAU did, so...

If he just starts out as a mad scientist, then I think he loses his edge. Give him money, power and good publicity - that sets him above the rest. Then have him lose it all, and show just how dangerous Lex Luthor is when he has nothing to lose.

Yeah...although that does have the side-effect of making him like Norman Osborn in the first Spiderman movie.

The main thing is that Lex Luthor is simply not an interesting villain. The DCAU version is the best while Kevin Spacey was the most menacing but otherwise, Luthor is just a Mad Scientist cliche.

Well, I've always liked him and found him interesting, so I suppose that's where we part ways.

I used to only really be interested in Batman because I thought he had the best rogues gallery. I got into Batman himself when I realized he was a good Lex Luthor. A Dark Is Not Evil good Lex Luthor, which is even better. I was already a Lex Luthor fan, and I still am. Especially lately. I've been buying a lot of Luthor focused books.

I sometimes get the impression that it's only people who prefer the Scientist Only Luthor who talk about this Scientist/Mogul dichotomy as if the modern synthesis of the two isn't a thing. Modern Lex is a self-made man, earth's greatest scientific mind (or one of them), and so rich and powerful he practically owns the city.

I admit that the mogul part is more important to me. Luthor at the top his tower, gazing out at his city while somewhere terrible things are happening. You could never connect them to him, but somehow he's responsible. A giant, a god, untouchable. But then there's the flying brick himself: Superman. The one person who can truly make Luthor feel insecure. Now his accomplishments are nothing. If Superman diminishes Luthor, he diminishes the entire human race! Nevermind the fact that Superman is completely selfless and Luthor never actually does anything except self-aggrandize and maximize his personal power...

The really attractive thing about Luthor as an arch-nemesis is that he's ostensibly outclassed by Superman, yet still an extreme threat to him. Most of Superman's villains are a direct physical threat. Brainiac is special because he's not only that, but you'd logically expect him to outdo Luthor in his area of expertise. I have my own ideas about how Brainiac should be written so that Luthor is still the superior foe. My main one is that Brainiac could have a larger body of knowledge, and be more intelligent than Luthor in a cold, relatively unimaginative way, but Luthor's vast scientific genius could be much more creative. A variation of this actually occurs late in my favorite DC or Marvel story Black Ring: Braniac is unable to correctly predict Luthor's movements because he fails to comprehend how deluded Luthor is. And Luthor snaps his neck.

Anywho, that's why I don't think his voice cameo in Batman: Arkham Knight was the best is could have been.

edited 1st Jul '15 1:20:22 AM by KarmaMeter

Well the snarky rejoinder to that is what is Lex Luthor businessman except an "Evil Real Estate Man", I mean multiple properties with his logo on it in different parts of the city?

That only works in stories focusing on the aspect of Bruce Wayne, but the vast majority of the stories is about Batman in his cave. And there he's nothing like Luthor in any version at all.

Yeah that's the whole Promethean thing and that only works if you get into Luthor's head and make him the protagonist. The function Luthor is intended to serve, which remains unchanged regardless of any new variation, is to be a nagging thorn for Superman to humiliate every now and again. Only when you alter that function and make Superman a bad guy or weak, does Luthor play a new role. In any case if Luthor truly believes that he's Superman's mentally superior and that he's an underdog going against a Physical God wouldn't it make more sense if he's a genius in a cave! with a box of scraps!

That when he's absolutely cornered with everything taken from him, he becomes a badass Mad Scientist who comes up with Powered Armor. That this Evil Genius has Joker Immunity because all the evil corporations and shady government types give him protection and use his services to fight Superman and of course that using Luthor is a double-edged sword for any of them. That's how Luthor worked in the Justice League cartoons and he's a lot more sensible in that light. After all, it makes no sense for any business mogul to be anti-Superman. They can only profit by collaborating and making nice to him, which is what Star Labs and other organizations do. In the DCAU, Mercy pointed out that Luthor's obsession for superweapons to destroy Superman was poor corporate-sense. I mean this is supposed to pay off in civilian applications eventually right? He's making expensive stuff at a loss and if Luthor is a Self-Made Man than he can't be as rich as Wayne (who comes from centuries of inherited wealth and so presumably can build himself a private military base and a satellite installation and still have money to burn).

To me, if Luthor is superior there's no need for Brainiac. Brainiac has to be the best/worst there is. In Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, Brainiac makes Lex his bitch and that's what happens in the JLU too, where Luthor engages in a lot of Foe Yay with Brainiac ("Brainiac, I am coming!")

edited 1st Jul '15 2:09:00 AM by JulianLapostat

[[Redacted. I just don't have the stamina for protracted internet arguments.]]

On topic, I was disappointed there was no direct fight with Deathstroke or the Arkham Knight. Rocksteady never made a single one-on-one fight in these games. Either Batman's fighting a group of enemies or he's outmatched and hiding (Killer Croc in Asylum, Mr. Freeze in City). The Ra's al Ghul fight in City was one-on-one but was represented as a group fight. I really enjoyed the Deathstroke fight in Origins by Warner Bros. Games Montréal and I thought Rocksteady might follow their lead, but apparently not.

edited 1st Jul '15 3:32:12 AM by KarmaMeter

I apologize for going Off-Topic.

That's not true, the Grundy and Clayface are pretty much Batman dodging a larger, intractable opponent in a small arena. It's classic Boss Battle stuff.

Its true that Boss Fight is something of a disappointment but then I feel that Rocksteady since they're not making Dark Souls or Shadows of the Colossus don't have much of a choice and I feel that after Arkham City, where you had Four major Bosses, they decided to do something different. Still, the Mr. Freeze Boss Fight is one of the greatest in gaming history, being a Final-Exam Boss for the Stealth Component.

Well, unless you go into Dark Souls territory, its very hard to make that really satisfying in an arcade game, where your command of combos and fighting corresponds to skill to the extent that you feel you are overpowering your opponent.

The Deathstroke Battle was good of course but it still worked in the schema of the old controls for the most part. I actually preferred the Bane fight at the very end, that was quite well done.

edited 1st Jul '15 3:31:05 AM by JulianLapostat

Wow, you type fast. You posted that while I was deleting my response because I can't take the stress of going to bed with this kind of thing to look at when I wake up. Not that you were mean spirited. I apologize for getting carried away also. I also wasn't being fair in characterizing my statements as something that shouldn't be responded to when they were in large part a response to what you had said.

Both Bane fights and the original Mr. Freeze fight are some of my favorites also.

edited 1st Jul '15 3:46:21 AM by KarmaMeter

It also has to be mentioned but boss fights in recent games are getting passé. Developers know that its something that has to really be its own game like in Shadow of the Colossus or Dark Souls or a narrative entirely separate from the main action. The Assassin's Creed games have never really had effective boss fights for instance, its only the wackiness of the context that makes it work and the four Legendary Ships of Black Flag are far tougher than anything else, and that is because its a Side Quest.

Even FPS games like Far Cry and Bioshock don't really have boss fights. So I think Arkham Knight does well in that regards.

The problem with bosses in the Arkham series is that Rocksteady has never found much of a middle ground between huge, hulking behemoths that Batman can wail on for a while before going town, and generic mooks that go down in a couple of punches. Bosses generally tend to be in the former category; i.e. the Titans, Bane, Titan Joker, Croc, Clayface, Ivy, even Ra's.

With the Deathstroke battle, they managed to craft a battle where you have to fight an opponent who's on mostly equal footing with Batman, rather than being vastly stronger or far weaker. That's something I'd really liked to have seen more of, and it's how I'd wished for the encounter with the Arkham Knight to go down.

Even with that said, Knight missed some other obvious opportunities for battles; like getting to actually properly fight Man-bat. That seems like it'd be an easy battle to design.

There's a catch with aerial bosses, and that's that Batman is very difficult to control while in the air. If you've played into the Riddler challenges, you'll remember that puzzle that needed him to use the batmobile ejector seat?

I have a hard enough time landing on flying drones and cars as is, making a boss battle out of the flight mechanic is either going to be unfairly hard, because you can't really control your aerial manoeuvring, or boringly easy, because avoiding damage is easy enough that you could do it in your sleep.

The first Spider-Man Movie game had a boss-fights in mid-air, with Spiderman against the Goblin Glider and the Vulture but then that was the game where it made it look like Spiderman was swinging from the Sky. It was fairly scripted stuff but graphically it looked kind of good for its time. Gameplay wise, it involved throwing projectiles at combatant while dodging them, so you didn't really have an aerial fight really.

The reason why everyone loved the Mr. Freeze fight was because it was a Final-Exam Boss where you had to use everything you learnt from stealth to take him down and you can't repeat any moves. In New Game Plus, Freeze even jammed your Detective Mode, and if you get too far away, he'd send these mini-drones to locate you. So it was something consistent to the stealth gameplay of what we know before but only now we had to use that in a new strategic fashion. That was satisfying. In combat that's kind of hard to make it challenging because there's not a lot of strategy that can evolve in like manner. Once you know the basics of ducking, dodging, jumping over and the freeflow system, all terrains become the same.

The fundamental reasons why Boss Fights don't work though is simply that Batman is too powerful. I mean in most games boss fights get their challenge from the fact that the hero is weak (say Link or the kid in Shadow of the Colossus) while the villains are strong, there is that underdog element. Whatever Batman is, he's not an underdog.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-23-batman-arkham-knight-review_4

Another anti-Batmobile article. You know I cannot really fathom these criticisms at such length. At this point its not criticism so much as some ideological thing about what games can or cannot do. The game forces you to play the Batmobile, yes Black Flag forces you to sail a ship, Metal Gear Solid forces you to use stealth, Arkham City forced you to glide and Arkham Asylum forced you to learn how to use combos.

The developers always said that the Batmobile would be heavily featured that it would be an extension of the Batsuit, and that is how the game is. The Batmobile was on the Cover Art and heavily featured in demos and promos. It's like people are acting this is like the Raiden twist of Sons of Liberty.

edited 1st Jul '15 11:10:24 AM by JulianLapostat

I can understand where some come from though. Fans demanded a usable Batmobile in the Arkham games since their inception, but we get more Batmobile than we could ever want. Yes, Black Flag had sailing, but here is the thing, people got tired of the classic AC combat. It's not as if Batman's combat system started getting old for people. A more appropriate tagline would’ve been "Be the Driver!" One seemingly spends more time behind the wheel than actually feeling like the stealthy, crime-solving Dark Knight himself.

That being said: I kinda liked it initially, but I hated many ways it was handled. The Riddler has worked horrendous race tracks into his puzzles, and there are a ton of shoehorned excuses for car chases or tank battles. It all might have been bearable to me if Batman’s wheels behaved like a real car, conformed to some recognizable rules of gravity. Obeying bizarre laws of physics that have no known real-life parallel, the vehicle slides and skids on the road, and flips itself over at many nudges.

The Tank mode never appealed to me, able to transform into a battle mode with full 360 degree movement and sluggish firepower that feels underwhelmingly slow and disconnected. You’re just strafing around and hitting the attack button until everything has exploded. I think I liked driving around, but the Tank mode kinda seemed like a breaker to me.

It sill didn't detract from the other fun stuff, if I wanna explore Gotham, I use the Grapple and glide!

edited 1st Jul '15 6:57:51 AM by YoKab

Ultimately the way I see it is if you want classic combat and stealth, replay ASYLUM and CITY for that "pure" experience.

KNIGHT is meant to be bigger and broader. And the Batmobile is part of that. If you really play the game you will find that the traditional combat and stealth is still a major part of the game. Like the Panessa Studios sequence is entirely an interior event. The lengthy Airship sequence likewise is classic Predator and Combat. The interiors of ACE Chemicals, also Predator and Combat. Then there are the bridging sequences where you need to access and take out drones and stuff before the Batmobile can enter.

So the way I see it, the Batmobile feels like its shoehorned more than it actually is, simply because people assumed it would be a simple gimmick and not a core part of Arkham Knight the game. Well things have changed.

edited 1st Jul '15 11:09:57 AM by JulianLapostat

I think the Tank mode was what ruined the Batmobile for me, strafing around shooting tanks and drones until they blow up isn't aenough for that mode to go on, especially how shoehorned it was. It just wasn't good in my opinion, I think the Tank Mode was a giant meh. And the Batmobile had those wierd physics. The Batmobile was annoying to me because it really was not that good!

And yes... I found the classic stealth gameplay and all that cool combat very enjoyable. I liked the improvements, I really did, but I found the Batmobile getting a bigger slice than it deserves a downside, as it was not that good. I'm not claiming the batmbile ran over the rest of the elements. I only used the Batmbile when missions dictated it.

Man, some villains are getting this "One Punch KO" in several missions, Batman must be a pro MLG (I bet somebody already did a montage parody of the game somehwere)

edited 1st Jul '15 7:16:59 AM by YoKab

I think Gotham as a map would have to be larger to really justify the Batmobile, as it wouldn't be feasible for you to glide everywhere. So, a more "San Andreas" size map, so you can do more chases, less wall slamming.

Overall, I enjoy the Batmobile and it makes you feel more like batman. The tank mode... Again I rather enjoy it. And if you listen to Halluci-Joker then it implies that all the new weapons on it may be a subtle influence from his presence in Bat's minds.

IF there were more long roads for good pursuits and more gadgets on the car (Like Watch_Dogs implied during ITS driving segments) that would've been an interesting twist and maybe meant using the car more during basic gameplay.

Not to drag this conversation back a ways, but the claim that boss fights are passé just stuck in my craw.

On topic? This is just as perfect a takedown of the Batmobile's role now that the game is out as it was when all we had to go on was the voice actors taking time out from talking about their roles to shill for it. "I NEVER USE GUNS, MORTY!"

edited 1st Jul '15 9:28:12 AM by ElkhornTheDowntrodden

I never played the Mass Effect games (I generally don't like Space Opera and RPG), I was just talking about a trend in some games about how there aren't as many classic Boss Fight these days.

Like Bioshock Infinite did not have a Final Boss (Bioshock 1 did), neither did Far Cry 3 or Far Cry 4 for instance. Dishonored is another game without any real boss fight and the only there is kind of an optional thing. Bosses are still important for something like Dark Souls, Bloodborne or Shadow of the Colossus (which is nothing but Boss-Fights). Uncharted 3 or Last Of Us didn't have a final boss fight either. GTA V doesn't have them either (GTA IV had one!) Then you have an independent game like MARK OF THE NINJA, no final boss-fight there. Assassin's Creed games tend to have something like bosses but they are kind of formalities and its mostly trippy chase or platform sequences.

Batmobile gets better after a while(and changing the default control scheme, jeez who's dumb idea was that?) but the excavator part was by far the worst part of the game. I actually liked the cobra parts, they were like predator sections in a batmobile sort of. The cloudburst one was the most intense boss in the game, though yeah it's difficult! If you switch to car mode once he goes berserk he usually can't catch you.

That sounds like approval to me.

edited 1st Jul '15 9:41:15 AM by ElkhornTheDowntrodden