Main ListPrevious Listbold games are games that have been beaten, previously beaten, or are unbeatable.
italicized games are in progress.
standard games are games I am not currently trying to beat.
strikethrough games are games that have been abandoned.
28.
Batman: The Video Game (GEN)
This game is an action platformer, but it has the problem, to me, that batman moves just too damned slow and there is no way to run for some of the sections that really have precise timing for the jumps, running would've made it easier. Combat in the game feels less than inspired and the game has the shmup sections like all the other games. Thinking about all these shmup sections has me kind of yearning to play the Arkham games again, kind of can't wait because those games are my kinda game. I do recall the beginning of the game getting stuck and having to learn about the grappling hook, which I'd call frustrating, but I hadn't played Batman Forever yet at this point lol. Never a fan of the refighting all earlier boss fight trope and unfortunately this game has it. Frustrating platforming at the end like all platformers. Overall a pretty weak entry in the series.
Rating: Hard pass
29.
Batman: Return of the Joker (NES)
Something I'll note, other than the Game Boy version of this game, both the Genesis and SNES (Revenge) versions of this game are pretty spot on with this version of the game... so much so to the point that I would recommend not playing the Genesis or SNES (It's unreleased) versions of the game at all because the NES version is the best way to play this game. That said, all three versions of this game suck in general, but this one sucks the least. The boss fights in this game have you and the boss sitting with like 80,000 HP and you deal between 100-1000 damage per hit depending on the version, with the genesis version being the worst, but I'll talk more about that there. I'll reiterate that it's disappointing that the NES version of the game is the best playing and looking version of this game given that it's the oldest version of the game, albeit only by like a year.
Rating: Hard pass
30.
Batman: Revenge of the Joker (GEN)
A pretty spot on recreation of the NES game, graphically the game look pretty good, but that is literally all it's got going for it. Even that isn't that great because the colors are darker overall which makes a lot of things harder to see and they did change up some stuff that makes some of the more frustrating aspects even more frustrating. Like the beginning of the game with the spike balls, you can't even see that they are there because they are hidden, it's kind of bullshit. This game, you do so much less damage in the boss fights that the boss fights take forever to finish. You deal less than 1k damage (sometimes as little as 200 dmg) and the boss has around 100k health, so it takes over 100 hits to finish off the boss. That honestly has to be the biggest complaint about this game, because some of the boss fights take like 10 minutes and that just isn't reasonable for these old precision unforgiving games, maybe I can pause, but geez am I going to get tired of this BS real fast.
Rating: Hard pass
31.
Batman Returns (NES)
The first beat em up entry in the franchise, in my youth I had played the SNES version like crazy, so I see some resemblance in this game, but I can definitely see how things had to be changed it being NES and all. One of the things that threw me in this game was the one of the levels will loop endlessly until you go into the buildings and find the right building or go into all of the buildings, I only looped one extra time I think, but I thought that was real interesting. Don't know that I've ever seen that applied in a beat em up game before. Of course the game has the obligatory shmup sections too, can't forget that! I had some frustrations I think with the duck tank machine boss fight that I didn't see the person on youtube have the same problem interestingly enough, but maybe I was playing the fight all wrong.
Rating: Hard pass
32.
Batman Returns (GG)
This is where I mention that I'm playing these games linked to Retro Achievements which means if a game doesn't have achievements yet I'm trying my best to put off playing the game yet because I'd much rather earn the achievements for the game rather than beat it and achievements show up 6 months later. That said achievements are kind of community driven, so if no one has the interest and going and developing achievements then it may never get done. I thought about developing achievements but then I thought about how that is kind of cheating me developing the achievements and I don't personally know how I'd point the achievements and what achievements to implement, so I'm just like, it's fine. Plus in order to generate the achievements I'd have to play the game quite a bit to get all of the info necessary and I'm kind of just not about that for games that I know I'm not going to enjoy. Anyway, back to the review. So, first off, I'll state that I actually played through this game twice, I didn't count it twice, but truly I should. I played through once on route 1 and again on route 2, because the achievements for this game existed to have you play both, which required two playthroughs. The game plays more like the Batman Movie games where it's not a beat em up, but an action platformer. Route 2 really relies on using the grappling hook to get past obstacles and gaps whereas route 1 is a more standard experience, so I'd consider it essentially the game's built in difficulty system. Levels are largely similar, just route 2 has more traps and such. If this game has a general theme it sticks to in its design, it's the use of the grappling hook. As always the platforming sections towards the end are brutal and frustrating and surprisingly no shmup sections. I'm going to think about splitting this because I really did beat the game start to finish twice.
Rating: Hard pass
33.
Batman Returns (SNES)
Ah, yes, one of the staples of my childhood. I played this game like crazy and now as an adult I see lots of comparisons to the LJN Spider-man/Venom games, even though this isn't LJN, it's Konami. That said I really enjoyed the LJN Spider-man Venom games even though apparently they aren't well remembered by most folks. Despite both being made by the same company, the NES and SNES games are just so crazy different graphically at least. No shmup section, but it's got a wild driving section. This game had one of my favorite things, which was being able to easily walk up and grab and enemy and throw them at the background environment, sometimes destroying some of the background. I'm a bit fried after writing like 10 of these reviews back to back, I may need to take a break and write more later.
Rating: Soft pass
34.
Batman: The Video Game (ARC)
Good lord this game was pretty terrible. I get it's an arcade game and designed to make you pump in those quarters, but good golly this game is pretty bad. The driving section is essentially a light gun game, but in the arcade you know it wasn't a light gun, so it's like playing those console light gun games with a controller.
A lot of sections in the game are just absolutely BS in how they throw enemies at you and how some of the enemies will throw stuff the frame they are spawned on screen so you have to know they are going to spawn before they spawn to prevent getting hit and there is a lot of bs where they throw tons of enemies from both directions who shoot guns or throw bombs, it's just a lot of BS. On top of that the platforming and combat also suck. Just really a no good game.
Rating: Hard pass
35.
Batman: The Video Games (PCE)
LMAO this game, out of nowhere you get a bomberman-esque Batman game. You got mazes with enemies and you throw your batarang to stun them and just walk into them to knock them off the map. The premise of every level is to stand in x# specific spots to complete the level, this might be collecting items, it might be cleaning up graffiti, it's wack... but honestly, this game is kinda fun, it's dumb fun and almost has no place being a batman game, but I enjoyed my time with this game. Until I reached the levels where you have to do the warping around, there was one level in particular that I spent nearly 10 minutes on, if not longer, because I couldn't figure out which of like 12 warps would get me where I wanted to go. Other than that, the game was quite enjoyable on its own.
Rating: Soft pass
36.
Batman: The Animated Series (GB)
This game started off confusing, it made it sound like you needed to find all of the teddy bear bombs, but I kinda just rushed right (direction) through the level, thought I was stuck and had to find the bears, back tracked, realized later that I wasn't stuck and I just needed to grapple hook... so another grapple hook heavy batman game
. Platforming is very solid in this game, towards the end it has a timed section that I had some trouble with because it just didn't give you any time to screw around with, you had to be pretty precise to get through it on time. I think somewhere towards the end they started throwing spikes and wall spikes at you so you had to be pretty precise with your platforming which got frustrating. One of the last areas had warps around which I thought were linear, but I found myself having to backtrack and find the right route a bunch of times so that was interesting if not also frustrating. Early game is good, but as the game progressed the game got more and more frustrating.
Rating: Hard pass
37.
Batman: Return of the Joker (GB)
This is one I skipped because it didn't have achievements on RetroAchievements, but the achievements popped up on the site and I was like oh yes, I'll go play this now. But wound up happening was me sitting there and troubleshooting a couple of achievements that weren't popping right with the developers of the achievements. So I'd get to a point where an achievement was supposed to pop, it wouldn't pop, and I would basically just stop playing until the devs got back to me or fixed it. I managed to get it all done inside a day I think, but there was a lot of ok, guess I'll wait. This game is completely different from the console counterparts, same kind of game, but just completely different. That said lots of frustrating things in this one, like the first level has weird water rising and lowering stuff that damages you just being touched by it. Lots of false platform stuff that on harder difficulties disappears within a frame or two of you landing, so you've got next to no time to jump away. This is the game that taught me more about how achievements work for retro games and that achievements are made specifically with hardcore mode in mind and that the official stance is that if an achievement doesn't work in softcore mode, it's kind of on you for playing with save states and such. My first ticket I submitted, the dev kind of sounded like they were like sucks to be you, but they made a change to see if it fixed it and it did. Not sure what softcore mode was messing with there, but it happened.
Rating: Hard pass
38.
The Adventures of Batman & Robin (SNES)
Every set of levels corelates to an "episode" of the show, I've never seen the show so I don't know if it actually follows an episode or something, but I get what's going on, specific bosses, specific "episode". I don't know, game was fine if not pretty basic. The museum level was pretty good in having to find all the folks to get the code to get into the vault. The racing level was absolute BS because they didn't really give you enough time to get through it, like I had to redo it so many times because I wasn't absolutely perfect, I wound up running it perfectly and still only had a second or two to spare, absolutely brutal. I enjoyed the dungeon crawling of the Riddler episode, but even that was a bit annoying. Changing up the mechanics per episode was novel, but also the game seems to do the same trope of refight all of the previous boss stuff.
Rating: Hard pass
39.
The Adventures of Batman & Robin (GEN)
Another same game different dev, this one is more of a beat em up game, but it's practically 2D instead of 2.5D like most beat em ups. And of course it adds in shmup levels which I hate. I mean considering how you fight, even the "beat em up" sections are essentially shmup style since you don't really fight so much as just throw batarangs. Really just didn't enjoy this game.
Rating: Hard pass
40.
Batman Forever (SNES)
Oh boy, this game is absolutely terrible, luckily it looks like it's the same on all platforms so I don't need to play it more than once. The digitized graphics are interesting and gives it a very Mortal Kombat feel, even kind of plays very fighter style, which is probably why we got the Arcade fighter game, haven't played that yet, so no comment. This game seems to also heavily rely on grapple hook stuff but it just doesn't work well, it's absolutely wonky in execution. Doesn't matter what platform this game is totally not worth playing and should've been unreleased, but unfortunately it did release. I pretty much had to follow a video walkthrough to get through this game because everything was just so obtuse.
Rating: Hard pass
41.
Batman: The Video Game (ZX)
This game could've honestly been ported to like Game Boy or something, it's not great, kind of sucks actually. I had to look up how to progress early on, but once I did that twice for learning about the grapple hook, I managed to get through the rest of the game with little to no issue. The game does have the problem of enemies firing the frame they appear on screen, so you have to time things well even though it's really hard to know when an enemy will render. Tries to follow the plot of the film like the other games.
Rating: Hard pass
42.
Batman (ZX)
The first Batman game ever released, presumably based on the Adam West TV Series. Robin's been kidnapped (Because he's a kid) and before you can go even think about saving Robin (Probably why Joker killed him) you need to reassemble the batmobile... so this entire game is you running around the batcave trying to find all of the pieces of the batmobile so you can go save Robin... but for some reason there are monsters all over the batcave. Isometric action platformer, can't really defend yourself so just dodge enemies through out. I basically had to follow a video walkthrough step by step... to the point that I had my phone propped up so I could pause/unpause the video on the fly without leaving the game. I think this game would've been pretty brutal back in the day, it seems to save your progress after you collect each batmobile part, so it's got that going for it, but it's still pretty brutal, and I don't know that I would've been able to figure out a lot of the little intricacies with this game without the video guiding me... and I definitely would've gotten lost a ton because the batcave is pretty fricken expanse.
Rating: Hard pass.
43.
Batman (SNES)
This is essentially an unreleased demo of the Software Creations version of Batman. It's a not very good beat em up game with only 2 levels and it just loops endlessly. I only even found out this exists because I was looking into the SNES unreleased version of Revenge of the Joker. It's a really not good game with no real plot and obviously adds nothing to the franchise as a whole.
Rating: Hard pass
44.
Batman: Revenge of the Joker (SNES)
This is the unreleased SNES version of the Genesis remake of the NES Return of the Joker. Follows the Genesis/NES versions pretty exactly, but has its own set of problems. Boss fights are different from the SNES version and are just as frustrating as the Genesis version if not moreso... The difference maybe being that the boss fights aren't as long as the genesis counterpart, but more frustrating in design. Game obviously has its bugs and isn't fully refined so there are a lot of issues with platforming in general, especially on the snow stage. Obligatory shmup sections just like the other console counterparts. Final boss part though, is like a 5-10 minute fight, which isn't an exaggeration, so while all of the Genesis fights feel long, the actual final SNES boss really is long.
Rating: Hard pass
45.
Goldeneye 64 (N64)
I was looking at Retro Achievements and saw the massive achievement set for this game and decided that I wouldn't mind replaying Goldeneye 64 again and earning all of the achievements, so I did. Not much really to talk about except to emphasize that the X1/XS port of the game does such a great job of fixing the issues that were caused by the C buttons on the N64 controller, because trying to play the original N64 game via an emulator using a modern controller, is still pretty crap. You can't properly swap the stick functionalities around, and even if you swap them improperly, you've messed up the ability to move through menus seamlessly. Up and down on left stick, right and left on the right stick... otherwise you stick with defaults which is move forward/backward left stick, strafing right stick, turning left stick, looking up/down right stick. It's messed up no matter what. I stuck with default controls so I wouldn't get confused in menus. Given modern ports exist, there is no reason to go back and play the original N64 version.
Rating: Soft recommendation
46.
Goldfinger 64 (N64)
I've been wanting to play this rom hack for so long, but unfortunately the developer for this rom hack did such a shit job on the very first level, I always gave up real quick. The framerate is terrible and the lighting is too dark on the first level that it's really hard to play. I struggled through and continued and one of the things I noticed was that the developer really didn't do a good job of designing the levels to run properly on the N64, it really needed to be much more closed in environments so it's not having to try to render things so far away or too many things in general. I personally had the issue that regardless of difficulty that enemies would see me and start shooting before the game even rendered the enemies on screen, so I'm having to blindly fire in a general direction hoping I down the enemy while running in their direction. Some of the levels are much better framerate wise, but still design is still pretty poor overall. I managed to get all of the achievements for this game as well, a big part of what pushed me to keep playing because I wanted to earn all of the achievements. At some point I'll play the Tomorrow Never Dies and The Spy Who Loved Me rom hack demos too since they also have achievements. While overall my experience with this rom hack was pretty good after pushing through the bad, I still honestly couldn't really recommend it because it's just not that good in general and is plagued with issues.
Rating: Soft pass
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