New Chapters

The last week has been interesting, to say the least.

Ever since forever, I was interested in gaming-I still remember owning a chinese console as a kid, “street fighter”. Just another version of the endless chinese clones of Nintendo Famicom.

Over the years, my passion evolved. With spending hours at the internet coffee’s, endlessly playing the same levels of the same few games, from owning my own PC and moving towards consoles, I was always interested in the phenomenon.

Among my favourite brands around gaming, two names were always on the list: the Rocksteady Studio and the Xbox console. They both managed to disappoint me within the last week.

For starters, Rocksteady entered the game studios Hall of Fame by creating Batman Arkham Asylum, a superhero games which changed forever not only the superhero games, but also many other action games. Even now, 15 years after it was launched, I can see new games borrowing elements from it and for it’s following games. 3 other entries were introduced in the Batman ArkhamVerse, City, Origins and Knight, which are still regarded as the best superhero game series of all times and one of the best game series in history. The series served as a good fanservice for the Batman: the animatied series fans, with Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy returning to voice Joker and Batman for 3 of the 4 games (Arkham Origins featured different voice actors for batman and joker, the game being developed by another studio but in Arkham’s spirit)

The fans expected for this universe to end with Arkham Knight, who’s ending was a decent tribute to the series run and offered Batman a solid send off.

This all changed when their next game was announced to take part in the same universe, Suicide Squad: kill the justice league, who was also set to feature the last Kevin Conroy’s performance of Batman (unfortunately, he passed away in 2022).

To sum it in a short sentence, the game which launched last week trashed this legacy and it disappointed a lot of fans. I was planning to buy the game just for the story, but now I won’t…I can’t. Arkham’s Batman deserved better than what he got there, and even if I can overlook other things that I genuinely dislike about this game, I can’t forgive this aspect. Basically, most ArkhamVerse lovers boycotted the game as well. Farewell, Rocksteady-thank you for all the good memories.

Now, Xbox-my favourite console. I like the UI, the integration within Microsoft’s ecosystem, like OneDrive and PC, and I proudly owned several Xbox consoles during the last few years.

Now Xbox wants to bring their exclusives to PlayStation, in typical Microsoft move to destroy what they had helped build. Not going to go into details on why I think this would be the end of the xbox console, but I am a bit sad about all this.

I don’t want to give it too much thought either way, these corporats have their own agenda and talking about owning, I don’t own Microsoft stock (although I probably should) so it is what it is, such is life.

Time for a new chapter. Since everything around me changes, for the better or worst, I might as well aspire to focus on the better.