Batman: Arkham City on PC is the version Gotham needs (and you deserve)

You can boast about the 3D effects on a game; that's normal. Or you can be so proud of the 3D effects on a game that you overnight a gaming writer a 3D monitor so he can see them in person. That's what NVIDIA did when they heard I would be taking a look at the PC version of the Warner Bros. game Batman: Arkham City. So there I sat in front of my 3D loaner monitor, glasses on my face, waiting for the game to load.

This is a Games for Windows Live release, so after downloading the game from Steam and entering the CD Key to unlock the game, I had to also log into my Xbox Live account and re-enter the same key for some reason. This process often boots my wife off the upstairs television if she happens to be watching a Netflix movie on the Xbox 360. I'm going to say it again: Games for Windows Live is a hostile system for consumers, and it's a constant annoyance in our house.

That being said, the PC version of the game does nearly everything else correctly.

A system killer

Our testing rig is a beast, so I max out every available feature on every PC game I test and go from there. I also enabled the 3D effects, because they were an obvious selling point for NVIDIA. This was one of the first games that crushed our system like a can; I was pulling around 20 frames per second at 1920x1080 resolution, with all the DirectX 11 and PhysX options turned all the way up. Clearly, things needed to be adjusted.

The game comes with a benchmarking feature so you can see how well or poorly your system will handle different graphical options. You're going to want to set aside some time to tweak your systems and find what works for your particular rig. This is a showpiece game, and you won't be able to turn on every effect and feature at once unless you're running multiple high-end graphics cards.

I actually ended up turning off the PhysX features and turning down some of the DirectX 11 effects so I could keep the high resolution with 3D enabled and still play at 60 frames per second. (I know, it's a rough life sometimes.) The game looks perfectly fine at more modest settings, but the ability to turn everything on and go for broke, along with the benchmarking tool, is going to make this an attractive game for testing high-end gaming systems.

One annoyance: you can only adjust the game's graphical settings when you first boot the game. Once launched, you can't adjust your settings or resolution. This creates a weird loop:  working in the menus, launching the game, running the benchmark, turning the game off, re-adjusting, and then repeating until you find a balance between performance and aesthetics.

Our Velocity Micro gaming rig
OS	Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU	Intel® Core i7 2600k processor, Hyperclocked
RAM	Patriot 8GB 1600Mhz PXD38G1600LLK Memory
Video	EVGA GTX 580 1536 MB 015-P3-1580-AR
Motherboard	Asus P8Z68-V Pro Motherboard
Storage	Patriot 2 x 120GB Wildfire SATAIII SSD PW120GS25SSDR in RAID 0
Optical drive	LG UH12LS28 BDROM/DVDRW

Like the integration of Games for Windows Live, this is not an elegant solution, but the game comes to life once you have everything dialed in.

Wonderful use of 3D

There's a reason that the 3D aspect of this release is being hyped; this is one of the best examples of 3D in PC gaming that I've seen. 3D as a technology can be fun on consoles, but the graphical trade-off is often severe—the visuals on the Halo: Anniversary release take a sharp nose-dive when played in 3D—but with a strong PC you don't have that problem. It's true that 3D effects come at a cost on the PC, but the results can be amazing.

In Arkham City, Batman zooms around and drops down on unsuspecting thugs, and everything has a little added kick due to the added depth. Arkham Asylum was a wonderful game, but Arkham City increases the scope of the experience and allows Batman to operate as we're used to seeing him: patrolling the city and taking care of things as they pop up. It's a large, sometimes overwhelming job to be the world's greatest crime-buster, and the strong 3D effect makes the city seem like a living, breathing place.

Sadly, it's impossible for me to show you this, and 3D requires a big investment in both computing overhead and equipment. Short of inviting people over to my house to put on the glasses, there's no visual way to get the benefits across. (Nintendo has the same problem with advertising the 3DS.)

Let's put it this way: if you've ever been interested in buying 3D equipment, or if you just picked up a 3D-capable monitor, I would start with this game.

How does the game play?

Unlike the console versions, the Catwoman content comes with the game and is included in the first install. There's no need to put in a different code and wait for another chunk of content. Thank the maker.

The game has been reviewed backwards and forwards, and it remains one of my favorite games of the year. The game supports wired XBox 360 pads natively, but the menus can be controlled with the mouse and keyboard with no issues. The game itself is controlled better with a gamepad, in my opinion, but it's not hard to get used to playing with a mouse and keyboard. Arkham City is a third-person brawler, and that's the sort of game that doesn't see a huge improvement when you bring the controls to a mouse and keyboard. Still, you have the choice.

I played for a number of hours and ran a series of benchmarks, and haven't yet seen a crash or a major issue. It's true that PC gamers have had to wait way too long to play Arkham City, but the game is here now, and it offers everything you need to test the mettle of your system. The use of Games for Windows Live is unfortunate, and adjusting the graphical options could be easier, but once you get past these two hurdles you'll see how a high-quality PC port should look and act.

The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade

Introduction

                                             

  Gaming today is a widely recognized part of our cultural landscape. But those of us over thirty are just old enough to remember a time before gaming, before digital entertainment invaded the arcades, our computers and our homes.

Gaming itself is as old as history. Artifacts from ancient Sumeria and Egypt have shown that our ancestors enjoyed playing board games thousands of years ago. But electronic games required the invention of electronic computers. The earliest computers were slow, failure-prone monsters that took over entire rooms and had less power than a modern pocket calculator. Still, early programmers on these machines felt compelled to waste time by making these computers do things like playing tic-tac-toe. After World War II, electronic computers moved out of the realm of cutting-edge laboratories and into universities and large corporations. Many university students became the first game programmers, transforming their fantasy and sci-fi imaginations into digital adventures.

The concept of hooking up an electronic game system to a television set was invented by Ralph Bauer in the early 1950s. Later he took his ideas to the TV company Magnavox, which released a refined version of his "Brown Box" prototype as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. The Odyssey was primitive, displaying only spots of light on the TV screen, and it required translucent plastic overlays to simulate the appearance of a game. Still, the revolution was underway, and there was to be no stopping it.

The first wildly popular home console system was the Atari 2600, released in 1977. It used plug-in cartridges to play many different types of games, and thanks to the popularity of Space Invaders, it became a best seller. Computer games, written largely for the Apple ][ and TRS-80 computers, were also taking off at this time. While the console industry experienced a crash in 1983, it soon recovered and both computer and console games never looked back.

There are many books and articles on the history of video games. But one area that I felt was not sufficiently explored was how games tended to be categorized in certain genres, and how the genres themselves had evolved and changed over the years. Besides the difference in graphics, was playing tennis on an Atari 2600 significantly different from playing the same game on a Playstation 2? Many old-school gamers often lament the focus of graphics over game play in modern titles, but was it really true that only graphics got better over time? I decided to find out.

Please note: The categories and games I decided to review are by no means exhaustive. In selecting eleven categories, I have left out a few that some will feel are significant. Also, due to time restrictions, I decided to choose only six games for each category. The choices of games are not random, and are not necessarily fully representative of all genres and platforms.

Of the 66 games reviewed here, I have personally played 50 of them, or 76 percent. I played over half of these at the time they were first released, and over the years have managed to finish 15 of them, although not all the games have an ending as such. 19 of the 66 games are console or arcade games, or 29 percent, so some may feel consoles are underrepresented in the list. However, if you count games that have been ported at some point to game consoles, 31 or 47 percent fall into that category. In only one game out of 66 was I a member of the development team.

With that said, let's jump right in to the genres and see how they have evolved over the years. When looking at the screen shots, make sure to hover your mouse over top to see if a higher-resolution image is available.