Batman Returns (Lynx) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
86A playthrough of Atari's 1992 platforming beat 'em up game for the Atari Lynx, Batman Returns.
For the pragmatists out there, here I present a perfect example of the thinking that ultimately toppled the once mighty Atari. The Lynx was, without a doubt, a hellaciously powerful system by 1989 standards when it was released. Shortcomings of the 160x102 screen aside, it could easily compete with and best the SNES and Genesis hardware on several levels. So, why did it fail?
To put it simply, software like this destroyed just about any remaining faith fans had in the brand.
In their final years, everything Atari did always seemed to start out promising, only to destroyed by corporate money grabbing. Batman Returns is a prime example of that. Sure, it looks fantastic (well, at least to any other competing handheld's games) in screen grabs, but the animation is incredibly stiff, jerky, and slow, the controls have an obnoxious lag to them, and the game was obscenely hard. The enemies can take a lot of punishment, and they CONSTANTLY swamp you. I'm guessing that this was meant to obscure the sheer dearth of content. It also seems like all of the effort went into the first stage. Gotham City looks great in stage one. The rest of the levels have virtually no variation in them at all, leaving it feel pretty bland.
Making matters worse, Atari themselves created the Batman Returns arcade game, and while it wasn't necessarily the best game ever, it was competent, fun, and it looked awesome. This game attempts to mimic the formula. It doesn't succeed at doing much, however, beyond making you want to smash the Lynx. The hours of memorization that went into this playthrough... ugh.
And the cherry on top? They actually used this game as a pack-in at one point! I'm sure it was to draw people with the Batman license, and so that they could compare screenshots to the Game Gear and Game Boy Batman games, but make no mistake. This is absolutely the worst game released based on the movie license. It's such a shame, because like with many of the later Lynx games, if it had been given a few more resources and a couple more months in development, it really could have been good.
On a side note, this was done with a Retroarch shader. It's a much better representation of the representation of the original experience, and it helps obscure the painfully low resolution a little bit.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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