Batman The Movie

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Batman must save Gotham City from a lunatic villain called “The Joker” who plans to take over and bring crime and chaos. The storyline is loosely based on the 1989 blockbuster movie “Batman”. The game features 5 levels of action. Your mission starts at the Axis chemical plant (were Mr. Jack Napier fell into acid and transformed into the deformed “monster” we all know... the Joker!) As Batman, you have to hunt down Napier and fight all his deadly gang members in order to proceed to the next level. Your main weapons are your fists, your kicks and your trusty batarangs. You can also use a bat-rope to climb into higher platforms. On each level, the action perspective changes and you also drive (or pilot) your Bat-vehicles (like in the second level where Joker is chasing you and you have to run to your Batcave driving your Bat-mobile.) While driving or flying, you have to avoid various obstacles and traps (e.g. police blockades) –and, believe me this is NOT easy as the gameplay gets frustrating, at least in most of the game’s versions (actually it’s hard to control the Bat-mobile, while the Bat-plane seems more controllable. In any case, Batman: The Movie is a classic, end of 80s, action platform game.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the CPC+ version are nicely drawn using bright colors (probably this version sports a couple more colors compared to the standard CPC). Unfortunately, the screen scrolling on the CPC+ suffers quite often since there are several frame-rate drops here and there. In general, the CPC+ version looks more like a direct port from the older CPC. Note: I think that if the game was developed from the very start on the CPC+ hardware, it would offer way better graphics and scrolling. The quality of the enhanced CPC+ color palette can be clearly seen on the loading screen displaying Batman; a picture that looks more like a 16bit screen rather than an 8bit! Aurally, the game offers the classic Batman-tune we all know from the Atari ST version, while each level has its own music scores along with some “catchy” SFX. Compared to the other 8bit versions, the tunes here are all in stereo but the C64 version plays more qualitative tunes due to its more advance sound chip (SID).