Saturday, October 29, 2011

Arkham City Post #8: Shark Repellant Bat BEAT DOWN

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

Part 7: Taking Out the Sensor Jammers

I was determined not to get distracted again as I headed to the Museum for the THIRD time; so imagine my chagrin when an emergency broadcast came over my radio.  But rather than pulling me off to yet another side mission, this message actually reconfirmed my previously set location.  Apparently a group of elite undercover cops, hand-picked by Commissioner Gordon, who had infiltrated Penguin's gang (against my counseling, btw) had since been discovered, and were being held hostage in the Museum.  I hacked the security panel and rescued the first officer from a group of unarmed thugs in the main exhibit hall.

Penguin fancies himself a collector, and as such he had retrofitted the museum's display cases to serve as prison cages.  Some of these contained live subjects (such as a masked female ninja - my first thought was Kitana from Mortal Kombat, but I had suspicions as to who she really worked for), some contained the mutilated corpses of enemies who had crossed Penguin in some way, and some were left empty in preparation for future captures.  I noticed spots for some of my old friends (Joker, Harley Quinn, Two-Face) and two spots for me: one for Bruce Wayne and one for Batman.  I'd better make sure Penguin never gets his hands on me - I'd hate to see his look of disappointment about having to revamp his entire trophy case when he realizes he can only have one or the other.

I made my way through the maze of the museum until I reached Penguin's imposing gladiator pit, wherein I fought wave after wave of henchmen, and simultaneously battled an unmistakeable sense of deja vu.  Then it came to me: Rocksteady featured this fight in their E3 2011 demo, (along with the battle with Two-Face's thugs at the Courthouse and the predator tutorial challenge in the Church) which I played a few months earlier.  I suppose they included these three sections in order to give players a taste of all three varieties of henchmen.  What Rocksteady did NOT include in the demo was what followed the henchmen: a gigantic half-baked Titan monster in Penguin colors.  A quick check of the map revealed that there was in fact a Titan container in the Museum (which I destroyed as soon as I located it), and an even quicker Ultra-Stun allowed me to deliver a quick Beat Down.

The next step in my journey took me into the Terrors of the Deep exhibit, which Penguin had flooded and frozen, using Mr. Freeze's technology, I suspected.  My suspicions were confirmed when I noticed that one of the undercover cops had broken free and was attempting to escape across the ice, when he suddenly froze in place.  There was Penguin, standing on the balcony leading into the Iceberg Lounge, wielding Mr. Freeze's ice gun.  As I carefully ventured out onto the ice to rescue the cop (plus the other three in the room), I was brutally attacked by a giant shark straight from the set of Jaws.  Luckily he didn't destroy all the ice - Bats don't like the water, unless they're safely situated in a turbo-charged, fully-armored watercraft.

I knew I had to find some way to get past Penguin's ice gun before confronting him, so I re-established my primary objective: find Mr. Freeze.  Maybe he could give me some clues about how to disable his weaponry.  I found him in a display case of his own, tastelessly decorated with palm trees and surfboards.  He was without his suit, so only a vial of some eerie glowing blue liquid plugged directly into his heart was keeping him alive.  But before I could rescue him, I was confronted by yet ANOTHER gigantic one-armed Russian henchman, this one wielding a sickle.  After I took care of him and his coterie, I learned that he and Mr. Hammer "worked" together as a former side show attraction: the Abramowitz Brothers conjoined twins.  Apparently after their separation, they both pursued parallel lives of crime for different crime bosses, but each kept their trademark patriotic weapons. (Get it? Hammer and Sickle?  Russian?  See what they did there?)

After I rescued Freeze, he informed me that he had indeed developed a countermeasure system to prevent people from using his weapons against him.  The only problem was that it was located in his suit, which was being guarded by armed thugs in the Armory across the lake.  A quick predator sweep through the room took care of them, and I was able to configure my newest gadget: a firearm Disruptor, which incapacitated the weapons of any armed thugs nearby.  Hmm, the Remote Electrical Charge in the Steel Mill and the Disruptor in the Museum... the one-gadget-per-dungeon structure of this adventure was making me feel more like Link from the Zelda series than the Prince of Persia.

I ran into one more obstacle before I could confront Penguin in the Iceberg Lounge: all the ice in the lake had melted, forcing me to glide onto a nearby raft and pull myself across the room using my Batclaw.  The only problem with this strategy: you guessed it, the shark.  No sooner had I ventured out into the middle of the lake when I was confronted by a toothy mass of fins and gills splashing about and trying to capsize my raft.  I didn't have any shark-repellant bat spray in my utility belt, since it DOESN'T EXIST (although the reference was not lost on me), so I turned to my next best option: my fists.  See below for a snapshot of what went down, including a pretty descriptive tutorial prompt at the bottom of the screen:



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