The Batwing is a marvelous piece of technology, if I do say so myself. It's more efficient at vertical take off and landing than the Harrier, has a higher top speed than the F-22 Raptor, and has a much sleeker design and a more awesome color scheme. Arkham Island was so small that I didn't need it to get around and I didn't want to have to engage Hugo Strange's TYGER helicopters every time I took the air in Arkham City (although I did use it as a very loud, very vibrate-y courier service to drop things off during both adventures), but on this Christmas Eve caper, it was just the thing to transport me between the auto-drop-off locations at various points in the city. Or it would have been were my signal not being jammed almost immediately after takeoff. I knew this problem would make my life difficult if I didn't deal with it right away, so I put the interrogation of Penguin's arms dealer on hold for now in order to deactivate the jamming signal coming from the closest CGC Tower.
A handful of armed thugs were in there holding the engineers hostage, but they didn't prove much trouble. What proved more trouble - and more interesting - was reconstructing the scene of a gruesome explosion that took the life of an innocent repair worker. Using my advanced Detective Vision, I was able to create such a detailed evidence chain that I could basically watch the event over and over again as if I were in the room. Let me state that this was strictly for crime fighting purposes - this isn't Grand Theft Auto, I don't like watching people get brutally killed just for the entertainment value. Anyway, the keycard I recovered from the unfortunate exploded worker allowed me to hack the encrypted access panel with my Cryptographic Sequencer, leading me to the madman behind the jamming signals in my towers: a shadowy figure called Enigma. The smug brainiac had also gathered a large amount of private information that he was planning on using to extort practically the entire population of Gotham. Obviously dealing with my would-be assassins was the more pressing matter of the night, but I knew I would have to find time to interrogate his data handlers across the city in order to stop mass panic from breaking out.
But the first person I had to interrogate was Penguin's arms dealer, a thug aptly nicknamed "Loose Lips." I had to dangle him off the top of a building to get him to talk, but once he did, he led me to a series of relay points across the city through which Penguin's communications were passing. I had to traverse the snowy distance on foot since my Batwing towers were still being jammed, but I eventually found his hiding place: a disused cargo ship off the coast of Amusement Mile called "The Final Offer." The deck was heavily guarded by armed thugs and the inside was a maze of flooded tunnels, across which I could only traverse by standing on a plank of wood and using my batclaw to pull myself across, a method I would revisit both in Arkham City for both Penguin's museum and Joker's steel mill. Speaking of Penguin's museum, this ship also had a makeshift gladiator pit - the boiler room - in which I had to battle Black Mask's next assassin: a Russian street thug known as the Electrocutioner. I say "battle" when I really mean "give him one swift kick and he went down." I guess there's a reason nobody had ever heard of this guy. The onslaught of thugs that came in afterwards was slightly more challenging, but nothing I couldn't handle.
While I was fighting his cronies, Penguin had locked himself in his office with a couple of his hench-bimbos and placed a cadre of armed guards in the outer room with a hostage: a thug working for the Falcone crime syndicate. It seems that Penguin was attempting to persuade his fellow bird-themed to take themselves out of the weapons trading business by torturing the kingpin's son Alberto Falcone. Now generally I couldn't give two bat guanos about what bad guys do to each other in their spare time, but seeing as I needed information from Penguin, I put a stop to the session before it got out of hand. The diminutive crime lord didn't have much to say except that he had heard about a murder at Lacey Towers, which was a known safehouse of Black Mask's. No sooner had I heard this important plot point than my legs were taken out from under me and I was dragged back into the boiler room.
The architect of this sneak attack was none other than the next assassin on Black Mask's list: the skilled melee fighter known as Deathstroke. Despite his head of gray hair, lack of his right eye, and the fact that most of his fighting repertoire was taken almost entirely from the purple and blue Ninja Turtles, this guy was an incredibly formidable opponent. He first came at me with a Donatello-esque bo-staff, which I was eventually able to take from him and break over the reinforced knee pads of my costume. He then took out a straight NinjatÅ, or half of Leonardo's arsenal, which was a little faster and sharper than the staff, but still manageable. The gadget in which I was most interested was a sort of remote grapnel launcher. He would attach one end to me and the other end to an explosive canister up in the rafters, then activate the hydraulic mechanism, which pulled the canister to me at high speeds. I was able to grab it at the last second and throw it back at my assailant, but I knew that I could make use of that device as well, both to pull two objects together, but also to create a high wire/zip line effect for traversing long horizontal distances. I made sure to add it to my utility belt after knocking the assassin unconscious and tying him up, a mistake I failed to make with the Electrocutioner, who had regained consciousness and walked away after our first fight. Oh well, I guess I'll eventually have to deliver another single punch to knock him out again.
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