"Batman" for the Game Boy

Batman buys a handgun

This might seem like a weird pick for the first actual article on Goblin Axis, but for me it met the tough but fair set of criteria a discerning individual such as myself would demand for a review to be written up tonight. See below:

• The game did not make me literally vomit.
• I could complete the game in under an hour.

Though I had to make an educated guess on the second criterion, Batman seemed to hit these two important marks, so that's how I spent the last 30-45 minutes.

Batman for the Game Boy was developed by Sunsoft and released alongside the popular NES Batman game that you've played and you like. The two weren't directly released as support for Tim Buton's 1989 film¹, but were loosely based on it. Very Loosely.

Shooting park rangers at the museum

Of course, when it comes to Batman games, most people would probably think of either the NES game I mentioned above, or one of the newer Arkham ____ games. In both cases, you do the kind of things Batman does: punch criminals, swing around using grappling hooks, throw a Batarang or two, neglect to read your Bat Spray labels and end up using Manta-Ray Repellent Bat Spray on a shark and die. These are but a few of the hallmarks of the dark knight. Even the later Game Boy Batman game, Batman: Return of the Joker, with its hilarious music, generally followed this rule.

Not Batman though. In this one, the caped crusader² decides he's not going to deal with any of that crap and buys a gun. The game that follows is a generally unremarkable but overall solid platforming shooter that borrows elements from Mega Man, Contra, Castlevania and Super Mario Land without feeling like any of them.

The main thing that jumps out about the game is that there's nothing specifically wrong with it. This sounds like a kind of backhanded compliment, but in the scope of all games (and especially licensed games released for the Game Boy), it's actually kind of remarkable that I had no major qualms with the game.

There is, ala Super Mario Land, a scrolling airplane shooter section crammed roughly in the middle of the game. If I was really going to dig for a bone to pick with the game, this would be it. It's a very simple, bland bullet-hell-lite style of shooter, but it's over soon enough, so it just feels nitpicky to rail on it.

The boss from 3-2 was more interesting, which is why I don't have a screenshot of it.

On either side of that, though, you've got some good ol' basic side-scrollin' thug-shootin' bat-mannin' action, that's not unlike Mega Man if you got weapon upgrades as drops. The shot types aren't terribly interesting, but they do give for a bit of variety. One mixed blessing is that they have one weapon upgrade that's simply flat-out worse than your default shot. The "S" weapon seems to simply be your normal shot, but with a shorter range. I assume the S is for short, but I don't have access to a manual so I can't be sure. Arguably, the S is made useful by the game's limitation on the number of shots it lets you have on screen at a time. You start out only being allowed a single shot on screen at a time, and if you miss with the "R" weapon³, you've got a hell of a long time to wait before you can take a shot again, and you just get to stand there like a moron. If you miss a shot with the S, you can shoot again in no time flat, but then again you probably missed because the enemy was more than 6 inches from the end of the gun.

Fortunately, you can upgrade the number of shots on screen to the point where it's more or less unlimited. I got it up to five by the end, which basically allowed for a nonstop meltbeams of shots into the Joker for the final fight.⁴ You can just as easily get this downgraded by power downs, so check your zone, punk.

The Joker makes a funny joke at Batman's expense.

It's worth mentioning that the game is fairly easy. With the exception of a single snag point at the very end of the game during the game's single forced-scrolling segment, I only died twice, and both were caused by me more or less getting too comfortable with the game and kind of zoning out. I'm not saying this to brag about how amazing I am at video games or anything. I'm not. It's just an easy game by nature, and a lot of that lends itself to the game just being all-around well made.  There's a tinge of floatiness in jumps caused by poor post-jump air control, but you get used to it quickly and I never found myself struggling to get Batman from point A to point B. Similarly, the game absolutely does not require any kind of level memorization, with perhaps the exception of the final forced-scrolling level. Pretty much any other traps or threats that pop up you can deal with on the spot. The difficulty is further lowered by the game never wiping your powerups. Even after a game over, you'll retain any weapon upgrades you have, which is helpful, because you can't get yourself into a position where you're unable to progress because you're stuck with the N in single-shot mode⁵. The best word to describe the game is probably "comfortable."

The climactic scene in 1989's  Batman where Batman confronts The Joker in the cathedral bell tower and riddles him with bullets for 2 minutes straight.

That's the main appeal of Batman on Game Boy. There's nothing in the game that's really going to grab you by the throat and shake you until you die (in a good way), but it plays well, it's pleasing to the eye and ear, and most importantly it has no serious problems. Batman is the kind of game you think of when a lazy reviewer like myself uses the term "solid," and that's a good thing.

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1 Both were released in North America about 8 months after the movie^↩
2Note that I have now exhausted the list of alternate names for Batman that I know^↩
3Which shoots a Batarang that goes straight out and comes straight back. R probably stands for "Return," but again, no manual^↩
4Spoiler alert: the Joker is both of the bosses for the platforming sections. You fight him once as Jack Napier, and once as the Joker, and both fights are more or less the same^↩
5Not that the game really gets hard enough that that could actually happen, but it still saves you from some tedious item hunting.^↩