I Love Being the Goddamn Batman

Remember in Frank Miller’s utterly insane All-Star Batman and Robin, where Batman is just running on the rooftops in the rain and laughing about how much he loves being Batman? It’s a tremendously stupid Batman moment, but it’s brilliant in that it captures every Batman fan’s mindset perfectly — yes, he may be brooding and tortured and orphaned, but we all want to be Batman because his life actually is awesome. If we got to run around in a costume and use insane gadgets to beat up bad guys all night, we’d be cackling too.

I bring this up because Batman: Arkham Asylum is coming out in a few weeks, and someone made this video of several of the “Takedowns” Batman can use to bring down thugs almost instantly, and it’s awesome. This is really the first Batman game that will let you act like Batman, whether its skulking and picking off your foes or just beating the hell out of a group of them at once, and both sets of gameplay make me cackle gleefully, just like Batman on that rooftop. Have we considered that Miller might have been playing an early build of the game when he was writing All-Star?