Batman: Arkham Asylum

Last time I neglected to mention my only significant complaint about the game, which was the second-string voice acting. Despite Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, and the other main characters delivering absolutely stunning performances, the asylum guards' lines really failed to move me. The writing was mostly trite, and the fact that only three actors voiced all the guards (one of whom is that guy who's in everything) was pretty distracting.

Now, though, the guards don't really come up very often, so the point is effectively moot. Instead, I get to creep up on the Joker's goons and, rather than instantly knock them all on their asses, listen to them tell crazy misanthropic stories. The last one I heard was about a guy who killed his sister because the Joker told him to - but he "didn't really like her anyway." Another thug said the Joker ordered him to kill his sister, too, but he didn't have a sister, so he just killed "the first bitch he saw."

I struggle to come up with adequate praise for Arkham Asylum's pacing. The entire game is checkpoint-based, and no one room or sequence is ever terribly long - not to mention, there's almost always plenty of leeway to recover from a mistake before Batman will die - so repetition is a non-issue. And though the game flow does have portions of high- and low-action, e.g. some detective work inbetween fights, it never really cools off; there's always a persistent tension, a palpable drive to the next goal.

It's hard to put the game down, not just because it's fun, but because it has that carrot-on-a-string quality of always making me want to see what's next.

Progress: 26%