Batman: Arkham City Message Board older than one year ago

#batman The people behind Batman's video games seem to think that players can never have enough Batsuits. Loads of variant outfits—some free, some not—have been pushed out for both Arkham City and the iOS spin-off Arkham City Lockdown. The latest update to the Dark Knight's portable adventure includes more new looks, including one from a graphic novel that's not even out yet. More »

#batman The latest update to Rocksteady's hit Bat-game came yesterday, bringing with it a new Batsuit and new Challenge maps for players to perfect their stalking and combat skills in. More »

Rocksteady has announced that it will be giving a free Batman Inc. skin to Batman: Arkham City players. In a post on Arkham City's official forums, director Sefton Hill wrote the following: "We have had an amazing release of Batman: Arkham City and we wanted to thank you all for your incredible s...

Rocksteady is giving us all a free Batman Inc.-style Batman skin for Arkham City, as a "thank you all for your incredible support before, during and after the game's release," according to a statement from director Sefton Hill. With that costume, you'll be all set to travel the world and recruit some international Batmen, although, of course, you won't actually be doing that. The costume will be offered as a free download tomorrow on Xbox Live, PC, and PS3.

The world has opened up for us in other ways, however. Along with this announcement, Hill shared a code that will allow you to use any downloadable skin in the campaign without having to complete it first. At the main menu, after choosing your save slot, press left, left, down, down, left, left, right, up, up, down. Then all the costumes you've bought or otherwise acquired will be available. Old school!

If you really feel like buying stuff, you have a couple of options there, as well. The "Arkham Bundle" collects the Nightwing Bundle Pack, Robin Bundle Pack, and the Arkham City Skins Pack for 1200 MSP ($15); there's also a Challenge Map Pack including the new Batcave map, the Joker's Carnival, and the Iceberg Lounge, for 240 MSP ($3). Both are due today.

[Thanks, Nick!]

Phew. I was just about to scribble some rot about the release of free challenge maps for Arkham City, which are only downloadable through Games For Windows Live. As I was staring at the error message that greeted my attempt to install them, a tweet landed ‘pon my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “Why all this effort to clobber villains at the Jokers Carnival, and in the Iceberg VIP Lounge and Batcave? Even if you were doing it using the free Batman Incorporated skin it’d just be fisticuffs. Better to take a top-hatted stroll in the snow.”

By jove, what a grand idea that was. You can watch a slightly interactive documentary of my turn around the environs thanks to Winter Walk, which is as pleasant a way to while away a few minutes as you’ll find today. Thanks to Dan Marshall (@danthat).

#batman To thank you for making their publishers millions of dollars and themselves a swag of awards, Batman: Arkham City developers Rocksteady have unlocked a couple of holiday treats for owners of the game. More »

#otherpeoplesgoty What's our game of the year? We're not telling... yet. But E Online has gone with Batman: Arkham City. Portal 2 was second. Uncharted 3 came in third. Breaking the pattern, The Elder Scrolls V came in fourth, not fifth. More »

#toys Not to be confused with Square Enix's bigger, more expensive pieces, these Arkham City figures from DC may be smaller, but they also feature a lot more characters. More »

Another year, another 12 days of holiday giveaways! Starting today and running through Christmas Day, we're doing the one thing that makes us feel truly alive: giving. Specifically, we're giving you fine folks some of the swag we've managed to collect in our cluttered home offices. And the good will and merriment doesn't stop here! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for even more chances to win!

To kick things off, we're assembling a Batman: Arkham City prize worthy of three wise men but, instead of going to a bunch of bookworms, it's going to one of you. You'll get a copy of Batman: Arkham City for your Xbox 360, a Power A Batman: Arkham City controller for your hands, and a Batman: Arkham City t-shirt for your curiously unclothed torso. How do you win a prize of this magnitude? Head past the break for the answers to all life's questions.

Given Rocksteady's past, I wouldn't be surprised if it was being honest about Arkham World.

Rocksteady Studios is no stranger to teasing.

The basic plot for Batman: Arkham City was hidden away inside Batman: Arkham Asylum, and the first news about Arkham City was dropped just months after Arkham Asylum was released.

Is Batman: Arkham World next?

While “accepting” a Character of the Year award at the Spike TV Video Game Awards this weekend, a Mark Hamill-voiced Joker was holding onto a script with Batman: Arkham World listed at the top. He joked about “spoilers” before hiding the script, and quickly moved on.

Arkham World doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but the blockbuster success of both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City means Rocksteady and Warner Bros. would want to stick with the Arkham name in some capacity.

#vga The two lead voice actors from this year's Batman: Arkham City ripped the Spike Video Game Awards on Twitter last night. They both lost in their respective categories, but, they said, that's not why they'e complaining. More »

While accepting the award for Best Character at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, the Joker -- from Batman: Arkham City -- was seen holding a script for Batman: Arkham World and made a joke about spoilers. This is far from Rocksteady confirming Batman: Arkham World, so take this with a grain of salt...

The most successful games based on DC Comics properties, like, say, the two recent Batman games, aren't based on movies. Unsurprisingly, then, Warner Bros. sees no particular reason to cross-promote with DC games.

Warner Bros. Montreal executive producer Reid Schneider told Canadian Business that WB isn't pushing the studio to tie into movies. "No, we're not going in that direction," Schneider said. "It's really about make the game what it needs to be and forget the movies."

In fact, it's avoiding movie deadlines, he said, that helps the games become great. "If you look at the similarities between [Batman: Arkham Asylum and Neversoft's 1998 Spider-Man game], they weren't based on movies per se," Schneider said. "They were just taking that really rich fiction from the comic books and exploring the characters. It's not about hitting the movie date or some arbitrary date-it was giving the game the time it needs to be successful and really just concentrating on the quality of it." It's been successful enough that the games are getting their own tie-ins.

Batman's costume gets torn up pretty severely over the course of Batman: Arkham City. We can only imagine how filthy it gets, and what Batman smells like by the end. So do him a solid and replace it with the fresh new ones in the Arkham City Skins Pack, newly available on Xbox Live, PSN, and Games for Windows this week.

The $5 pack collects all the previously retailer-exclusive (and NOS energy drink-exclusive) alternate looks for the Dark Knight, including 1970s, Year One, The Dark Knight Returns (aka Fatman), Earth One, Batman Beyond, Sinestro Corps, and the delightfully incongruous Animated Series skin.

Arkham CIty's had some DX11 problems since its delayed PC release. A new patch from Rocksteady tries to fix this, but only if you don't have Windows Vista or 7 32-bit. If you do, it makes things worse. Oh dear. [Rock, Paper, Shotgun] More »

Batman: Arkham City arrived on PC crazily late, and launched with a pretty much borked DirectX 11 mode. Which didn’t make a lot of sense, given what a song and dance NVIDIA and Warner were making about its graphics, and if forum-hounds’ apparent discovery that the release build was compiled back in September is to be believed. Finally, though, a patch has arrived which purports to fix it, for the price of 190MB. Unless you’re running 32-bit Vista or 7, in which case it makes DX11 performance even worse. To the point that you’re advised to only run the game in DX9 mode. Sigh. Another patch is apparently due, though.

A few other wotsits have been rejiggered too – full details below. No, they haven’t removed any of the preposterous levels of DRM, sadly enough.(more…)

Release notes:
We have just released a patch for Batman: Arkham City PC that provides fixes a variety of DX 11 issues, as well as fixes for a few other non-DX 11 related issues. The DX 11 fixes will apply for the majority of players, however, some specific Steam users will experience issues when running under DX 11.
With this latest patch, Steam users with the following Windows Operation Systems should avoid running the game under DX 11 until further notice:
- Windows Vista 32 bit
- Windows 7 32 bit
Users running Windows 7 32 bit or Windows Vista 32 bit should ONLY use DX 9 settings until a future patch that addresses this specific issue is released. We are actively working to address the remaining issue tied to DX 11 for users running 32 bit versions of Windows Vista or Windows 7.
Major fixes that this patch addresses are listed below.
- Performance / hitching issues have been greatly improved for running in DX 11.
- An issue with players running out of Video Memory or encountering a Rendering Thread Exceptions has been address. This was primarily affecting 32-bit Operating Systems.
- A progression block after defeating Ras Al Ghul has been fixed. This was issue occurred primarily on lower end computer setups and described as Batman not readying his Reverse Batarang.
- A crash that occurred when scrolling between the Character Bios and Arkham City Stories has been fixed.
- A crash that occurred when selecting Press Start immediately when available at the Title Screen has been fixed. The issue was described as crashing/hard locking around the DLC (Downloadable Content) check.
Thank you all for your patience.

#speakuponkotaku In today's completely topical edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Ｓｏｕｌｓ feels he's found the perfect developer to make the next Matrix game. Does anybody still care about The Matrix? More »

#batman Artist Dean Fraser of Springfield Punx fame is up to his old tricks again, giving the heroes and villains of Batman: Arkham City a Simpsons-style makeover. Mmmmm, Springfield Catwoman. More »

#speakuponkotaku In today's lifelike edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter MarcianTobay says it's time to honor the motion capture actors, without whom our professionally-voiced video game characters would be nothing more than well-spoken robots. More »

#crime I've never been a fan of Black Friday, it's a celebration of everything terrible world: consumerism gone wild, so wild these days that it can lead to violence. More »

You've probably had your hands on Batman: Arkham City for quite some time, and as you've raked in Riddler Trophies, taken out Titan containers, and interrogated thugs, you've probably come to think of yourself as a pretty decent Dark Knight. Well, it's time to prove it...

“You’re going to bleed like a dead cat.”

At first, I thought this was just clunky dialogue, some poor writer struggling to come up with yet another cat-based reference for Batman: Arkham City’s thugs to bellow at Catwoman, as a break from the rather more disturbing threats and insults they so frequently offer. Many have commented that the game’s dialogue, especially incidental comments from thugs, is unimpressive. And troubling too. Puzzling, given how lavish the game is in so many other respects. Then I sat down and thought about it. What if there was something I was missing? What if that line, “you’re going to bleed like a dead cat” was rich in subtext and nuance I was just too ignorant and lazy to pick up on? And what if, in turn, that meant all the apparently wretched dialogue in the game had been misinterpreted? What if we’d made a terrible mistake? There was only one thing I could do – a careful, stage by stage analysis of the sentence in question. Only then could I truly uncover its mysteries. Some might ask why this game, of all games, should be subjected to such painstaking analysis. I have one word that perfectly addresses all such queries: “because.”(more…)

Rocksteady has revealed via Twitter a new batch of Batman: Arkham City DLC is due to arrive December 20 and will feature the Batcave...

Well, we don't know for sure that the Batcave challenge map included in the next Batman: Arkham City DLC pack isn't the one Adam West and Burt Ward called home, but it seems far more likely that we'll be beating down Gotham's worst in something a little more contemporary.

According to this tweet, the pack arrives December 20 and also includes two previously available maps: Iceberg Lounge and Joker's Carnival. No pricing information has yet been revealed, however we feel safe in assuming that the sum total will cost more than nothing and less than a hundred billion dollars.

#batman After being mentioned in the GTTV Presents GameStop Unwrapped TV special on Thanksgiving, it looks like the newest location for players to kick the asses of Gotham's worst criminals is going to be the Dark Knight's innermost sanctum. A new DLC pack's coming on December 20th, which bundles the all-new Batcave challenge map, along with the previously available Iceberg Lounge and Joker's Carnival maps. There's not been a press release about the Challenge Map Pack yet, but Rocksteady Studios confirmed the date on their official Twitter account. No word on pricing yet, but expect it to be in line with the range of previous add-ons for Batman: Arkham City. (Note: The art above isn't from the game.) We'll update when we learn more. More »

#fanart Fan artist Dean Fraser, who specialises in turning pop culture icons into characters from The Simpsons, has spent the week giving Batman: Arkham City his (or, well, Matt Groening's) signature treatment. More »

Bruce Wayne has finally returned to my PC, ready to swoop and scuffle his way through the prison-district that is Arkham City. It’s no secret that I used to wear Batman pajamas when I was a youngster, nor that I have been known to shed manly tears when thinking of the Caped Crusader’s tragic origins in Crime Alley. These facts make me the ideal person to tell you Wot I Think of this new crimefighting caper.

(more…)

Batman: Arkham City is now playable on Steam, after a week of mild confusion over its availability in various regions. However, more pressing concerns have arisen now that it’s been properly released: the DX11 support seems to be as broken as the bat after a few rounds with Bane, rendering Brucie’s latest adventure unplayable with the current DirectX package.

(more…)

Cloud gaming service OnLive is banging its drum for new members in the UK again, so they’re reactivated their remarkable £1 offer (which they’re surely making a massive loss on – they must have ton of marketing money stored up). Your first purchase after joining currently costs just 100 pennies, and that includes the likes of Batman: Arkham City, Saints Row 3, LA Noire, Lord of the Rings: War In The North and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. All PC versions, but tweaked for OnLive – which in Arkham’s case means no GFWL. Woo! OnLive has its issues, but I really rather like it – I’ve played quite a lot through it now, and while the experience differs from game to game for a lot of titles on a decent ISP the experience is pretty incredible. Especially if you have the microconsole thingy and are sat back on a sofa – with your face stuffed directly into a monitor the cracks are that much more visible.

Oh, and if you already have an OnLive UK account, that doesn’t stop you from creating a new one purely to nab a game for £1. Repeatedly, in fact – you just need a different email address every time. Snicker.