WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Batman Returns

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Malibu Interactive

Released: 1992

Anyone who's listened to our fine podcast likely knows that I count this game as one of my all-time favourites. While Sega was so busy trying to show the world the benefits of their CD add on through full-motion video games like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, the released Batman Returns and showed gamers just how much horsepower this much maligned system really had.

The Batman Returns games are another example of the strange – and wonderful - place movie license games were at during the 16-bit era. Batman Returns on the SNES was a completely different beast than the game found on the Genesis (published by Konami and Sega, respectively). The SNES game was a gorgeous looking beat-em-up in the vein of Final Fight, where an impressively big Dark Knight dismantled the Penguin's Red Triangle Circus Gang one latex-covered punch at a time.

The Genesis game, on the other hand, was pretty darn ugly. The characters weren't all that well animated, the colours were washed out and everything was very purple. The music was also prety awful (a bit of a trend in Sega's Genesis games for a while there). Most importantly, though, was that it played like a very shallow, overly frustrating beat-em-up. I quickly gave up on it.

Boy was I wrong.

The main selling point on the Sega CD version was the all new driving segments. Yes, the main action game was just a repackage of the Genesis cartridge. But the driving segments promised to put the Sega CD through its paces, with crazy amounts of scaling and rotating sprites (state of the art on consoles back then) that put the sheet of paper Batmobile segments of the SNES Batman Returns to shame.

So basically, I bought the CD version under the pretense that I was buying kick ass driving game, not to mention a showpiece for my expensive add on. That the cartridge game was in there was more of a bonus.

Sega positioned it as such, too, as there's an option right from the start to play the driving levels exclusively (plus, choosing this option added an extra driving level to the end of the game).

I wasn't disappointed. Batman Returns – The Driving Game is one of the most amazing 16-bit experiences I ever had. Driving through each stage, shooting Red Triangle cars and motorcycles, or checking them into buildings along the side of the road was awesome. The bosses were huge and varied. The challenge was just right. The music was incredible (my first real experience with Spencer Nilsen's work). And the level of detail just blew me away – driving through road obstacles or blowing up enemies generally resulted in a scattering of shapnel bouncing and rotating all over the road.

I remember talking to my pal Jim – who worked at the game store I frequented at the time – and just praising the game up and down. At one point I mentioned it was a real shame that it was over so soon, and that the action game wasn't even worth playing. That's where I was wrong, he told me. Despite the crappy visuals, the action game was actually pretty fun. The magic was in weapon management.

See, Batman Returns came with loads of wonderful toys at the Caped Crusader's disposal. And if you played the game simply trying to kick and punch your way to the end, you missed out on all of that. It's the age-old gamer behaviour – save your special weapons for the boss encounters. The way to play this game, though, was to utilize the various weapons constantly throughout every level, keeping an eye on your supply and learning which one was best for every situation.

With this knowledge, I tackled the game again and couldn't believe how much fun I was having. Spencer Nilsen's great soundtrack helped to pull my focus away from the general ugliness, and all I saw was a great action game with a level of depth I never even suspected it had.

I played the game over and over again. Even after I'd beaten it (the full game – all driving and action levels combined) I played it again in order to refine my strategy for each encounter. At my peak, I could play through the full game in exactly one hour, each and every time. For some reason, that made me very proud.

It's not that pathetic. Remember, this was a pre-GameFAQs world.

This game is significant in a few other ways, too. One major reason being that, for all the scrambling to get real actors on screen as we made our first forays into the brave new world that was multimedia gaming, Batman Returns featured absolutely no footage or still images from the film. Neither did it include any of Danny Elfman's score. Heck, it didn't even feature many sound bites – the only one I remember hearing was the Penguin mocking me on the “Continue” screen.

This was also the game that helped cement my alliegence to GameFan magazine and to assure I didn't pick up another copy of EGM for a long, long time. GameFan covered this and most other Sega CD games with their trademark level of enthusiasm. EGM, on the other hand, seemed to write the system off almost immediately. I vividly remember reading that the SNES version's driving bits – the flat, sheet of paper, mode 7 stuff that was so impressive one time, and became so boring after a while – were every bit as good as what you'd find on the Sega CD.

At least, that's how I remember it. I'm probably a bit fuzzy on the details. But, being the Sega fanboy that I was, that was enough for me to write off EGM up until just about the point that Ziff Davis first hired me.

After all these years, my Batman Returns skills have definitely disappeared. I was able to fumble my way to the end of the game recently, but there was a lot of continuing and save-stating going on. Still, just firing it up every now and then and jumping into that first driving sequence, shooting my first Red Triangle gangster, brings me back to the time when I was devoted to this game so completely – when I had saved up my paper route money to buy the system and hooked it up to my old stereo in order to really experience the great music properly. When I was just about to head into high school. When my buddies and I would go rent a new game on Friday night and spend the whole weekend beating it. Nerd heaven.

Good times.