13 Video Games That Define The Modern Era

7. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Back in 2009, Rocksteady achieved the long-thought impossible with Batman: Arkham Asylum, otherwise known as the first super-hero game that wasn't super-terrible. Quite to the contrary, actually. After years of half-made, movie-licensed tie-ins and uninspired cash-ins, Rocksteady's Batman had no Summer movie release to meet. No predetermined plot to butcher and compromise. Arkham Asylum cut to the core of what makes Batman such an incredible character to all his fans, splicing the talent and tone of the 90s Animated Series with the the most fitting backstories from The Dark Knight's official comic lore.It's a bummer that more action games have shamelessly aped Arkham's combat than those that have tried to do something original with it. Sleeping Dogs came the closest, putting an R-rated, kung-fu twist on Batman's free-flowing dance of counters, dodges and multi-takedowns, but the caped crusader still knows best. The Arkham Series is the modern day champion of exploratory problem solving and multi-tiered level design. Rocksteady keeps their Triforce inside a Zero-Suit... if you catch our drift. The best thing about the whole experience was how well the game mechanics defined Batman's nature - how the key principles of fear and non-lethal combat directly influenced gameplay. The Arkham games have surely set the standard for modern hand-to-hand beat'em-ups, but they've also married the narrative and context of a deep, dark world with thematically consistent and fiction-specific game mechanics. If every super-hero game based its moving parts in the core themes of its main character and their role as a crime-fighter, maybe we'd have a few extra games as good as Arkham Asylum. And then there's Arkham Knight, right around the new-gen corner. Holy Back-catalog, Batman!