Moving on immediately from the last episode of The Angry Video Game Nerd, we have James, dressed as Batman and playing various Batman video games, being held captive by Mike Matei, playing the Joke, forcing the Nerd to play more Batman games, these having more of a focus on the Joker himself rather than more generic Batman characters and themes.
We start with an animated Batman style opening showing the Nerd and Luigi (yes, Mario Bros. Luigi) fighting various characters from previous bad games James has covered in the series. A cute little tribute to the 60’s Batman series.
Game wise, we start off with Batman – Return of the Joker on the NES. Not as good as the first Batman game on the system, but not bad. Unique enough, different for sure (and not actually based on a film) but lacking a bit. I do like that James gives Sunsoft, the developers of the games, credit for their great music – I just hate he skipped out on the best music they ever made for an NES game, the soundtrack for Journey to Silius / RAF World. Ah well, I’ll talk about that one personally in the future.
Anyway, the game gets difficult quickly, and seems frustrating enough. It’s certainly enough to piss the Nerd off!
We move on to.. Batman – Return of the Joker. Again? Yep. This time on Game Boy! It’s more of it’s own game, more similar to the first NES Batman game than Return of the Joker! Cruddy controls and what looks like pretty bad level design leaves this game also frustrating, with the Nerd unable to make it past the first level!
Next we have Batman – Revenge of the Joker on the Sega Genesis! Well, at least it’s a different title but guess what? It’s a 16 bit version of Return of the Joker on NES. Yep. Basically the same damn game, but somehow it’s worse here. Bad enough to cause the Nerd to break from his captivity (okay so it was crappy loose ropes, whatever) and take on the Joker! Here we get another lovely tribute to the classic 60’s Batman series with the typical crude jokes and finale that you would expect with an AVGN episode!
Final Rating: 4.0/5
Another fine episode. Honestly, one I really do enjoy. Too bad it’s so short – I feel like it would have been combined with the other part to be just one episode were it a newer AVGN, but at least these episodes feel like they belong together and tell a cohesive story (and are a cohesive set of reviews) as compared to other multi-part episodes in the series which were more segmented (Ghostbusters anyone?) The episode has comedy, has good parody, and is a nice mix of classic Nerd humor as well as something new.
At this point, you can tell the nerd is changing and really starting to hit its stride. We’re getting close to the beginning of what has to be the best period in the series. More on that, however, when we get there.
Enjoy!