Batman has always been one of my favorite heroes. This is probably due to the fact that he is just a regular guy without any super-powers. He is super-rich, but that's about it. In theory, any one of us could become Batman with the right amount of cash and the right work ethic. In the past two decades, Batman has also brought technological advances with many of his titles. The 90's movie entitled just "Batman" was the first movie ever made on DVD, for instance. Batman is a techie's hero, and the newest game to carry his moniker has shot up in the video game sales record books as a result.

Batman: Arkham Asylum takes place in an entirely new world for our hero. This is not the world of the comic books, the animated series, or the Dark Knight, but rather a fresh look at the subject. Obviously, from the name, the game takes place entirely in Arkham Asylum, where most of the bad guys that Batman snatches end up. The Joker has taken over the place, kidnapped Gordon, and it's time to beat up some baddies and get the world back to normal.

My experience with this game started last night. I had played the demo, and knew that my system could run the title with PhysX on high at an acceptable frame rate. We'll go more into the benchmarks in a later chapter of this review. I installed the game and dove straight into the setup menu. Unfortunately, there was no PhysX option. Curiously, I opened up the game and started my hour-long trip into Hell.

I began by logging into my Live account (NordicPC of course), and put in the product key for the title. This all went fine, until Live asked me to update the game. Sure, I thought, Why not. I watched as the fill bar shot up to nearly full in about 2 minutes, just about right for a little update. But then the bar just sat there. Confused, I decided to skip this process for now, and get into the bad-guy beat-up that was coming.

The beginning of the game is a long intro sequence which takes about 10 minutes. As soon as I saw that PhysX wasn't enabled, I wanted to get that fixed before I wasted any more time, so I killed the program from the Task Manager. My initial thought was: NVIDIA didn't want the game to run poorly, so if you want PhysX you need dedicated hardware. No problem, I grabbed a 9600GT of the shelf and installed it alongside my 8800GT. Still no dice on the PhysX though. I fired up Google and searched for "Batman Arkham Asylum no physx option." Unfortunately, all I could find were topics about how the pirated version is missing the ability to run PhysX. Grrr, I thought, I just activated this thing, I know it's legit. Needless to say, I found a site that recommended hard-setting the option in the configuration file so off I went.

This time I got a good ways into the intro, and then it crashed. Drat, back to Google. The whole time I was thinking to myself this is why PC gaming is going down the toilet. The payoff better be worth it. I was able to find a post that said there was a patch out, and that it would be installed from Games for Windows Live. What do I do? Open Games for Windows Live from the Start Menu, of course. Digging around in that worthless Marketplace, I found no patches or updates. Grrr, again.

I got back inside the game, and figured making this Live update run was the only way to go. So I tried running the program as administrator, no help. The fill bar still jumps out to a nearly-finished state, and then sits there. Wait a tick. The update was 266MB, I know I couldn't have downloaded that much yet. I opened up my router's bandwidth chart and sure enough, there was 2 mb/s coming right at my server. Not terribly quick, but it's a new release, lot's of traffic on the servers I'm sure. Okay, so someone just didn't know how to program a working fill bar, that's cool. I can take a joke.

The madness continued as the installer finally launches to a "Batman: Arkham Asylum cannot be found. Exiting installer." WHAT! Yes, they really did that. Some dumbass forgot that some of us run 64-bit systems, and that Batman: Arkham Asylum might not be installed in the "Program Files" directory. You can't just up and move that kind of thing either, because registry entries point to the "Program Files (x86)" folder, and you might have issues. So I uninstalled the 9GB of data and reinstalled it explicitly to "Program Files" this time around.

What's so horrendous about this problem is that this has been going on as long as I can remember, literally back into the Windows 95 days. Say you have a data drive you want your Program Files directory to live in for some added performance. You can enter the registry and change the variables that say where that is. Properly-coded apps will simply look for $ProgramFiles and go there just fine, no issues. Poorly-coded apps always expect their things to live in C:\Program Files\ and they always break. C'mon guys, use the darn variables!!!

Okay, so now, literally over an hour after I started trying to play this thing, I've got it installed in the right place, and I only have to wait another 20 minutes for this patch to download. Why MS wouldn't let me use the patch I have already installed was bothering me, so I did a search for any files greater in size than 250MB in my profile. I found this nice patch.tmp file, that was totally worthless to me without a way to extract the files. Doh. Wait it out Solberg. 15 minutes later, the patch installs just fine, PhysX options come back, and the game runs amazingly. Even better, since I had already installed a dedicated PhysX processor in the 9600GT, it ran better than the demo ever did. I'll bring the benchmarks once I have some time to compile them.

So there you have the intro to this multi-part review. I really can't wait to dive into this thing and really get into the PhysX implementation. At 1080p with PhysX, the game is such an awesome experience, so much better than the PS3 version I played a couple weeks ago. I'll be back with videos to show it off, don't worry.