Batman Returns [SNES]

I've never seen the movie, so I didn't really know what kind of stuff to expect when going into this beat-em-up. Of course, if I expected license games to be faithful to their sources, I'd be sorely disappointed over and over again, so that's kinda moot.

But the problem is that that doesn't leave me much else to talk about. The most I can say is that this game is that it is average. Run-of-the-mill. You won't see anything in here you haven't seen before, right down to people on motorcycles trying to run you over. But what really drags this game down is the feel of it. Batman is supposed to be a "ninja beating up a bunch of thugs." (There's more to him than that, of course, but this isn't a blog about comics so we won't get into all that.) However, there is no feel of ninja-ness to this Batman. There's no sense of agility or fluid grace to this impostor. Almost all of his movements are slow and plodding, and, while that may be par for the course for the genre, when Batman is moving like Mike Haggar then something is terribly wrong.

And then there's the fact that sometimes he'll use his cape to fly around like a flying squirrel. What the hell?

Bottom line is, I don't think Konami ever has or ever will match TMNT II-IV.

Drill Dozer [GBA]

A platformer from Game Freaks. A girl and her person-sized drill machine goes around...drilling stuff. Blocks, walls, enemies, etc. It's a great game. Not perfect, but then again what is these days. It makes intelligent use of the drilling mechanics and it never becomes gimmicky. It controls really well. What more can I say. It's a lot better than Game Freak's other franchise so it's a shame that it didn't sell well because that just tells Nintendo to keep on milking the Pokemon franchise for all its worth instead of ever again releasing the studio to try and make anything new. Go out and hunt it down.