Egotastic
Huzzah! Alongside the lofty likes of Tetris, Asteroids and such, this is retro gaming. Space Invaders, which surfaced way, way back in the cloying sands of time (1978), was enjoyed/sprayed by errant beer-droplets in drinking establishments/sworn at upon game over screen by so many of us. Those endearing, iconic and harshly-angular ‘invader’ designs -screw you, Thing-That-Looks-a-Little-Like-an-Octopus, That Other Thing and... That Other Other Thing! Screw you always!- are now an intrinsic part of popular culture. But why? WHY?
As the developer himself was (not) heard to proclaim, “A plot? An actual goddamn reason for shooting the shit out of E.T the Extraterrestrial’s extended family? Who has time for that? Nuts to it.” Essentially, then, we have nary an inkling as to who’s invading/why they’re invading. A later iteration featured a minigame in which a elderly criminal psychologist with a shit-tacular beard rambles for six hours about the roots of their invasion-centric tendencies, but it was not particularly well-received. Or, y’know, real.
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Meet Black Mask and Deathstroke, the First of the Villains in Line for Punchy Bat-Justice in Batman: Arkham Origins
As we saw last week, the prequel to the much-ballyhooed Arkham games has been announced (refresh your memory glands with our previous coverage right here if you missed it). This is a title of the sort of caliber that can garner ‘Game of the Year 2013’ nominations before even a piss-poor trailer comprising about three nanoseconds of gameplay footage amid copious PR bullshittery from the developers is released. It’s an exciting prospect indeed. If you’re a fan of the previous installments (which you damn well should be. We’ll refuse to indulge in friendly-yet-awkward, averting-eyes-from-your-neighbor’s-wang adjacent urinal small talk with you in public toilets if you aren’t), you know this.
But what you may not know is just who the hell some of these guys are. Bruce Wayne in his vaguely camp Halloween/fetish-y pervtastic get-up is instantly familiar, of course, as is the Joker, Catwoman and so forth, but it becomes a little more obscure after that. For those of us without the comic book expertise of the guys of The Big Bang Theory, hit the gallery to meet Deathstroke and Black Mask, the first of Batman: Arkham Origins’s announced aggressors.