Batman - The Caped Crusader

Year 1988, and Batman wasn't yet Burton's Dark Knight — that would come a year later. This Batman belongs to an older school: comic-book style, colorful, a bit naive. And that's exactly what the game from Special FX looks like too.

Batman: The Caped Crusader is actually two separate mini-stories packaged into one bundle. In the first, you stop the Joker; in the second, the Penguin. Gotham City, danger, the Dark Knight arrives. Nothing surprising, but for 1988, it's a solid license.

The gameplay is adventure-driven — you walk around screens, collect items, solve situations. The whole thing is presented as a series of comic panels, and that was genuinely an idea that grabbed people's attention back then. The graphics faithfully mimic the style of drawn comics, colorful and flat, with clearly readable scenes. Controls were keyboard-based, which seemed perfectly normal at the time. Today you'll spend a bit longer getting used to it. The puzzle logic is straightforward — don't complain about the difficulty. The game doesn't treat you as an enemy.

What I remember most is that comic-book visual style. In 1988, it wasn't a given that a game looked like it was torn from the pages of DC Comics. Most platformers and arcade Batman games back then were generic action with Batman slapped on at the start. Here, someone really tried to capture the aesthetics of the source material. It's aged acceptably — the graphics are old, but deliberately stylized, so it doesn't hurt as much. What's worse is that the puzzles themselves are short and pretty simple, so the whole thing feels more like a rough sketch than a full-fledged adventure. Two games in one package doesn't mean double the fun, just twice the same serving.

Today, mainly those wanting to see how licenses were handled back then will play it — and how originally, when effort was made. For the average player, it's more of a historical artifact than living entertainment, but you'll get through both parts in the browser in half an hour and leave with the feeling you've seen something that genuinely stood out from the crowd back then. That's not nothing.