This is something that has been bothering me for quite some time now. Personally I'm a huge fan of Batman since the animated series from the 90's - and I'm also a huge fan of stories about vigilanties and actually I even admire some real people who take justice into their own hands when the law enforcement or legal system just doesn't seem to really care for justice. Still I'm of course aware of the fact that vigilanties should be treated the same way as regular criminals since if vigilanatism was tolerated by any modern legal system, hell would break loose. It's enough that many trials are dedicated to determining whether a killing was performed in self-defense - I can't even start to imagine what happened if the ethical motivations behind a killing could be enough to make it a legally completely tollerable act. So, now that I have both expressed my fascination for this topic and proven that I'm neither a maniac nor a supporter of criminals:

In the animated series occasionally Batman would be accused of vigilantism by the media and representatives of the legal system. He is described as "judge, jury and executioner" in one person. The problem is: any Batman I know is NEITHER of these things (except maybe for the one who existed before the Golden Age of comics). As there was only one or two episodes where this would be a topic I never felt the urge to express my thoughts on this publically but lately I noticed that there's many discussions between fans and opponents of the Batman franchise where occasionally both sides describe him as a vigilante. Just today I stumbled upon a YouTube video where some teenager explains that Batman is not a superhero but a vigilante... no, please, that's enough! So now I'm gonna explain to you why Batman is NOT a vigilante.

First we should ask ourselves: what does Batman actually do? Batman catches criminals and delivers them to the police or in some cases other represantatives of the law. In almost all cases he's hunting down people who are already being regarded as criminals not just by the society but even the legal system and who are being tracked by the police. He's never a judge, a jury nor an executioner. What Batman does is unofficial law enforcement.

Now let's look at the definition of vigilantism. The term vigilante is defined as a person who punishes alleged lawbreakers. Are Batman's victims "alleged lawbreakers"? Check! Does Batman perform punishments? No! Batman catches criminals but one of his most iconic features is that no matter what a criminal did, he's not gonna torture or kill him. There's always these incredibly tense moments where he's finally tracked down a villain, beaten up his goons and nothing is keeping him from torturing or killing his nemesis aside from his personal moral code. And following this code is equal to never passing the line to vigilantism. Ultimately Batman grabs the criminal and delivers him to the law so the jerk gets a fair trial - this means that the punishment, the most important aspect in vigilantism, is left to the legal system. On the other hand this introduces a dilemma which makes Batman even more interesting as killing the criminals would certainly keep them from harming the innocent people for good while Gotham's criminals have a tendency to escape from prison or continue their wicked ways even after serving their sentence.

Over the decades there has been of course many different interpretations of Batman but the description I wrote above applies to almost all of his installations since the introduction of the Comics Code Authority in the 50's. It's still true for the animated series, for Christopher Nolan's Batman movies (where it's always a central topic) and for the video games by Rocksteady Studios (Arkham Asylum and Arkham City). Interestingly enough Tim Burton didn't seem to care for this aspect of Batman in his adaptations at all while, let's be honest, the ethical dilemmas are the one thing that really makes Batman a remarkable superhero. Oh no... I just called Batman a superhero... oh, I'm gonna regret this...

Btw: if you want to see a real comic vigilante check out The Punisher!

This is my second entry in a series about big game design failures that either kept me from having fun with certain games or prohibited their commercial success for painfully obvious reasons. While at first I was kind of afraid that soon it would become very hard to find more entries I'm rather amazed by the amount of titles on my list. For now enjoy volume two.

Yesterday I read an article about Diablo 3 which says that there's gonna be no more skill trees and that now your character can be reconfigured at any time - it's incredible how surprised the author seemed, almost scared of those huge changes as if an unwritten law that has been valid for millenia was going to be removed. Oh my God, they did it, they broke Diablo! They have destroyed an RPG dogma that has existed for more than ten years. But hey it's Blizzard and of course all those kids that are whining about the changes will ultimately admit that Blizzard is ingenious and always right. The more professional reviewers will say "hey, it's Blizzard, they have two decades of experience and unlimited funds and can take as much time as they want, that's why this experiment did work out!". Duh...

Several weeks ago I started working on an article about games that started whole genres or at least spawned a good number of clones. Among them were games like GTA 3, Dungeon Keeper, Commandos,  Dune 2, Wolfenstein 3D and of course Diablo. In either case I was rather amazed by the fact how almost all the clones seemed to have been done by mindless sheep who not only were uncapable of actually improving the original games but also didn't even understand their very essence. Still some of them addressed several flaws of the original games but unfortunately weren't good enough in general to influence the whole industry. Now that Diablo 3 is coming nobody seems to remember that there has already been a "skill tree reset feature" in several Diablo clones, among them the rather boring Loki. So if even the creators of a mediocre clone seemed to notice that the idea of irreversibly defined skills isn't that good after all, how can so much credit go to Blizzard for abandoning their own idea?

In case you haven't noticed it yet: I'm NOT complaining about the changes in Diablo 3 here. No, as a matter of fact they are perfectly welcome to me. I would go as far as to say that Diablo 2 was a broken game and has finally been repaired and soon the classical skill tree will be considered as archaic and stupid as medpacks in first person shooters  - the question is: Why did it take almost twelve years for the big players in the industry to do something about the fact that cRPGs provide you with the perfect toolset to design your own unique hero, to experiment a lot with it, while the game mechanics punished you for doing so? One wrong click and your character was basically broken. On the apparent level it has always been about experimenting while the proper gamestyle was about calculating which future abilities actually make sense at all (while 90% of the others should be avoided at all costs). When I played Diablo 2 and created a character who seemed to work well at first I always feared that twenty or thirty hours later it would turn out that all my skill points were wasted and I could start all over. It's one of the worst gaming experiences possible and because of being afraid that this might occurr it was very hard for me to enjoy Diablo 2 or any of its clones. And now I'm supposed to be amazed by the fact that it finally occurred to Blizzard, supposedly the greatest game developer of all time? Oh yeah, I'm amazed all right - as I'm always amazed when someone is proclaimed a hero for destroying the monster that he created in the first place.

City Interactive is probably one of the weirdest companies in the video game business. Despite being known for developing and publishing lots of low budget crap they have grown extremely fast and its founder found his way to the cover of the Forbes magazine. So I decided that it's time to check out some of the games created by these guys starting with the original Terrorist Takedown.