Batman: The Video Game (NES)
As an adaptation of Tim Burton’s Batman film, Batman: The Video Game on NES didn’t have too many characters it could pull from the movie to populate an action platformer. While you will eventually face off with the movie’s main antagonist, the Joker, some bosses and baddies for the stages before then were pulled from the comic books instead of the movie adaptation, but the selections were a bit unusual in a fun way. While some bosses are made up of B-listers like Killer Moth and Electrocutioner, their inclusion isn’t as strange as who supposedly shows up as a regular enemy. K.G. Beast, Deadshot, and even the Flash villain Heatwave are supposedly faced during the regular levels even though they appear multiple times and sometimes with other versions of themselves on screen. However, the game trying to pass off a generic looking troop as “Maxiezeus” when Maxie Zeus usually wears his toga and Roman theming loud and proud does make it seem more like the manual was having a bit of fun ascribing identities to basic goons, but it is an amusing touch to imagine Batman punching his way so easily through foes who normally take entire comic issues to overcome.
Batman: The Video Game follows the events of the movie but doesn’t feature them too prominently, an occasional interstitial scene between levels at least introducing the Joker a bit before the big fight but not doing much story telling. The manual even just says the Joker’s managed to spread his evil throughout Gotham City, Batman having to fight his way through a few different areas like the city streets and the Axis Chemical Plant to stop this straightforward crime wave.
As Batman, you have a few skills and tools available for navigating the dangerous environments and taking down the oddly named baddies in your path, his fists being the simplest but not necessarily the least effective. They’re free to use and enemies who are being repeatedly punched can be stunned a bit or even fail to deal damage as they move for a second, but you won’t always be able to afford the time to cleanly punch someone into submission if there are other dangers around. Batman has three Batweapons that are available at all times so long as you have the Pellet ammunition that enemies can sometimes drop. The Spear Gun flies far, but the Batarang is far more effective because if you line it up right, you can hit a foe multiple times with the cheaper to use weapon. The Spear Gun’s range doesn’t often justify its use, but the last weapon, the Dirk, can help with certain situations since the blade thrown splits into three and can hit things like moving mines that would be risky to approach or foes on elevated platforms who fire too often to easily attack.
Managing the pellet ammunition so you can use the Batweapons effectively is technically a consideration, but this is the type of platformer where you can sometimes find a spot where you can repeatedly defeat a constantly replenished enemy and see if they drop anything useful. In a boss fight you might run low on pellets if you’re sloppy and even though continues are infinite, losing lives forces a level restart and you’d need to restock should that happen. Life can also be replenished at those spots where it is easy to trigger enemy appearances, but with how dangerous levels can be and how navigating them is part of the challenge, it’s actually nice to have those “refill stations”. In fact, having such an easy source of ammunition benefits the game as well, the player able to use their weapons more often without it undermining the difficulty specifically because levels feel built around you having attack options. One very important ability Batman has in this adventure is a wall jump, the player able to spring off walls pretty reliably and it is feasible to reposition yourself ever so slightly or take smaller jumps as needed when scaling something like a shaft full of deadly gears or Heatwaves.
Batman: The Video Game expects a lot of tight platforming from the player to get through the later levels, good wall jumping actually perhaps the most important skill to cultivate as drops start to become pretty big setbacks if you slip up because enemies will reappear if their spawn point goes off-screen. A fight up to a high place after some precarious leaping about feels tense because of this danger, but that also makes it satisfying to overcome. You can feel a bit of fear if you’ve been worn down and some foe like the large hopping Jader or the jetpack-wearing Enforcer show up and make your run to the next possible point for easy health refills a bit tougher, but the infinite continues ease some of the burden so you can figure out stages if your initial reactive play isn’t strong enough to carry you through.
Admittedly though, bosses in Batman: The Video Game can sometimes be a bit of a drag because you only have three lives before the Game Over and sometimes they hit hard enough you can die before you even had much of a chance to figure them out. On the other hand, a few of them can be taken down with rapid use of the right Batweapon, and there are some in-between cases where the fight becomes more interesting when you start to notice the trick to overcome them. The Joker fight itself is fairly brutal, he opens fire right as the battle begins so you’ll probably get hit on every attempt and lose a good bit of health there, but you can start to notice his patterns and figure out where his attacks can actually hit, making clearing him rather rewarding because it’s a battle you have to get good at to prevail. While the game could definitely afford to loosen up on how tight some jump timings need to be, the mix of difficulty in the boss battles at least means it’s not constantly demanding tiresome perfection.
THE VERDICT: Batman: The Video Game has some pretty tight requirements for its wall jumping action, but with infinite continues and opportunities to replenish your resources, you’re given the room to figure out the levels and even use your arsenal as you see fit to figure out how best to succeed as the Caped Crusader. The bosses do feel like a bit of an odd mix because of the varying levels of skill or smarts expected from you, but figuring them out can be an engaging process when they aren’t too simple.
And so, I give Batman: The Video Game for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GOOD rating. Besides specific fights like the showdown with the Joker, most of the enjoyable action platforming comes not from the big boss confrontations but the moment to moment level navigation. Levels are spaced specifically to give you the room to carefully wall jump but there is a tangible punishment if you do it too poorly, the game not really setting up cheap ambushes so you know if you slip up it was because you didn’t hit the sweet spots demanded of you. Enemies do pose a threat because your life meter can drain fast but not so fast that you’re constantly dying, and while grinding basic baddies for resources is a bit dull, it at least gives you a way of managing the difficulty some. You’ll still likely get enough pellets for at least frequent Batarang use even without resource farming, levels doing a nice job of putting weaker enemies in troublesome spots and big baddies in spaces where you can more properly fight them so that the action extends beyond leaping up shafts or around platforms. There are technically only 5 stages though, albeit ones split into smaller sections so dying only brings you back to the start of the current space, but the real room for improvement does seem to lie in the uneven approach to boss design. The Joker is plenty tough without that first cheap shot, other bosses could maybe afford to hit for a little less damage so you can have more time to learn them, and perhaps some barriers should be in place so you don’t just use 40 Batarangs to wear down the ones that feel like too much work to engage with properly. They are going to force some full stage retries with this design so their contribution to how the adventure unfolds isn’t small, so either cleaner design there or the opportunity to continue at the boss would do a good bit in helping the game flow better and be a consistently better adventure.
Batman: The Video Game makes some amusing choices with how it identifies its villains, but its big success is in the fundamentals of movement with that well done wall jumping mechanic. Batman may not be best known for such an ability, but it turns him from somewhat stiff to fairly agile here, and even his Batweapons feel like they are built for platforming assistance because of their range in hitting enemies in different positions. A challenging but worthwhile little adventure can be found in this particular adaptation of the 1989 Batman film, it perhaps not capturing the Caped Crusader’s style that well but still mustering up a superhero platformer worth tackling.