Batman Forever: The Arcade Game

Variants

• There are no known variants.

Misprints

• There are no known misprints.

Review

Quick Capsule – Not a Review

Hello train, meet wreck. The game based off of the arcade game based off of the movie is one of those rare gems where no matter how bad you know it is you just can’t turn away.

A side scrolling game a la Final Fight heritage, Batman Forever fails on all cylinders sans one; hyper combos. As your stiffly animated character literally slides across the playing field, you can mash on the buttons in different Street Fighter patterns to see if any combos can be unleashed, resulting in 200 hits. The problem is, most enemies only need 4 hits to die, and bosses fall off around the same number, thus rendering the option useless.

To make matters worse, the game follows the insane psychotic color scheme of the movie, which means your eyes are bathed in pastels and bright primary colors that should never have met on-screen together. Cobble that with the horrible pixelated characters, awkward animation, and an almost seizure inducing set of special moves, and you have a concoction of visual crap with no game play to save it.

Except I can’t turn away. As horrible and cheesy as all of that sounds, it’s become one of the best guilty pleasures. Throw on a GameShark with Infinite health and a Turbo Fire controller, and it’s just a surreal experience.

As of this posting, it’s averaging in the near $100 levels on eBay. It ain’t worth that much cheese, trust me.

Final Score: NA – No Review

Summary Text

Screenshots

Videos

• There are currently no videos for this game.

Trivia

• This wasn’t the first Batman arcade game! There was originally a very limited production of a side scrolling game for the original Michael Keaton Batman that never saw a home release. It too was a side scrolling fighter, but with classic 2D images and driving sequences.
• Acclaim must have had a weird licensing deal where they could have the characters, but not the costumes. In every game they made based on the Forever movie, Batman and Robin’s outfits don’t match up. Batman’s costume has an oversized insignia, while Robin has some minor coloring issues. Don’t even get me started on the 16 Bit version costumes…ugh.
• Plenty of sound bites from the movie are used in the game, a particular favorite being The Riddler quip, “Now THAT’s impressive!” after the player performs a high ranking combo.
• Practically every aspect of this game is digitized; i.e. just like how Mortal Kombat was developed. Sadly this really shows, since whenever you’re in a crowd no one really matches up.
• Also released on the Saturn. The only real comparison would be the Saturn’s ever-so-barely better character renders, and that’s about it.
• Despite teasing you in the opening trailer, and even having it bring your characters in, there’s no Batmobile stages to be had.