Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na….
You know, not enough trademark notices use the word “indicia.” We should bring that back.
This week, we’re looking into Batman: Return of the Joker, the last and rarest of three Batman games on the NES. The other two games are based on the two Tim Burton movies, and are…okay, I guess? I feel they haven’t aged super well. Return of the Joker, however, is based more directly on the comics, though it does retain some aesthetic elements from those films. It’s also totally sweet.
The most striking aspect of Return of the Joker is how good it looks – the sprites are huge and smoothly animated, and the backgrounds are detailed and colorful. Simply put, this doesn’t look like an 8-bit game. There’s a good technical reason for this – it makes use of a unique “mapper chip.” These chips allowed developers to get more out of the NES than what the stock hardware could do on its own, from enhanced graphics to improved sound. A good number of NES games have these – Super Mario Bros. 3 and most of the early Mega Man games have one that help with side-scrolling – but Return of the Joker has a third-party one made by Sunsoft. Third party mapper chips were fairly common in Japan, but in the U.S., this is the only game that has one. Sunsoft really knew how to get the most out of this console…just look at this:
Dang! Combat in Return of the Joker is all about firing batarangs, so it plays out a bit more like Contra than an old beat-em-up. You’ll get opportunities to get different types of batarangs (including a nice, Contra-esque spread gun analogue). Other stages, in which Batman has a jetpack for some reason, are a bit more like Gradius:
The game’s boss battles are also quite a bit different – in these, you and your foe each have a big amount of health that ticks down at the bottom of a fixed screen.
While I greatly appreciate the variety in gameplay, I do have to say that these fights can be pretty brutal. As a side-scroller from the 8-bit era, you can expect the difficulty to range from tricky to sadistic. The last stages are just dumb, but they’re doable. By the end, you’ll be going mad – mad, I say! In fact, you’ll probably look something like this:
Despite the occasionally stubborn controls and frustrating difficulty, the varied and gorgeous Return of the Joker is probably the best Batman adaptation on the NES. It’s also a bit pricier and harder to find than its counterparts – nowadays this one will run you about 35 bucks. If you like the franchise, though, it’s likely worth the trouble.
I feel like the quality of Batman video games varies to an unparalleled degree – while the Arkham series produced some of the best games of the last decade, the IP also produced 2003′s Dark Tomorrow, one of gaming’s largest doo-doo piles. There are a lot of other great ones, as well – a few mid-90s games titled The Adventures of Batman and Robin had different developers on different consoles (sorta like Aladdin), but all of them are good. The list goes on and on. While it’s totally unrelated, I also highly recommend Ninja Baseball Bat Man:
Where else do you get to fight a sentient plane while aboard another, large plane? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
Next week’s game is an absolutely radical delight from the late 90s, which debuted a series that died way too soon. I hope to see you then.