Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 95: The 8-bit adventures of Batman

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

Renowned Batmanologist and comics scribe Chris Sims joins Jeremy Parish and Benj Edwards to explore the lore of early Batman games and how they fit into the evolution of the character's franchise.

This week in Retronauts, I want you to tell your friends about me. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts East. This is the exciting third episode of Retronuts East, and we're changing things up a little bit this week. For one thing, we have proper recording equipment, so it no longer sounds as if we're recording in what one person called a submarine. Hopefully this sounds like a proper podcast at long last. And secondly, Benj Edwards is here, but in seat number three, we have special guest Chris Sims, because this episode is about Batman, and Chris Sims is, as far as I know, the biggest

Batman fan the side of Bob Kane. I refer to myself as the world's foremost batmanologist. There you go. So it's like the world's greatest detective, but focused entirely on Batman. You got it. You got it. All right. So Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I have been a professional comics critic for about eight years, seven years. And I'm also a comic book writer, although most of my comics writing has been done at Marvel but I'm a huge Batman fan.

I have read an awful lot of Batman comics, and more germane to this conversation, I've played an awful lot of Batman video games and found many of them wanting. Yes, that is the true Batman video game experience. And, of course, Ben here, you can tell us about yourself again because it's good to refresh our listeners' memories.

Yes, if I remember myself, my name is Benj Edwards. I am a freelance journalist and game historian, and I write vintagecomputing.com, the blog. I write for PC World, Fast Company, the Atlantic, things like that. My God. And I'm Jeremy Parrish, the host of Retronauts this episode, the co-host of Retronauts in the grand, sort of abstract sense of things. And as mentioned before, this week we are talking about Batman video games, which as far as I know is not really something

we've done on Retronauts, which is kind of a strange little gap. Actually, we haven't really gone that much into video games about superheroes as far as I know. Maybe there was one that Bob hosted with some other people that I wasn't in on, but I don't think so. So this will be new territory for us. And it's fitting that a thunderstorm just started. I know, right? That's crazy. Like, don't walk through any alleys on the way home from Zorro right now, because that's

just bad news. Yeah. So, I feel like I'm mostly going to talk about how much I love the NES game, but maybe we can go further afield and venture into mysterious Batman games. I guess we're going to find out. out, it's a crazy crap shoot of an episode. So here we go. This episode is brought to you by Audible, the audio book service with more than 180,000 titles to choose from.

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You need one of those. Pomerometers are falling. Maybe I'll throw one of those in every once in a while. All right, so we are going to talk. about Batman video games. And something that I find a little strange is that Batman was a very late entrant into video games. The first Batman video games, so far as I could find, was 1986. By that point, superhero video games were a thing. You know, you had, well, you had the thing in Adventure Quest. Was that what it's called? Quest Prove. That's it. By Scott Adams.

Not that one. Not that of Scott Adams. The good one. Yeah. The good. Yeah. So you had those graphical adventures for computers, one of which started The Thing, one started the Hulk, one starred Who else? There were like four of them, weren't there? I think there were four of them for models. The ones that I remember being advertised were

the Thing and the Hulk. I remember the Hulk one, he fought a villain named Quasimoto. That sounds like a good match for someone of the strength. It did not seem fair, to be honest. He just crushed him up real quick and tossed him in. But then again, I guess, you know, Hulk is kind of

at a disadvantage in a text-based medium. So maybe it balanced out. But yeah, before, you know, before even Quest Probe, you had... Superman for 2600, Spider-Man for Atari 2600, which was kind of like an early platformer where you were scrolling upward and the green goblin was throwing pumpkins at you or small squares that you had to pretend were pumpkins because 2600 graphics were a little, little simple. Square pumpkins.

Yeah, square pumpkins. They make those in Japan. Yeah, I've seen that. It's okay. Anyway, so, yeah, like I was saying, it was kind of a weird thing that Batman would be so late getting into video games. But maybe that kind of reflects where Batman was in terms of cultural cachet in the 80s, the early 80s. Yeah, when did the Dark Night Returns come out? That was 1986, right?

So there you go. Yeah, Dark Night would have been 86. Year 1 would have been 86, 87. Yeah. And that was kind of like the beginning of the rehabilitation of Batman. which really sort of culminated in the 1989 movie, I think, you know, just in terms of... You get into some dangerous territory. I'm saying in terms of cultural awareness.

Yeah, no, I think you're right. But I think one of the interesting things about it is that you did an episode not too long ago about, like, the Adams family games and how, like, there was, like, Fester's Quest, there was no larger Adams family property out there. And I feel like Batman was a constant mainstream presence, if not in comics, then from 1966 on, because that show was in syndication. Yeah, I watched it. I grew up on it and with super friends. Yeah. But those were a very different sort of Batman than today's Batman. Yeah.

Your conception of Batman. Yeah, that Batman would trip over stuff. I mean, that wasn't like, I'm going to murder you, Batman. I was really hoping when they announced Arkham Origins and it was the. Like, oh, yeah, we're going to, like, take it back to the beginning. I was really hoping that it would have that 1966 aesthetic with those rock steady controls and mechanics. Well, I mean, there was a Batman 66 outfit that you could put on as a skin, but it didn't have the same vibe. Yeah.

Too muscular. But I feel like to really do a Batman 66 video game, you've got to go back to, like, clunky PS1-era brawler mechanics. Like, you can't be too elegant. Well, it's kind of surprising. You know, we're going to talk about the Spectrum game in a little bit. it. But it's kind of surprising that there was never really a game that was based on the kind of mechanics you would have seen in Batman 66, like going around looking for clues and escaping from death traps. I mean, as far as I know, the kind of closest thing that we got

to that would have been like the Who Frame Roger Rabbit NES game, like where you're driving around this weird city and you're going into buildings and looking for clues, and it's not very good, but you play it because it's what you got that weekend. I can see like a Deadly Permanition Remake, not a remake, but something in the style of deadly premonition, but campier? Like, that could be interesting. Wasn't there a game, the Cape Crusader one? Wasn't that where you go around and find a floppy disk and you put it in a computer? Yeah, but I mean, it's like you're just kind of walking around punching stuff.

It's not, it's not that to take to me. I mean, if you want to talk about, like, you know, kind of adventure game elements, the very first game we're going to talk about was like that. But, but yeah, in terms of, you know, more of a structured. mystery. I think the closest we've really come has been the telltale Batman series, which is more of a, you know, like a visual novel, but there is some of that element of detecting. And I do like that Arkham, the Arkham games, you know, by Rocksteady and Ruby, or what, Wonder Brothers Montreal? Yes. They did kind of throw a bone

and make a little bit of a concession to Batman as a detective by giving you detective vision, but that was, you know, basically like Metroid Prime Scanbyser. You're not solving anything. You're just looking for something that's glowing. I have a lot of thoughts on Detective Vision. Hopefully we get there. We can maybe make it the quota if we don't make it that far. But yeah, I guess we should just jump in and talk about Batman's really weird beginning in video games.

Batman begins the video game. No, it's just called Batman, and it was released in 1986 in Europe, I think. I don't think it ever came to the U.S. and it was developed by Ocean Software, so you know it's good. And it was a very, very, very European PC game from the 80s. It is an isometric action game very much in the style of night lore and that sort of thing, and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with Batman. I have no idea.

Like, my guess with this is that they got the Batman license and thought, What do we do with this guy? Let's just... Okay, we've got this game in development. Let's just slap Batman on there. I feel like if you make a Batman game and you never leave the Batcave, you have failed at making a Batman game. If you never actually get to the setting of Batman, then you have messed up somewhere along the way. The treacherous Batcave.

Yeah, I mean, it's worth talking about what this game actually is, which is, again, not Batman in the rollicking adventure style that you would expect, but rather a game where Batman needs to assemble parts of the bat jet by traversing the bat cave, which is curiously full of monsters and hazards. And, uh, yeah, like that's, Robin. Well, you're trying to rescue Robin. You need to assemble the bat jet so that you can go rescue Robin. It is, it is pretty rough of Robin to essentially get lost in his own house.

In fairness, none of us has. Is he rescuing Robin from the attic? The mansion or something? I've puttered around with this game just a little bit out of curiosity on an emulator, but I've never actually finished it, so I have no idea what happens once you get the bat jet. It's one of those, again,

very European, very British 1980s, PC games. So it's not forgiving. It's meant to be played and replayed and replayed until you finally brute force your way through and memorize every little trap and trick, and I just don't have time for that because it's not in 1986, and I'm not a kid who picked up this game for five pounds. Yeah, they had a captive audience back then. There's nothing else to do, but like tip over sheep or something.

I don't really think that's true, but sure. Why not? Latent cultural stereotype. But I mean, this is the UK equivalent of what you saw in the NES, where they would take a random platformer and be like, yeah, let's just put the movie license on there, like total recall or something. You're like, what does this really have to do with the movie? Like, this has nothing to do with any Batman property ever. Like, nothing about this game says Batman except there's Batman. And it's a great little version of Batman, too.

I love that he's, like, ponchy and he has these skinny little legs. And he's very, very stern as he walks slowly through the Batcave, searching for... Constipate. He might be. He needs more BatBran. Chris, have he played this game, this early one? I haven't played it. I wrote about it several years ago

way early when I was starting at Comics Alliance. I did an article on some Batman games, but I've only really watched it being played on YouTube, and it's I mean, like you said, Jeremy, it's almost unrecognizable as Batman, other than that it's got like a

weird little dude. More than anything else, like I feel like this is the kind of Batman game you would see from, if like somehow, like some indie developer on Steam got the Batman license. It'd be like, oh, yeah, here's a game where you're just like chubby Batman wandering around the bat game. Like, I feel like maybe that could work, but it is, it does

not look fun and it is not fun to watch. Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's really very much a creation of the cauldron of video games that existed in the UK at that time. Like, the idea of walking around within, you know, the character's house, trying to find stuff is straight from Jets at Willie, which was a huge hit over there. And the isometric perspective and platforming was based on some rare hits like night lore. And you even saw some of those games make to the U.S. like Solstice on N.S. And it's sequel Equinox on Super NES. But yeah, that wasn't really, we saw very little of that.

But that was a huge, huge thing over there. So, yeah, so this is very much just a British-ass game. It's as British-a-game as you can get. Platform was Spectrum. And it didn't make it to other Zetics. Yes, you're very excited about learning about said. Yeah, just learned about it. But, yeah, it did make it to other platforms,

but I believe the origin point was that the spectrum was that dark alley that gave birth to Batman. That's pretty dark. But, okay, so that's a really weird beginning for Batman. But I think, you know, after that, things do start to look a little more like, oh, yes, this is a Batman game, beginning with, another Ocean game from 1988, which you would not recognize as being from the same developers as the first game

because it's just not a British isometric platform. Maybe it's just a different developer, same publisher? I think, I think, I don't know. Ocean could have just published it. Maybe, I have no idea how that worked. I saw both developers when I looked it up listed as Ocean, but who knows? But anyway, this is a much more ambitious game, I would say.

and Benji said it tries to do a little bit of the detective thing. You want to talk about that some? I think I played it. Is this the one that's also on the Amiga as well? Yeah, it's on C64, Amiga. Basically, if it was an 8-bit or 16-bit microcomputer from the UK or from Europe, it was on there. It looks like it borrows comic book elements of different frames that pop up as you move from room to room, picking up discs and putting him down

and other things and then punching guys randomly. Chris, what do you know about this? I had actually never heard of this until Jeremy showed over the show notes. This is one that I am completely unfamiliar with. It looks cool. It just looks cool. It looks good. It plays kind of boring.

Yeah, I mean, it's my biggest problem with this game is that if you actually try to play it, it's really confusing because whenever you go into another room, there's a lot lot of, okay, there's a lot of back and forth wandering. You're sort of walking in a side-scrolling view, but not in a platformer sense. It's like a brawler. You don't really do a lot of

vertical movement. So you go into doors and stuff. And when you go into a door, another comic panel, like overlay appears. And so kind of, you know, as you go into doors, you start getting like these stacked comic frames one on top of the other, which is a neat effect. But each time a frame pops up, you have a little less space to maneuver in. And it's also really disorienting. Yeah, because they pop up in different spots. Yeah. Well, I just like the idea of, you know, being in, you know, a building and going into a room and then going into another room and each of these is sort of overlaid one on top of the other is actually kind of the reverse of how visually it's presented. You know, the idea of a door in the background and pressing up to go into it. Like you're going sort of behind what you can see in the background of that stage. But then it's popping up as an overlay. I just find it really. really, really sort of confusing. I don't know. I feel like Angley did a much better job with this comic book panel concept in the Hulk movie

that no one likes. I like that movie. I did too, but no one else likes it. I mean, doesn't he get like 40 feet tall at the end or something? Well, he fights a cloud at the end. That's somewhat problematic. Wait, wait, you're talking about the Ingley one. Yeah.

Yeah. He fights a cloud? He fights a cloud. Man, I don't remember that part. The cloud is the absorbing man. Oh, okay. But I did like all the comic books, like all the ways that the sort of screen would divide into panels and they would come back together.

Yeah, so if you've seen that movie, like, that's kind of what they were going for with this game, but it just didn't quite work. Also, Comics Zone, or Comic Zone, or Sega Genesis. I'm ready to talk about Comic Zone. I mean, I actually, I feel like that's probably the closest video game equivalent to this. It's not nearly as thoughtful in terms of, like, the layout and structure as Comic Zone is, but the idea is similar. So please talk about.

Oh, well, Comic Zone, I think, is like, genuinely, bro. Like, it was, uh, I've talked before about how I have this kind of deep-seated resentment, uh, towards the Sega Genesis from when I was a kid. Wow. That's been your fit right in. Because I had a super NES and I don't know how it happened. And I can't, I literally cannot explain it. But when I was like 10, I had it in my head that like, if you were a working class blue collar salt of the earth person, you got a super NES. And the Genesis was for rich people.

those one percenters Lording their Sonic the Hedgehogs over the rest of them. I think Genesis was actually less expensive. I have been told that, and I cannot justify this with any logic. Maybe you were thinking of Neo-Geo. Did it have anything to do with the fact that the soundtrack of every Genesis game sounds like somebody farting? Oh, let's not get into this.

Oh, let's stop. That's just going to cause all kinds of strife. There are only certain models of Sig Genesis that have sound issues, and it's also really incumbent on the composers of the games to do a good job with the FM synthesis technology, Sega Genesis audio can sound. You don't want to lose listeners here. We're not going to lose the listeners, but it's going to just going to be a shit show in the comments. Come at me.

Comic Zone was one of those... Come at Benge, not me. Comic Zone was one of those games where I was like super jealous because, like, first of all, I can tell you it is exactly what being a comic creator is like. It is an accurate representation of my job. But the idea of just being able to like swing around the front of a panel and move into the next one. That's such a cool idea. And I'm really shocked that no one else did that.

Like, it's such a great way of adapting, like, the feel of a comic book, even if, like, imagine seeing that in a Batman game or in a Spider-Man game. Like, it would have added a completely new weird... I should have licensed that technology to the comic book companies, you know? Done some adaptations. That would have been great. I don't know that it was actually technology. I don't think that would work in 3D is the problem. What do you call video games if they're not technology?

like you're making it sound like some sort of patent yeah like a patent it's more of a sthetic yeah it's a gimmick but the developer knew how to do it they could have like I wonder if they pitched it like we could do a Spider-Man game like this is like a technical institute I'm pretty sure you're right

yeah so they they were around like their people keep making video games they could do it again but I guess you know with the dissolution of 2D video gaming and the move to 3D like that concept became much harder to pull off because it really does, like you need yeah, you just need like the two-dimensionality of video

game to emulate the two-dimensionality of the page. I feel like you, in games like Maximum Carnage or the Punisher arcade game, like there would always be these little touches like in maximum carnage would reproduce the panels from the storyline

as interstitials between levels and there would be the big sound effects when you knock somebody out and Punisher would have a little bang that showed up when you shot somebody in the arcade game. But I always, like, I always, knowing that Comic Zone was out there,

I always kind of wanted them to take it a step further, which, getting back to Batman, in a minute, we're going to talk about the Batman, the animated series game

for Super N.S. They did, I think, a really good job of mimicking the aesthetic and style of the TV show in the way that it had, like, title cards and,

and the music matched each level. So, yeah, but I think, you know, the Batman, 1980 game from Ocean, was an admirable attempt to kind of move in that direction, but it didn't quite work.

But I do, like, I do admire their moxie. I mean, for the time, it was pretty ambitious. And, you know, there's a lot more going on than just walking right and left and punching guys. In fact, I kind of wish they'd put a little more work into the actual mechanics of combat because it seems pretty brain dead. but, you know, you are, like, walking around and activating computers and stuff, and so there is a bit more of something happening than just, you know, walking in one direction and punching people, which is what you usually saw in comic book games, like Captain America and the Avengers and Max from a Carnage and so forth. So, you know, good on them for that. But this one is, you know, if even the foremost Batmanologist has never heard of this game, it is pretty obscure, at least here in the U.S.

I think it was probably, I think, you know, the sort of PC origins of this and the developer made it a bigger thing in the UK. But, yeah, so it's like a graphical adventure that also wants to be a brawler, and it doesn't quite do either one very well. But by God, they tried. And moving on 1989, that's when it's when it came out, right. That's when it came out, right, Tim Burton movie. So how many licensed Batman the movie games were there? There were lots of Batman licensed movies based on the video game. This is where they start really making up for lost time.

Yeah, so basically those two ocean games were kind of these weird relics from before DC and Warner really said, let's make Batman matter again. Let's really build this franchise into something. And again, I think that was really invigorated by Frank Miller's work. with year one and the dark night returns and all of a sudden people were like oh he's not just like the ponchy guy who says bowzing bat and he's actually kind of cool and spooky and weird and like wow batman yeah and of course i'm sure you can talk about this more but you know throughout the 70s batman and the comics was not really that can't be a character you had neil adams and you know like some very um like at least i love the artwork of of that era of batman and

That was when they introduced concepts like Raza Ghul and stuff like that, right? Yeah, the thing that I think a lot of people have in their heads about Batman that's not quite accurate is that the TV show changed Batman, and he was like that for the next 20 years. Whereas in reality, if you go back and watch it, like about half of the first season of the Batman TV show in the 60s is a direct adaptation of comics stories that were going on at the 3rd. the time. The only thing they do is they pat them out to the last two episodes. Yeah, you did a column, right, where you like broke down each episode and a lot of times you would say, like, hey, here's the TV series. That was at Comics Alliance. Yeah, I did an episode guide for the first season. And I go in and talk about which comics are being referenced. And they've collected a lot of them, too. There's a really great collection of stories that I think is just called

Batman the TV stories that DC put out, not when they started really pushing Batman 66 again. and you can see how faithful they're being. But the pendulum starts to swing back as early as 1971. There's an editorial shift at D.C. The decision is made for Batman to leave Wayne Manor, and you get him moving into Wayne Tower in the middle of Gotham City, which lasts for quite some time. And then, like you said, you've got Denny O'Neill becomes the primary writer,

who also attempt to do the same thing with Wonder Woman and the same thing with Superman to kind of modernize him a little bit. Wonder Woman Tower? No, but she does lose her powers. Invisible Tower. And it gets a white suit and does Kung Fu on people. Holy cow. Yeah, it's a weird little era.

Those didn't really stick. Danny O'Neill's attempt at kind of modernizing Superman was to take away kryptonite, actually, which is a really interesting, like trying to update the character by taking away his major weakness. I thought it was a really cool idea, but that doesn't really stick either. With Batman, it certainly had a lot more success. You had stories like the Joker's Five Way Revenge, which kind of tried to take the Joker back to a sort of less comedic take. In the mid-70s, you get Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers coming on, and a lot of what they do is go back to the 40s and 50s.

You know, Deadshot had been a character who hadn't been seen for 20, 25 years at that point, and they give him a new costume and an updated origin. They bring back Hugo Strange, who was one of the first Batman villains. they do The Laughing Fish, which was an updated adaptation of the first Joker story from Batman No. 1. So you saw all this shifting in the comics, but like we said, the mass media pop culture is more informed by Batman 66 and more informed by Super Friends. Yeah. And Adam West appearing at car shows and feuding with Jerry Lawler on Memphis television in the late 70s. So when it comes time for Batman 89, I think Warner Brothers as a company and I think DC as a publisher really saw their chance to get a different version of Batman out into mass media pop culture. And it's really weird because if you go back and watch that movie, the movie is very much a dark, kind of gloomy, kind of murderous death-filled take.

on the pop culture Batman. It's, it's very kind of campy and weird, which seems at odds with the way it was viewed in pop culture in time. Yeah, but it's got that Tim Burton thing going on. So the campiness has an element of surreality to it. Yeah. It's not, it's not, you know, like comic book surrealism and goofiness, you know, four colors, bright colors, et cetera.

There's one color in that movie. Yeah, it's black. But, yeah, it's more like kind of what you would expect from the guy behind Frankenweeney. like it's just kind of weird sometimes and uh it is exactly the batman movie you expect from the director and star of beetle juice yeah basically yeah um and that kind of hits critical mass with batman returns which is a very surreal weird and kind of oddly uh Frankenstein together movie with so many different clubs bizarre but uh it can never be overstated how big the marketing push was

for that movie. Like if you, I mean, I was, I was seven and I have, you know, distinct early memories of just the Batman logo being everywhere. It was on McDonald's French fries. Yeah. I saved the box. That's why I know. It was a huge, big into Batman back then. Fair enough. It was a huge, huge marketing push. And that's where you see things like, uh, um, back when bookstores wouldn't stock comic books, Warner Brothers formed a division that was just called Warner Books for the specific purpose of getting dark night returns into bookstores so they were you know you see uh great morrison um uh and uh i want to say dave mckeen do arkim asylum at that point which is a much darker take on all the villains so they're doing it in the comics they're doing it in the the mass media

pop culture and then you see that kind of reflected at the the kind of height of the the eight bit era too yeah and so the the kind of weird thing about batman is that you know the depiction of him as this guy in like gray long johns with blue underwear and gloves and cape like you get that in one video they're trunks jeremy they're trunks it's not underwear so anyway he wears his underwear in the outside and um he just chris just pulled out his battering when you said that uh yeah so you get that in exactly one game. You get that in the Batman Ocean game from 1988. And at that point, like, you know, the public visual that D.C. wants to communicate for Batman changes to, you know, to Michael Keaton, basically.

Yeah, so the black suit and body old. Yeah. Bulletproof. Yeah. Bulletproof arm. Mold is like a chest. So there's, there's almost no depiction of classic old school Batman, you know, the 70s, 80s, pop culture, super friends, Batman, the one that I had all the action figures of, like, that doesn't really exist in video games. He really kind of came into his own with Batman the movie. And like, that's, you know, as you said, you know, an attempt to make up for lost time. That's saturation. There are, every platform had a Batman the movie adaptation. And almost every single one of them was different by different developers or different publishers or even

by some of the same people making two different games based on the movie for different platforms. It's, it's, yeah, like, I just feel like, you know, the 1989 movie really, you can't escape its, its influence on video games. And of course, you know, as you said, there will be shows based on the cartoon and games based on the cartoon and so forth. But, like, this is really sort of of the beginning of Batman in video games. Thank you. Oh! And I hadn't really thought about that until you said it, but it really is weird that we don't get the

the blue cape and cowl gray suit Batman, because that is, for a lot of people who weren't necessarily reading comics but coming to it from pop culture, that's the Batman that's in all the licensed art. Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is the artist of the mid-80s DC comic style guide. And he also, in addition to having the, you know, definitive work from this versions of costumes for pretty much everybody, he was also primarily responsible for any of the art that you would have seen on lunchboxes, on t-shirts in the 80s and 90s, on action figure packaging a lot of times. And that Batman is by and large the sort of, you know, the Neil Adams, Jim Apparo, same new look Batman that we'd had from in the. the comics from, gosh, I guess, 1964 to, you know,

the mid-90s when he had, when he got the black suit in the comics, finally, so. Yeah, and to me, like, that is sort of the definitive Batman visual, even though it's changed a lot over time. But I grew up, you know, in the very late 70s and early 80s and had, you know, Batman jigsaw puzzles and occasionally we get comic books. I remember going in to surgery to have my tonsils and I know it's taken out, and my parents picked up a copy of a detective comics for me to, like, read while I was vanishing into anesthesia.

And when you woke up, Batman was standing by your bedside? Sadly, no. Jeremy, come with me. I remember it was, my new ward, Jeremy. He was fighting against man bat, which, you know, when I was in, like, second grade, thought, that's so cool. There's Batman and Man Bat. And then I woke up from surgery, and I have no idea where that comic went. But, like, that's still a vivid memory.

But just that, that look of Batman. Like, I, as a kid, I thought, oh, Batman, he's fun. He's cool. Also, Spider-Man. Sure, why not? But, you know, it's just, like, that sort of primal vision that I have of Batman, just not something you see anymore, especially not in video games. And one of the reasons I think that's so weird is because on the NES games,

which would be where, you know, the ones that I was most familiar with as a kid, Batman's not on the art. Like, Batman's not in the box. There's the logo, which again, that thing, just that logo everywhere in the late 80s. And then the second one is just the Joker. Like you don't actually see Batman if you're going into Kmart and looking at the electronic section or if you're going to Sycamore video down the street from my mom's house. That was what you saw.

You saw the logo or the bad guys. They never really bothered to put Batman himself on those covers, which I wonder if that was because the licensed art that they would use with everything because I'm pretty sure. I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that's a Garcia Lopez Joker on the cover of Revenge of the Joker. I wonder if that's because the stock

art that they would have had for licensed products like video games would have conflicted with the Tim Burton Batman and the black suit. Could be. Probably. Because what we see in the game is a weird like, he's clearly supposed to be the Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Batman,

but he's purple. Purple. Yeah. But that's just because of the color limitations. You'd want of black backgrounds. You couldn't have a black character on top of black backgrounds, or else it'd be like, where's my hero? That should bring us to the Sunsoft game, where he is purple. Well, yeah, we need now to talk about Batman 1989 video games. I think first before we get into Sunsoft,

we need to talk about the last of the Oceans trilogy. Ah, see what I did there? Yeah. The final Batman game by Ocean. Ocean's 89. That's a lot of George Clooney. Yeah, so actually, George Clooney would end up being Batman. My God, how deep does this go?

I just blew my mind. Okay. So anyway, yes, a third game by Ocean, also for 8-bit microcomputers. And I haven't played this one, but watching videos. I thought that's what we've been talking about the last 20 minutes. And we've talked about the movie, but we haven't talked about the games based on the movies. Okay. So we're going to get to Batman.

We took a digression to talk about the context. Super Nintendo on Hour 3 of this podcast. Well, we had to put down the context of the character and why the movie. was such a big deal. It's what happens when you invite me over to talk about Batman. It just spirals out of control. All right. So yeah, this first movie by Ocean, I feel

like it was pretty ambitious. Like, you know, it's more of a an NES style platformer which you didn't really see a lot of on computers. A lot of scrolling and action and so forth. But it's stiff animation. The controls are really rough.

The level design seem kind of sprawling and you're like, oh, what's going on. So, yeah, not really that great. But the Sunsoft game for NES. I can talk about this for a long time. But, Chris, you said something earlier that made me think that you don't like it. Yeah, I think what I said was that I think this is a good game, but I don't think it's a good Batman game. Why is that, Chris? I feel like... Yeah, well, yeah, that's... You don't have gun. You have, like, a little, like, yeah, you have a battering and you have a grappling thing. sure doesn't look like a

No, but I think there's a There's something that works in this type of game And I think it's something that you see in Probably most famously in Mario Brothers And that's fragility You see, you know, like Mario is constantly in danger The entire environment around him is out to get him And you see that with Metroid

You see it with Castlevania All the classic big Nintendo games that people like are kind of based on that bolderability and sort of being pitt against your element. I don't necessarily know if that works when you're Batman. Because I think part of the core of Batman is that the, you know, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but I feel like part of it is that, you know,

Batman should only be in danger from the villains, not necessarily from a sewer or, you know, just a random robot. In fairness, the sewers are full of like poison and spinning spikes and things like that. True. But, I mean, part of what makes Batman Batman is the fact that he is not superpowered. He is a man who is very, very capable, very agile, pretty strong. But, you know, he's not, he can't take the punishment of Wonder Woman or Superman.

Like, he has to be more cautious. I really think what they did with this game was the Japanese designers looked at it and said, like, how can we translate Batman into sort of the video game language that we use? you know, like the concepts that you see on NES. And I feel like they said the closest analog is a ninja. Yeah. It is very much a ninja action game, like short-range combat with occasional limited projectiles. And he's not super durable.

He does, you know, you have to be very careful, but he can jump off walls and stuff like that. Like, you can't really grapple, but you can, there's a triangle jump off the walls. Like you can do a wall jump. That reminds me a Ninja Gaden. Yeah, it's basically Ninja Gade. with longer ears. Well, you can't stick to the wall like you can't have to the wall.

Nidja Guiden, you can stick to the wall. Whereas this one, you have to like jump and then immediately jump the other direction. Oh, so it's like Mario, while jumping. Yeah, I mean, Mario used, you know, no, New Super Mario Brothers used that concept. It would appear before that in Super Metroid, and on NES, you also saw it

in Capcom's NES version of Strider, which appeared around the same time a little bit before that. It was very clumsy in Strider. Who did Kabuki Quantum Fighter? That was Hal. Howe published it? Since off, that man always reminds me of that game for some reason. Incidentally, if anyone is listening, that is a license, I would write for a dollar.

I am all about Kabuki Quantum Fighter. Oh, man. I don't know how it's a license for that now. It was published by Hal that developed by ICOM and someone else published it in Japan, I think. So it's a mystery. I might have to do like a bootleg of Kabuki Quantum Fighter fan comic and some of it comes. But yeah, you're right. This game does have that sort of, um, I,

You know, I think Frank Sevaldi refers to this as guy games, where it's just like a dude, and you're not very big on the screen, and there's all kinds of stuff shooting at you and threatening you. I mean, it's very much in that Ninja Guideon, Vice Project Doom, Shatterhand, Powerblade, like, all of that. Kickmaster. Yes, exactly. Kentucky Quantum Fighter. You know, even the G.I. Joe games were kind of like that, except for a little more projectile-based. But, yeah, it definitely has that feel where you're like,

a little dude and you're in a very dangerous environment and it's tough and you need to use lots of ladders and robots no ladders you're just aren't there wrongs you have to climb up or am i thinking of a different game uh are there long run maybe it's the other batman i played this one recently i don't remember a lot of ladders it's mostly wall joker thinking of kabuki qualifiter but it is a game about precision and accuracy and playing very cautiously which i feel is actually true to the Batman's spirit. Batman is very deliberate. That's his gimmick. I feel like there's a little bit of that in there. I feel like

there's a little bit of that in there. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a terrible game. I think it's devastatingly difficult for, like, from Jump Street for a Batman game. And I think that it's, I think it's, I think it will always be in the shadow of like a Ninja Gaiden, because Ninja Gaidon's more fun and deals with a lot of the same things. whereas with Batman

the levels are the levels are a slog they are meant to drain you and drain you and then you eventually get and your reward is that you have to fight Firefly or KG Beast I think is in that game too I never got that far I like the music

that's one of the best things about it visually it is a fantastic looking game they do a really great job of using blacks like the whole game you know it just has like It's like a velvet painting, but not tacky. Like, everything is sort of rendered against a sea of black, so it makes the details stand

out and really, you know, it really makes the whole world look like it's just wreathed in shadows. Yeah, visually, I think it's about as good as you could ask for from the era, because the cities do look like the weird kind of Tim Burton, Anton First kind of city where there's just, you know, exposed piping and fans everywhere, and then you descend into the sewers. Yeah, it's extremely industrial. Yeah. And it's all, it all looks like it's decaying. And it's just like, they, you know, in 8-bit visuals, they really did a great job of capturing that vision of Gotham City as like

Gothic. Yeah. You know, not, not a goth in a cheesy way, but just like, this place is old. And it was an industrial city and it's kind of fallen into poverty and disrepair. And Batman is the one guy who can punch his way to justice. Yeah. I just like, it, it seems, like the design of the levels doesn't really match up to the aesthetics in a lot of ways. They tend to drag on. For me, I will freely admit I am very bad

at this video game. All the levels are like five minutes long. They're not super huge. For you. For you, it's a hard It's a hard game. It is hard. I beat it when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago, and I don't think I could do it now because it has limited continues. So, you get to

Game Genie. Infinite Lives, Infinite Continues. Yeah. but yeah it's it really takes a lot of doing to get to joker and then joker is just a cheap bastard he like he's got that long gun did you ever make it to the end of this game uh yeah but not not legitimately so the long gun like the movie where he pulls it out yeah you take like two hits from that and you're dead all the bosses are like really very difficult um like again except firefly at the beginning i feel like Batman should not have that hard of time with Firefly though.

As long as you've got batterings, you're just like there's a level where the end of it is fighting like a big, like Mega Man style robot room. And I feel like that works with Mega Man because Mega Man has weapons. Right. Batman can't punch a robot wall. No, I agree

that the robot wall is not necessarily in keeping with the concept. But still, like I love this as a game and I love it as a Batman game. Hey, when was Blaster Master? 89, 88. 88, okay.

So this, I actually just did an episode on, a micro episode on Blastermaster and talked about how that was kind of like the jumping off point at which Sunsoft went from being like, what's up with these guys to, whoa, these guys make really cool games. I was thinking, they look great and they sound great. The graphics, like, they had these gradients or something in there. I think the Batman game has, like, you know, it goes from light to dark. Yeah, the dithering gradients in Blastermaster. and they had a really signature style.

Yeah, I agree. This was definitely one of those, like the second game that came out from Sunsoft and you were like, I need to pay attention to these guys. They're doing some good stuff. This is not janky NES software. This is quality. Also, it's really hard. But this came out, and in the U.S. right around the same time as Super Mario Bros. 3.

So, like, that kind of, if that helps you sort of hit it in your mind, like, when did this come out? It was right around the same time. I thought that was 90. That was the very beginning of 1990. Mario 3 was, I think, February 90, and this came out in the U.S., I want to say in January 90, but it came out in Japan at the end of 89.

Oh, okay. I would venture to say that Super Mario Brothers 3 might be a better game. Yes, but that's not really fair. That's not a Batman game. Yeah, Mario Brothers 3 is a terrible Batman game. Oh, no, you have the ears. Top 10 worst Batman games, Super Mario Bros.

Yeah, but you don't get the, You don't get the cape until Mario World. That's true. That's true. So any other thoughts? Oh, something I did want to mention is that I love the control physics in this game. Like I said, it's a very deliberate game. And there is this real sense of weight and momentum to Batman.

When you do, like, the wall jumps and stuff, like, there's a little bit of this sort of recoil. And in a lot of games, that would be really irritating. But this game is timed around that. It kind of reminds me of Castlevania in that the design of the game world, matches up to the design of the character, like to the limitations of the character. And you can't just fly through it haphazardly, but if you get the timing of the character

and the way he moves, then it makes things a lot more manageable. You realize, like, I have to wait until this enemy is moving away from me before it returns and then jump down and get it in that window. So there is a lot of mastery involved in playing it. And I don't know if I could play it very well these days.

I'm going to do a live stream of it this week and find out. If you drink enough gin, you can. Yes, that's exactly the Bruce Wade way. Put you in the zone. As much as I don't like the level layout in this game, it does do a really good job design-wise of sort of presenting you with the basic version of the obstacle, and then the next time you encounter a similar setup,

it's a little bit harder, and the next time it's very difficult. So it is one of those games that teaches through design, which I do appreciate. Yeah, I think it's a great game. Let's talk about the follow-up. Quality as a as a Batman game, I guess, is up for debate, but I would say it's

arguably the best game based on Batman 89. There were a lot of others, but I don't think any of them have to this. I think you're right. Sunsoft did do one other Batman game based on the movie for Game Boy, which, of course, you can watch in detail on Game Boy World and see me dissect that. Yeah, I watched this sweet video today. It's so good. It's a sweet-ass video.

So this is actually by a lot of the same people who made the NES game. Basically, they wrapped development on this and then threw this thing together in like four or five months. And given the accelerated development time and the fact that they didn't just take the NES game and try to convert it to Game Boy, I think it turned out pretty well. It's not amazing, but it's okay. It actually looks really good, at least in your video where you're playing it on a super Game Boy, right? Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much accurate to what it looks like in reality. If it was a little more green, I don't know if it would look quite as good.

The graphics... You just pretend the world is covered with Joker's Poisonous slime. Oh, gosh, gross. Batman really looks... The Batman spread in that game really, I think, looks shockingly good. Considering he's like this... Considering he's super tiny, especially if you compare it to... I think in the video you compared it to Belmont's revenge.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's actually a lot smaller than... the Castlevania. The projectiles are bigger than his head, right? Yeah, pretty much. Like, he's this tiny little guy, but you can see the cape, and you can see the little bat ears,

and he's got, like, a tiny little gun. This game actually has more shooting than the NES game. There is. Yeah, shooting. But, you know, that's kind of hard to get around in a tiny ape game. And then Sunsoft made a Batman game for the Genesis, too? I don't remember that one. Yeah, they did.

Something worth noting is that Batman, for Game Boy, I think, is the first Batman game with vehicles. Aside from the bat jet that you had to, you know, assemble in the Spectrum game, it has Batwing shooter stages, which of course are taken straight from the movie, where you're like flying toward the cathedral and... Definitely unloading those machine guns. Instead of shooting balloons, you're like fighting giant airships and stuff,

deridibles. I don't know where Joker got all this stuff, but it's pretty tough to get to the cathedral, by golly. The one that's for Genesis, I think I watched a video of a gameplay video of it. And it's the thing that was most notable about it is that you keep waiting for the intro to stop. And the intro keeps going until it tells you the entire story of the movie. It literally starts with Batman listens in on Commissioner Gordon at a party.

And then there's some stuff going down at the chemical plant. Yeah, the other games have that, but there is like interstitial cutscenes, whereas this game is just like, here you go, have a synopsis. Yeah, it tells you, like, everything that's like, now Batman's on his way to go fight the Joker. And it's like, well, the chemical player could have been a level. Yeah. If this was an Adam family game, that Bruce Wayne's party could have been a level. Yeah, I'm not really a big fan of the Genesis game. It looks really nice.

Like, it has really huge characters. But it kind of reminds me of, you know, other games with really big characters, like, um... Big character game. Oh, no, what is that game for Termographic? I can't remember what it's called. China Warrior. Yes, China Warrior. It's not that bad.

But you do kind of get that, like, limited mobility. Like two frames of animation. Yeah. And they're gigantic. Yeah. That was impressive back in the day. It was. But every time someone made one of those games with gigantic sprites, you're just like,

but it's not fun. I don't care about it's good. It's not fun. There are some other Genesis, like, boxing games or something that has huge guys. George Foreman's boxing. Yeah, but I mean, that's, you know, your boxing is like, one-on-one mono-a-mano whereas this is supposed to be like

Batman traversing Gotham City and climbing the cathedral and it's just very crowded it's it reminds me of you know what reminds me of is the Castlevania arcade game haunted castle we've never played that which is like Castlevania that sucks all the fun out of it yeah

part of it is because Simon Sprite is way too big yeah this does have vehicular combat sequences though and I'm pinning this as the origin of the Batman game contrivance that says Batman never uses guns unless they're large caliber cannons mounted on the Batmobile. Because these are kind of like sideways spy hunter levels, right?

Crap, I don't remember. I think they're sideways, yeah. I just look it up. I don't know if they're anything like Spine. I went through so many Batman games prepping this episode that they all kind of play together. We're going to be dreaming about it tonight. But I do remember that this is, yeah, this has like the shooting sequence.

in the Batmobile. You know what I just realized is they should have made a Batman Metroidvania game. That would be pretty cool. They did. It was called Batman

Arkham Asylum Blackgate and it was no good. It was made by the people who made Metro platform. Vita and then it was ported to I think PS3. It was on a 3m. That was awful.

I think, I actually think Arkham Asylum, the original Arkham Asylum does a really good job of functioning essentially as a Metroidvania just, you know, in a 3D space.

Yeah, I agree. But if you want the 2D, there is the armature game, but I don't really recommend it. Yeah, nor do I. It's a good example of how not to make a Metroid medium. Yeah, it's really disappointing. I had hopes for it. But no.

So anyway. It's more like a, a Castlevania Lords of Shadows, mirror of fate sort of experience. Yeah. Okay, that's old wounds. I'll talk about that. But what about the 8th?

HD version of Mirror of Fate. Do you like that? No, it's still trash. Come on. It's still bad. It's all right. It's fundamentally a bad game. I know it is, but, you know, when they're making these other stupid

Castlevania games, you've got to get what you can get. They're not making Castlevania games. Yeah, there you go. When they're not making other Castlevania. I don't have no Castlevania than Bad Castlevania. The last ones they made were those 3D, you know, Xbox, PS2, what were they? Yeah, Lords of Shadow. Yeah.

This was a tie into that. This was a side story. It was bad. It's the original. origin of Alicard in the new continuity. Post-Crisis Al-A-Card. I want to punch reality until he disappears.

Punch Castlevania. Castlevania franchise is a creature of chaos. It is. I don't like chaos very much. All right, so we're still not done with Batman 89 games. There are two more. One of them is really weird. Batman for PC Engine, Termo Graphic 16.

Like, I had never seen this game until I started doing research for this. And I was just like, what the hell is this? It's such a game out of time. It feels like a... The AC engine? Yeah, it's a, you know,

it came out on TurboGraphics in America. But it's not a typical action game. It's not a side-scroller. It is a top-down maze game, kind of like Pac-Man-ish. And you're traveling around different sequences trying to collect things. Like you're going and disarming codes

or collecting paintings. and it kind of reminds me of I guess all those classic Batman moves like collecting crazy I remember this game I've played it oh man that's crazy I mean I actually think this could have worked as a like a Batman 66 game

like it has that kind of light does it have stealth elements you have to avoid the gas in the corridors overhead yeah I remember playing this and being totally confused by it yeah it's very confusing and it has an element where you can stand at certain points and use Batman's

grappling hook, and it'll take you around the levels, which is kind of cool. But it really reminds me of a lot of the sort of generic puzzle games I've been playing as part of Game Boy World. Like, if you put this on Game Boy, it would just be one more forgettable, top-down puzzle action game, like Loop on the Third or something. Actually, yeah, it's a lot like the Loop on the Third game, which is not a good thing to be. There's not a lot of visual variety in the game. It's very monotonous.

and you do have different goals but they're all kind of basically like go to this place and do this thing so I don't know man it's how did this game happen it's also by Sunsoft the same people who made the NES game

and the Gameboy game made this maybe they're tired of making the same game over and over again they just want to do a different genre or something it's just so weird but it's cool that way because it's different I do kind of like the idea of having

like a license as huge as Batman was in 89 and then doing completely different games. Yeah, but I feel bad for, like, the TurboGraphics kids who were like, ooh, I want a cool Batman game where you're, like, you know, pushing the Joker and you get, you know, this Pac-Man thing. If we're going to start feeling bad for the TurboGraphics kids, we're going to be here all day.

That's true. That's not as bad as a Genesis, man, that console. Gosh. Oh, boy. I'm just kidding. I like the Genesis. And there go our Patreon donations. And, okay, finally, one last Batman 89.

game. This is an Atari game for the arcade. And if nothing else, I will say this has the best adaptation of the Tim Burton soundtrack. The FM synthesis version of, you know, Danny Elfman's music is so

good. I could just like listen to the like robot farting sounds of Danny Alpin all day. Metallic, rasping sounds. Yes. Yeah, that's what's... Is this one the weird beat-em-up? Like the Final Fightish one? It's not a final fight-ish beat him up.

It's got a little bit of that, but it actually reminds me more of Data East's Robocop game, if you remember that, where you're kind of this large character sort of moving one direction to another, and there are big enemies who've come out, and you just sort of fight them one at a time. Yeah, this is the all-black suit

that just has the huge Batman logo, right? Or is that later? That might be like, huge Batman logos. Huge tracks of Batman. I might be thinking of something that comes a long way. You could be. Like I said, like I said, these all blur together.

But this one, yeah, it definitely reminded me of Data East Robocop. And they did try to make some verticality to it where you have limited bat rope usage. And some stages even kind of remind me of rolling thunder where there's like two levels and you have enemies above and below and you kind of have to decide where do you go.

But it just has that sort of, that late 80s, early 90s, arcade semi-platformer feel where arcade designers were like, yeah, you know, this stuff's really popular on Nintendo. I feel like we should do something like this, but we've got to make it more impressive and just never quite clicked.

I don't know. Like, there's a lot of these games from that era that you saw in arcades. I don't remember many arcade games from 89. 90. That was like the dark times. Yeah, no one... You know, four Streetfire, too. No one after 720 or something.

Right. You know. No one from Capcom knew how to make good arcade platformers. It's like Strider, that was so good. Magic Sword. That was pretty cool. But then you had stuff like, you know, Data East with the Robocop and Toki and things like that. Just didn't really do it. This was part of that. And this has vehicular scenes also, which are auto-scrolling, first-person shooting galleries because Batman kills everyone. But that's actually, that's, that's faithful to the movie. It's a murder scene. Batman shot a lot of dudes in that movie. He sure does. I sure did. Thoughts on that also. I've got... You look pain. How violent is Batman exactly, Chris? There's about a, there's about, on Comics Alliance years ago, David and I did what

was essentially about a 30,000 word review of Batman 89. And I am, I'm not a fan of those scenes where Batman shoots his way into a chemical factory and then explodes it with people inside. But, you know, like some people like that movie. Yeah. Yeah, Batman 89 is kind of like a horror movie and Batman is the monster. A little bit. Yeah.

Which I guess is kind of what Batman's going for, but he's not specifically people dead in his wake. So anyway, that finally takes us through all the games based on Batman 89, and I think it would be good for us to take a break and clear our heads before venturing into new territory. No, I'm just going to stay here. I'm not stopping. You can't take me away from Batman 89. I want to talk about for another hour. The President's sale at Mattress Firm has been extended. It's your last chance to take home a free adjustable base with your qualifying mattress purchase. Up to a $699 value, absolutely free.

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Which I think is really interesting because that title is clearly meant to make this a sequel to Batman 89. Yeah, like the idea is, oh, he fell from the cathedral and splattered on the ground, but he's not totally dead. He's back for revenge because you killed him somehow. Yeah, and this is the one that I think has, I'm talking about the Jose Luis Garcia-Lopos art. I think that's what's on the ground. Yeah, it's this bright yellow box art with Joker on the front all laughing at you. with bat signals in his eyes. It's a really cool image.

It's a really cool cover. I got the interpretation that this was more based on the comic book Batman when I was a kid because it doesn't Batman, he has like the gray suit in this game or some kind of two-tone. Yeah, it is two-tone. There is that, but yeah, the way it's presented in position does make it feel like they were trying to build off the game or the movie. Kind of like the Goonies 2. Like there was no actual Goonies 2 movie, but there was a video game called Goonies 2.

And it was awesome. It was about the Fratellis, getting their revenge. With mermaids. It was so good. Yeah, I don't know where the mermaid came from, but sure, why not? Maybe that's just a thing in Astoria. So, yeah, Return of the Joker is, I don't actually like it that much, but, man, it looks crazy good on NES. Big sprites.

Yeah, it's got a huge sprite, but not, you know, not like China Warrior huge. Not the point where it hinges on the game. It's just enough to make you be like, wow, how do they do this on NES? Yeah. It has a great soundtrack, and I have never played past, like, the second stage. So I don't know anything that happens beyond stage two. But it looks great. And in Japan, it's called Dynamite Batman, which is the best name for a video game.

Dynamite Batman. That's the second best video game name with the word Batman in it, which I think the first one is Ninja Baseball Batman. Oh, that's true, though that sadly, we didn't put that in the notes. My mistake there Baseball Batman Yeah, that's a... What year was that? That was...

I don't even know when that was. It might have been early 90s. It was a brawler game, very weird and comical, had a baseball theme. What platform? It was an arcade game. I think it was by IREM.

It's a kooky one, but it is not related to Batman in the sense that you know him, in the platonic sense. Is it like a guy holding a bat? It's a ninja in a baseball uniform beating people up with a baseball bat. Well, it's like a four-player brawler, isn't it?

So there's like four ninjas with baseball bats. Even better. Or maybe two. I don't know. Anyway, it's kooky and spooky. No, wait, Batman's spooky. Ninja baseball batman is kooky. Anyway, so do you guys have any thoughts on Return to the Joker?

I remember renting it when I was a kid in the era where I rented every single NES game when it came out. And the big sprites was the first impression. The other thing was the two-toned costume that didn't follow the movie, and I was kind of confused because I was all into the movie thing at the time. I see. But I think it was hard. You didn't grow up with the comic?

I did. I mean, I watched Super Friends, and I watched reruns of Batman 66. I loved that. But at the time, I guess I was deep into thinking about the Tim Burton Batman. I thought that was pretty cool. So you were like, wait, no, the new version overwrites all this. Yeah, you can't just go backwards, yeah, and change it back. I mean, black now, he's got bulletproof.

Nipples. I think that was George Clooney. That was a nipple one? Yeah. That was Batman and Robin, which is the best of those four movies. Was that Clooney or Kilmer? That was Clooney. Okay.

That was Clooney, Chris O'Connell. I mean, if you're going to get any of those characters' nipples, it's probably going to be Clooney. The top billed Arnold Schwarzenegger gets billing over Batman in that movie. I'm going to freeze you. This is a really good-looking game. Like, the villains look great. it has a slightly different design aesthetic from the Batman 89 game. It looks and kind of plays out a little more like Mega Man, I think,

which is not necessarily a complaint as a guy who really likes Mega Man, but I mean, like those levels look like Mega Man levels, kind of to me. Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And there is a lot of like shooting with your wrist dirks or daggers or whatever the hell those are. Projecting stuff. Yeah, more Batman shooting to me while I was, yeah, I was looking at some of those games earlier today, and they just couldn't figure out the mechanics of a game where you didn't have to shoot people. Because I think there were so many times in the NES where two sprites touch and you die or you get hurt or something. So if you get close enough to somebody, you stick your stubby little arm out, you're likely to get hit.

So then it's easier to shoot somebody from a distance. I think that's probably why they made Batman shoot so many things. Yeah, I mean, there were really two schools of platform game design on NES. There was the Contra school where you were shooting stuff, and there was the Mario school where you were jumping on stuff, and Batman jumping on things and squishing them doesn't really work. So, yeah, they did go with the shooting approach, although, you know, like the NES game by Sunsoft, by default, you're punching stuff, and you have limited projectiles.

So they did try to make it, you know, somewhat a little more about, you know, martial arts, if you want to call it that. I think they should have done is you could touch an enemy. If they're not punching you, it doesn't hurt you. They should have done it that way. You know what I mean? But they do punch, you know what I mean? That's why I love Super Mario Brothers, too, where you could jump on.

Right. I mean, well, if you bumped into them, they hurt you, but if you jumped onto them. But you could touch them. And that's like, you break the Mario universe. Yeah, I really think what they need to do, you know, what they needed to do with a Batman game like this would be to go more with the, like, a stealth approach, avoidance. trying to dodge in a maze. And I think that's hard to do as a 2D platformer,

which is how they really kind of wanted to do Batman. But if they did something in the style of Metal Gear, that might have worked. Maybe that's what the PC engine game was meant to be, but didn't quite pull it off. Super Mega Man. It's pretty Mega Man-ish. Along the Mega Man lines,

you do get the stage clear images, and there's scenes where you get your jet pack. You get a jetpack and do some flying and shooting. at the same time, but Batman definitely looks like he is carrying a machine gun. But I do think it's a really good-looking game. When Batman gets out the machine gun, you know it got a series. So I had a little trouble with my research on this because it looked like there is a Game Boy game called Batman Return of the Joker

that is not based on the NES game, but it might also have been some other unrelated Batman game because it has like a Bruce Tim design look that calls to mind of the animated series, which, you know, that would have been 1992, so the timing wind up, but I don't know, like, I saw when I, you know, I haven't played this particular game, but looking around, like I saw it listed as both Return of the Joker and something else. Revenge of the Joker? Revenge of the Joker was just the title that the game was given on Genesis, but it's the same

game. It's like literally same game design and everything. Just bad because it was on the Genesis. So, yeah, I'm really confused about this Game Boy game, and I would appreciate someone correcting me in the comments because I'm, I feel as the person curating Game Boy World, I should know. But 1992 is a little further than I've made it yet. So help me out here. So with 1992, we also come to the next big Batman phenomenon, which is Batman Returns. And this game also ended up with games on every platform imaginable.

And there are many different kinds, more different kinds of Batman Returns games than there were Batman 89 games. So we're going to be talking about this for days. I hope not. I haven't really played these as much because by this point I was like, I'm done to the Batman thing. Yeah. But there was an NES brawler by Konami that I'm positive uses the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and 3 engine. Like it looks and moves exactly the same way. But it does have vehicular sequences, which the Ninja Turtles, I guess, didn't really do.

Although Ninja Turtles 4 Turtles in Time did have that, and that predates Batman Returns. So maybe they just kind of pull from that and said, let's do that on NES. It has, you know, the usual brawler issue, which is that it has like five enemies that you fight over and over again. And also, it posits that Danny DeVito is a better brawler than Michael Keaton, which I don't know. Maybe that's true, but I feel like Penguin shouldn't be that much stronger than Batman. Yeah, I mean, Penguin does have umbrellas, but I feel like he was never about

you know, like physical combat with Batman. He was more, maybe you can speak to that more, Chris. Well, he's got henchmen. He throws on him, right? The only way I think you could justify this is that Danny DeVito's Penguin is a very physical presence in that movie. He does bite a gentleman's nose off.

It's true. At one point. And that was before Tyson, wasn't it? That's an ear thing. Yeah, I know, but. they're totally different I think I'm better on my Batman history than on my boxing history Fair enough

Actually does Batman returns do any of the games have Have you fighting Max Shrek Like do you get to fight Christopher Walking at any point Because that would be amazing I don't think you do Which is a shame To have that big sewer fight at the end Between Michael Keaton and Christopher Walken that we all love

Damn it It does Strike me as kind of surprising that Batman returns games aren't better remembered or that they weren't better at the time because if you look at the structure of that movie, there are lots of set pieces that would seem to lend themselves really well to video games.

I mean, like, if you don't want to necessarily stick super close to the plot, you still have a sewer full of circus performers and weird objects like swan boats and rocket paint. Like, Rocket Penguins are the perfect video game anime. But for some reason, that didn't translate into a memorable video game experience, I don't think. Maybe people saw it and they're like, this is just crazy. This can't possibly be based on a movie. They're just making this up.

I think part of the problem was that video games were in sort of a transitional phase right around this point. You're moving away from the platformers of the late Indies era to more like the Final Fight-style brawlers. So you saw a lot more of those. I mean, most of the, actually, most of the Batman Returns games are brawlers. So that kind of sucks the... They were also on the super... Super NES around that time, what is this, 92. There's just like one after another, after another licensed games coming out.

And I remember being really jaded about that platform at that time. They were just like shovelware kind of stuff. And I think I put those games in that category, the Batman. Except on the links, I had an Atari links that I bought from somebody. and it came with Batman Returns, and it was pretty neat. I mean, it had good music, and graphics are good, and it had lots of clowns and crazy circus things. It was just to beat them up. You just walked around and beat up.

Right, which is what most of these games are. Yeah, I've played a little bit of the Links game, and it is at least a very impressive-looking game, considering the platform. Yeah, and I thought, you know, the platform seemed dead. even at that time, I must have got it around 93 or something, but the game had come out in 92. I was like, they're still making links games last year? You know? I still made it until like, I think there was

a links game that came out in 95. I remember on. CompuSer. I was just on, held on desperately, even more than the PlayStation. I was on the Atari forums on CompuServe all in the early 90s. So we were like, there's going to be another missile command game on the links. They're like, yeah, that's awesome. I have that work out for you.

It's depressing. But the Jaguar was cool. There was a Batman returns for Jaguar, though. Yeah. Another opportunity. Yeah, so Sega and CD and Genesis. Sega CD and Genesis is an interesting pair of games here because they're technically different, but they're the same. I'd like to say that the Sega CD game, is this the only Sega CD Batman game?

Because I have a Sega CD Batman game that I was surprised, pleasantly surprised by when I played it. It had this, these vehicular. scenes where you're sort of like third person over the car you're driving around and it was man I was like man this is actually pretty cool I think there was only the one and this that that is in this you have um like the the car sequences are okay so so the Sega CD game is the same as the Genesis game except the Genesis game didn't have any vehicular sequences it was all just brawling and platforming and so this one was developed by Sega not Konami um which is why it's totally different than the other games and this is probably the most like traditional video

And then for the sake of CD, they added ridiculous, like, butt rock music. They added, you know, the driving sequences, which have kind of like a super-scaler arcade effect on them. Yeah, that's what I liked about. It's definitely the more definitive version, even though I really hate the music. Like, it's super bad. It's that just, like, jarring electric guitars. I think I'm Joe Satriani, but without the chops kind of style. I apologize to anyone who's a fan of that, or if the composer of that music,

music is listening. I bet Tommy Tilariko did it. He might have. I don't know. Like, he was all over the place. And yeah, he did work a lot with Sega. But I would say the Genesis and Sega CD games really stand out the most of all the Batman Returns games. They're much less just like walk and punch and much more platformers. The Genesis game is really interesting because like the opening level, there's like an opening stage where you kind of go up onto some rooftops and fight Catwoman. And then you go to the next level and it's like everything is at a, at a weird tilted angle it's like a fallen building or something oh yeah i don't i don't know why what that has to do with the movie but i don't know either but it's at least interesting looking it's different than anything else that they did that anyone did with uh batman returns like super nes the game is just another one of those brawlers with way too big sprites and it's really bleak looking like it's extremely unfair in terms of the balance and it's just grimy looking and and there's no color or life to it. It's, ugh, I'm not a fan.

Me neither. The Sega CD game has that, like, that sequence where you're kind of going up a building, and the building is crumbling, and so you, it's got the wall in front of Batman that walk behind. It's a really cool effect. Yeah, I mean, it really seems like Sega put the most effort into coming up with something to do with Batman returns. Even if, like, the fight with Catwoman is, you know, just her flipping, doing like somersaults at you and you just jump down to a different level and wait for her to follow you down and punch her. And it's just the same thing over and over again. But, but, you know, they at least, like I said, kind of came up with some interesting ideas and also tried to capture the look of the movie. And then you get to the Sega CD version and you have some really cool arcade style.

super-scaler vehicular combat so yeah so it's cool it's smooth yeah all the games from what i can tell the the batman returns games all really tried to capture the look at the movie because if if 89 had a distinct look uh from those Anton first designs like returns really took it to this weird level that would get bigger and bigger until Batman and Robin when you're driving around on giant statues that are holding up highways, which, by the way, I love, I would love to live in a city made of Art Deco statues. But every one of these games, like you, has that one carving of the guy pulling the big lever. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's sort of like, yeah, like that's straight out of, you know,

Bioshockure. Yeah. Very, very Art Deco. The very Art Deco, like, progress lever. Progress lever. Flip this and you've got progress. So there were still two other Batman Returns games. We've talked about a lot, but there was also a Game Gear game by Sega, which, again, was a different game than the 16-bit versions. This was more of a, like a standard 8-bit action game, had brighter colors, smaller sprites, but it was a nice 2D, like, side-on perspective instead of the three-quarters view of the NES game. This also showed up on Master System because those were basically the same platform. and it has pretty much nothing to do with Batman Returns aside from some of the bosses, but at least it looks fun as opposed to like the Super NES game,

which is a joyless, brutal slog through sadness. And then finally, there's an Amiga version, which was published by Konami, but not designed by Konami. It's not like Konami did a great job with the other Batman Returns games, but this is really bad. Like, everything is really tiny, and it has really weird physics. everything's like slippery and

you're inundated with enemies who jump around and you have to fight them with really bad controls it's just kind of like the definition of a licensed game you don't want to play that's why no one played it

the immediate version does have one really interesting thing that like just from a visual perspective is that the like the bottom 20% of the screen where all your stats and information are

is designed to look like Batman's utility belt and I'm really surprised that that wasn't done more often and better? You know, the Ocean game that we talked about at the very beginning, the one that

looked like the 70s art style, the two-tone suit, the title screen, or the sub-menue for that, actually did have that sort of, not bat belt, but like a bat computer kind of aesthetic to it. So, occasionally you saw that, but for the most part, you know,

the games based on the movies kind of got away from that, because that wasn't really a thing in the movies. So, yeah, it is kind of a... Batman's utility belt. Does that hold up his pants? It does. That's part of utility. Okay. The utility, yeah. It's canonically. It canonicly holds his pants off.

Canonic, yeah. So anyway, that was 1999. In 1993, thankfully, we escaped from the gravity of Batman Returns and get to Batman the animated series. And maybe this is the game that I was talking about. boy game. I can't tell, like, just based on reading and watching YouTube videos and stuff, if this is the same game as the other Batman video game, not the, not the Sunsoft one, but the

second one. But this really captures the look at the animated series in black and white. It's not quite a Metroidvania, but it does have very open levels, and it has really solid platforming design, great animation. it looks really good. I am looking forward to playing this someday. And it's like the NES game. It makes really good use of blacks to create shadows,

which is tricky to do on Game Boy because you did have that screen, you know, that had the four colors, well, not just the four colors, but the slow refresh time. So you had to be really careful when dealing with blacks to avoid everything just becoming a blurry, muddy, and decipherable mess. So they did a good job with that. And this was, no, actually, I was going to say it was around the time that the Game Boy Pocket launched, but that was a little later.

Yeah, that was like 96 or something. I think it was 95, maybe six. Yeah, so this predates that. So it's still the murky, muddy green screen. But some definite ambition with this one, which is kind of what you expect with Konami on that looks really good. I just looked up a picture. It looks great for a Game Boy game.

Yeah, there's a really good use of gradients to create shadows and kind of really make, they did something that I think is pretty smart and put Batman largely against these very stark white backgrounds to make his very dark figure pop against them. So I had never actually seen this one before, but it looks really good. Yeah, it's one that I wish I'd had time to play a bit of before we did this, but it's definitely one that I will get to someday

in covering the Game Boy Library and should be a nice palette cleanser from Pachinko games and puzzle games. so that's exciting the future. Okay, so we've talked a lot about games that we're all kind of like, eh, but I feel like the adventures of Batman and Robin for Genesis and Super Nias is one that we have some opinions about. Yeah, I loved this game. It's the beautiful one with smooth animation. I've talked a lot lately.

Well, this was a, this game came out kind of after Batman the Animity. series was not only a success on television, but pretty much everyone in comics, outside of comics, in animation, was sort of looking at it and realizing, like, oh, this is the perfect version of Batman. And one of the big selling points for it was obviously the Bruce Tim designs and that sort of art deco style that was inspired by the Max Fleischer, Superman Shorts of the 40s. And the game captures that. so well.

Everything looks like it should. There's a fluidity to Batman's movement that even, you know, I mean, the Super NES had some really, really good-looking games, but the fact that this licensed Batman game looked this good was really surprising, even to me in 94 when I was 12. So I was only just now realizing that some games were good and some were bad. Yeah, one of the interesting things that they kind of had to do with the design of this game, the visual design was fight against the sort of super NES standard of making everything super, just having that super NES look to it. You know, there was a certain dimensionality and, like,

they really loved shading to make everything look, you know, like solid and sort of rendered in three dimensions as much as they could. And you didn't see a lot of games that had more flat color on super NES. And when they did, it was like earthbound and people said, why does this look so dated an 8-bit. But this game does that. They really kind of pushed against that prevailing style on the Super NES to go more in common with the TV series. And it really helps the game stand out on the platform, I think.

Yeah. And they did the animated series trick of doing colored highlights on black objects. So, like, Batman's cape is black, but you have those midnight blue highlights to suggest motion. And when he ducks, the cape moves behind us. Yeah, it's super lushly animated. I remember renting this game when it came out because it was well-received and stuff, and it's just amazing. It's almost too good.

It looked like a real cartoon to me at the time. It didn't look like a video game, you know? Yeah, it looked about as good as I could expect games to look back then. I remember thinking, yeah, this isn't like a super NES game, kind of like what Jeremy was just saying, just because it was just so fluid and so colorful and so, you know, it's well done. It was a great game. Probably one of the best.

And it had like a really interesting element that maybe could have been done better, but like the animated series itself, you would get these title cards, these very design heavy title cards to announce a new level, and then you'd sort of hear what the level was about, and in the way that Batman would,

you would have to pick your accessories that you would bring to each level. So if you were going to go fight the scarecrow, you would know that you would need a gas mask. And if you paid attention to what Alfred was telling you or what Commissioner Gordon was telling you, you would be able to pick the appropriate items. And none of this was involved a lot of problem solving on the players part. But I did think it was a really nice touch to be like, you know, there's limited space in the utility belt. You can't bring everything.

What are you going to bring if you're Batman? Like it was one of the first times in a video game that I felt like I really felt like Batman. in the way that, you know, I kind of didn't in the NES games because they're hard. They're very difficult. Yeah, one of the things that really stands out about this game, I haven't played much of it, but I just remember it being fair. And that's actually really surprising, not only because, you know, previous Batman games had been so hard, but because it is sort of a hybrid brawler and platformer.

Like, it has a little of both element in it. And both of those genres had a tendency around this time to be, Like, just really brutal and vicious and, you know, designed to suck down quarters or to be unbeatable on a single rental or whatever, you know, to kind of stretch your dollar and keep you from returning the game. It's a good point. It just does back away from the arcade-style brawler, the sucking your quarters and being addictive. Yeah, it does have platform elements to it. Yeah, it feels more like a console game. Yeah.

Like a home console game. Yeah. And, you know, it also feels like maybe it's more age-appropriate. It's like for once they said, you know, it's probably going to be like tweens buying this game. And we should design a game that is appropriate for people that age, not for 20-year-olds. Yeah, I really think it shows that they did take, there was a lot of thought put into this. Like, they thought to recreate the aesthetic. They thought to recreate the thing that people really loved about the animated series and thought to kind of design it to where it was.

would work. I really am, I have a lot of fun memories of this game. Yeah, I like that each stage is basically an episode of a cartoon. It's like, it's kind of a self-contained story when you face off against the boss of the day or the, you know, the boss of the episode at the end. It really kind of nails home, like you were saying, before that, that cartoon vibe to it. Yeah. It really makes it feel like, oh, yeah, this is an adaptation of the TV series. And something that I think would would later take this approach to Batman would be the Brave and the Bold games for Wii and

I guess DS. Yeah, by way forward. Yeah, that did like a really amazing job of each level being a distinct episode with its own distinct team up and its own distinct dialogue that would kind of capture the feeling of the show. I think you can trace that back to

the amount of care that was put in here. I love this game. Yeah, I mean, this is vintage Konami I think Sega might have co-developed or published or something, but... I think it's the last good Batman game ever made. Oh, that's some... Fighting words.

There's some fighting words, but... It's actually just the last one I ever played. This is also where we kind of have to call it a day because we've run out of time and we're at basically the hour and a half mark. So we made it like halfway through the notes that I put together. I guess we could reconvene some time and do the second half of this.

but I don't know if the next half of the games are really worth talking about. Maybe we could quickly highlight a few things before we call it. There are a few good games that came out, but for the most part. We should talk about maybe for a minute, like those crazy digitized, was it Batman Forever games that have digitized? The ones that look like they look like Pit Fighter. They're by a claim, so. Yikes. I mean, I never played them, I don't think, other than on an emulator, but.

Do we really have to talk about this? I mean, those would be next in the line after talking about the adventures of Batman and Robin. Okay, so we just talked about it. God, why would we want to, why would we want to end on a low note? All right. We could go out, we could go out beautifully. What's Batman Forever the arcade game from 96? You're just going to drag us down, aren't you?

Is that another digitized game? Yeah, that is, that is, um, crap, I don't even know. Batman Forever the arcade game is, it's not digitized in the Pit Fighter Mortal Kombat way, but it does have really ugly graphics. One of those looked like it was digitized 3D Mac kits, whatever the heck they call those. You know, little figures or something. Yeah, it's really bad.

So let's end on a low note, talk about something. We already, it's too late. We're dead. We're dead now. I mean, in all honesty, I do feel like the Adventures of Batman and Robin was the last good one until Arkham Asylum came out.

Yeah, that's one. talking about. But I don't know if Arkham Asylum falls into the purview of retronauts. It's a little too recent. Let's wait a couple of years. And Batman's chest is like four feet wide in that game. Have you noticed? Yeah, I really didn't play the game initially because I was just so

I found the visual style so unappealing. I'm like, this is not my vision of Batman. My vision of Batman is not like a slab of meat. He's like wiry and life. He's strong but, you know, like he looks like he could actually slink through the shadow.

as opposed to, like, have trouble getting through doors without turning sideways. Of course, he's not just muscle. He's brain, too, right? You say that, but that Bruce Tim design is like a Dorito. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about, four-foot-wide check. It's, like, that's stylized. There's no style to Arkham Asylum's visuals. It's a pretty ugly game, but...

You're not wrong. It makes up for that with... His pecks are like basketballs. Game design. It's fantastic, innovative, revolutionary, groundbreaking. But visually, man, it's just like the... the absolute worst kind of crap that you saw on Unreal Engine 3. It's just very much mired in that sort of late millennial style.

I do want to point out, there are fairly recent, but we did just mention the Wii and DS, Brave and the Bold Games, which are two completely different games, and those are fantastic. The DS one, I think, if you're a retronauts listener and you like Batman, I mean,

that game does have a part where Batman is, literally transformed into a gorilla in a Batman mask, and you have to run around a level like that for a little bit. It's pretty brilliant and super fun. Is that the one done by Way Forward? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did a bunch of great stuff on DS, alien infestation, and what else was it?

The, uh, they do the Shantay stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And the, uh, and the, uh, they did like a Thor platformer or something. Yeah. And there was, um, the Thor game was great, too. Mighty Switch Force. Yeah.

I don't know if they do is. Like, Brave and the Bold kind of hits the same notes, I think, is Adventure Time. Hey, Ice King, why do you steal our garbage? Where it's just like, oh, yeah, they really took notes from classic games and captured everything good about it. Like, Adventure Time is Zelda 2, whereas this is more sort of like brawler platformer, but the spirit's there. It's good stuff. Yeah. And the Wii version literally is structured like episodes with a great story.

structure and in really cool set pieces that enhance it and really good conversations. Like, you know, Batman hanging out with Hawkman and having a conversation as they descend into hell to fight gentlemen ghosts. Like, there's a lot of good stuff in those games that I think a lot of people messed. All right. Well, okay, good. I'm glad we could end with a little bit of mouthwash, a little bit of... Let's talk about Arkham Origins.

Yeah. Oh, Arkham Origins was fine. It's a fine Batman game. Blackgate, on the other hand. Oh, quick story. I played that at San Diego. They had a booth set up at Comic-Con, and that was the only time that I've ever looked at the guy

who was chaperoning me as I played the game. And I went, really? At the end of the first level where Batman just punches Catwoman in the face, and that is the entirety of the fight. I was like, ooh, that's how we're starting? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, well, not every Batman game can be great. But there were some good ones, and I kind of feel like we touched on most of them. So I guess in a sense, especially the retro ones. This was a complete episode. So thanks, guys, for coming in to talk about Batman. You're welcome. Thanks, everyone, for listening to us talk about Batman. So this has been Retronauts East Episode 3.

I have been Jeremy Parrish and will continue to be. You can find me at Retronauts.com. You can find Retronauts at iTunes or Podcast 1. and I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. So that's very exciting. Chris, where can we find you on the internet? You can find links to everything that I write, including the comic books that I write and the columns that I write online

at my website, which is the dashisb.com. If you want to see me writing about Batman, the best place it goes probably Comics Alliance.com, particularly the Ask Chris column, which more often than not is about Batman. It's not technically a Batman column, but it usually is a Batman column. Yeah, and there's, There's a lot of stuff in there.

You can find out my thoughts on how Batman works and why he shouldn't drive around in a car covered with guns, maybe. Also, I am a comic book writer as well. X-Men 92 is available most of it in paperback with the third paperback coming out in May. Deadpool Bad Blood also comes out in May. I can wrote both of those with Channel hours. This will definitely run this episode.

Oh, actually, no, it's coming in April. So, yeah, that'll be like next month. Well, coming right up on May 3rd, if you were a Retronauts fan and you want to, get some more content about old video games Sword Quest the new series from Dynamite

I'm co-writing with Chad Bowers with art by Ghost Rider X and lettering by Josh Kroc the team behind Downset Fight the award-winning graphic novel check that out

and keep an eye out for other stuff as well but the dashisb.com is where you can go find me and I've also got a bunch podcasts that you can also find there and Benj

I am Benj Edwards I have been here this whole time listening to Jeremy and Chris talk about Batman. And you can find me on Twitter, Ben Jedwards. Patreon.com slash Ben Jedwards, et cetera. All right. And as always, we will be back in a week with another episode. So please look forward to it. Thank you. And good night.

I don't know. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be. Yeah. The President's Day Sale at Mattress Firm has been extended. It's your last chance to take home a free adjustable base with your qualifying mattress purchase.

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when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican Senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from

it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.