Bird. Arkham Asylum could be the best ever By Garth McLennan Batman: Arkham Asylum could possibly be the best video game of all time. That may sound like a pretty bold statement to make but it’s true. This is one of those few games that come around once every blue moon. The game is a perfect meld of action- adventure and problem solving, sort of like The Legend of Zelda on steroids. The best parts of this game will blow your mind, and the worst will still leave you amazed. The absorbing storyline, written by acclaimed Detective Comics scribe Paul Dini, is simply superb, and you'll find it increasingly difficult to put down the controller. Arkham Asylum sets a new height for outstanding graphics, and the actual gameplay is easy but complex at the same time. The fight scenes are terrific, and really capture the essence of Batman from the comic books. Almost every room inside Arkham is laced with secret passages, mysteries and riddles that get tougher and tougher to crack. Virtually everything has the potential to be a clue. Much like the Grand Theft Auto series, Arkham Asylum has a free roaming style of play, which allows you to move through and backtrack around Arkham. There are certain puzzles and clues in all areas that can only be solved or obtained after completing later parts of the game, so you'll find yourself repeatedly going through already finished levels. A vast selection of Batman’s rogues gallery appear in the game and the voice cast is just perfect. Kevin Conroy and Star Wars’ Mark Hamill return from Batman: The Animated Series as Batman and The Joker, respectively. The plot involves the player as Batman moving through Arkham Asylum, which has been overrun and is now controlled from the inside by The Joker. As you make your way through the mad house, you'll have to figure out creative ways to subdue multiple opponents at once. Stealthily, you need to avoid detection on a number of occasions, level up Batman and upgrade everything from your basic move-set to the attributes of the Bat-suit. Special challenges can be unlocked as you progress through the game and find hidden bonuses. The story is richly woven, and it’s unmistakable that Dini has really brought the images from the comics to life. Plain and simple, it really feels like a classic Batman story. Like Batman comics today, the plot isn’t necessarily for kids, it’s very mature and remains dark throughout. When it’s all said and done, this is a game that people will remember for years to come. In a short time, people will be comparing it to such classics as Super Mario Bros’, GTA: Vice City, The Secret of Mana and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Do yourself a favour and don’t miss out on this one. Arkham Asylum is available for PC and Xbox 360 but the Playstation 3 version allows you to play certain levels as The Joker. Hitler: the biggest Basterd of them all! Tarantino gives us his version of how the war should have ended By Jay Schreiber, Arts Editor hat is the worst thing in the world? Waking up five minutes after class should have started? Having your car fail on you during a road trip? How about going into a job interview with a piece of spinach stuck between your two front teeth? The answer, arguably, is World War II, a battle between nations that saw most of Western Europe fall under the command of possibly the most evil man of all time, Adolf Hitler. Over the years, war films show the heroics in battle and terror amongst citizens of the countries involved. In Quentin Tarantino’s film nglourious Basterds both aspects are there except that the point of the film comes down to two words: “killin’ Nazis.” Anyone who knows Tarantino will member of the third Reich will be in the audience. Little do they know that the Jewish owner of the cinema has a secret agenda to wipe them all out and the Basterds are invited. Eli Roth, the talentless waste of oxygen he is, plays “The Bear Jew,” a big American Jew from Boston who loves taking his Louisville slugger to the side of a Nazi head. Despite his horrible career, Roth does have a good swing and I did enjoy his torturing of evil humans. Well done, Eli, now go find a hole to curl up in. Christoph Waltz and Til Schweiger were both fantastic as “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa and Nazi-killing Hugo Stiglitz respectively. Pitt was a good all-American who even up to the last minutes of the film never lost sight of his goal to exterminate the exterminators. Quentin decided that about half of “The entirely original premise is a Hebrew wet dream, a ‘this is what should have happened’ look at the World War Il.” attest to two things: he loves dialogue and nothing in his movie making process is out of bounds. Again the former video clerk delivers with intriguing scenes that quickly turn around to bite you in the ass before a sweet musical montage. Set “somewhere in Nazi-occupied France,” the movie follows a group of American, French and German Jews who turn against the Nazis in an attempt to take down the Reich. Unlike the allies, they don’t follow any international war rules except those laid down by their leader Lt. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt. They are called his Basterds, and their mission is to collect 100 scalps each, or die trying! When a pro-Nazi film is being premiered in Paris, every important 14 his dialogue would be in either German or French, a logical and intelligent choice for a Hollywood film. Last year’s Valkyrie was based entirely on the third Reich and yet there were no more than two sentences spoken in the mother tongue. Brad Pitt: 1, Tom Cruise: 0 For Quentin fans this is not Pulp part two and for historians, my sincerest apologies, but the Basterds are entirely fictional. Despite that, the entirely original premise is a Hebrew wet dream, a “this is what should have happened” look at World War II. See it for entertainment, see it for film study, or see it like I did: for revenge. Whatever the case, you will leave the theatre applauding. District 9 can’t change the world Blomkamp’s debut film wanting in substance By Liam Britten Science fiction is a genre almost entirely devoted to high-concept morality tales. Take a look at the Star Trek franchise; over the course of their countless series and movies, how many pieces have been fables that tell us in a thinly veiled manner that racism is bad? The thing about Star Trek and their life-lessons-in-space plotlines was that they followed through with their message. By the end of the episode, the bigoted aliens (or humans, robots, or whatever) had either learned to accept each others’ differences or they had failed to do so and perished. Either way, these episodes took their “racism is bad” stories to their logical conclusion and made a point doing so: we must confront bigotry or it will destroy us—and that’s a message for those of us living on Earth, not in space! That’s why this summer’s blockbuster District 9 was such a disappointment for me. The concept was phenomenal; alien refugees stranded on Earth face despicable racism and bigotry from a larger population that views them as far less than equal. The aliens, stranded on Earth because their spaceship doesn’t work, live in a fenced-off ghetto in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are widely reviled by human citizens who want them gone or kept separate from the outside world. Wikus van de Merwe (played ably by recently- unknown South African actor Sharlto Copley), an unsympathetic bureaucrat responsible for the aliens, is trying to move them into a new ghetto and begins a long process of evicting the aliens from their old homes, which is where the film begins. Is there no shortage of parallels to this plight? No end of real-world examples of this sort of thing happening throughout history, and sadly, today still? Palestine? Darfur? Jim Crow? First Nations people? Even the setting of Johannesburg itself, with traumatic memories of apartheid still fresh in the minds of many citizens is a parallel in itself. District 9 could’ve done so much more exploring these themes of racism and cold indifference to the unknown “others” in our society, but sadly spends its latter acts in a fairly standard, if well-constructed and paced, action sequence. Perhaps District 9 simply built itself something too big and important to finish in one film; that’s understandable. Perhaps there was a bleak point to the film abandoning the heart-wrenching and disgusting racism shown throughout the first act; maybe director Neill Blomkamp is trying to make the point that racism can’t be resolved in a three-hour film, or maybe it can never be resolved. But if those were his points, he certainly makes it a guessing game to know for sure. District 9 is not a failure by any means; the action is tight and visceral, and if that’s what you’re looking for, it certainly delivers. Perhaps if it was a little bit more of a sleeper film, instead of built up by a massive viral and traditional marketing campaign portraying it as a thinking feller’s sci-fi flick, I would’ ve enjoyed it more. But ultimately, District 9 simply dug up themes that it was either unwilling or unable to address with due care-and attention.