We video-game lovers of a certain age belong to an emerging industry demographic: the grumpy gamer. Like Frank Underwood, the political schemer played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards, grumpy gamers play in snatched moments of privacy in the short breaks of busy, stressful lives.
We buy consoles for our children, in part to recreate our teenage years, the good old days when we had to transcribe computer code from the pages of magazines before the satisfaction of a marathon all-nighter with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
We buy the games for the same reason my mum used to give me an apple, an orange and a sixpence every Christmas, or narrate “The Owl and the Pussycat” before I went to sleep. She did it because it took her back to her childhood.
So, I play Lego Batman with my kids, and when they go to bed I can play and review a darker Batman – this month, Batman: Arkham Origins, a cruelly unrewarding game, though not entirely without merit, as one would expect from this franchise.
The theme of Arkham Origins is assassination and survival. Eight mercenary assassins are hired to take out Batman. The Bat is supposed to glide through Arkham, picking up clues and solving problems as he works his way through the list of super-baddies who slug it out for the ransom on his head. Loyal butler Alfred, who dispenses advice to our solitary hero from the lonely Christmas batcave, assists him. I found Alfred a reassuring character – as one would expect from a Martin Jarvis voiceover.
Along the way, Batman meets old adversaries such as the Joker and the Penguin – the latter sounds like a Geordie, playing a New Yorker putting on a cockney accent. Victory requires the Bat to get into many fights with an array of thugs, some old, some new. By throwing old adversaries into the story, Warner Bros have given a familiar feel to its successful franchise.
That’s important because grumpy gamers are sentimental about old friends and foes. They talk about Mario, Zelda and Jet Set Willy as if they were the cast of digital friends reunited. When I press a fresh DVD into its console slot, there is always a parental impulse to lecture children about the artefact called audio tape recorder, the device that used to be the way we uploaded our games, back in the day. They look at me blankly, as blankly as they did on our first visit to Vinyl Revival in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Grumpy gamers also like to win as easily as possible. Games that require persistence and attention to nit-picking handset detail have less of a premium than they used to. When I slump into that midnight sofa, I want to mash the handset and not worry too much about whether it’s an XXY or an XYY thumb manoeuvre. I just want to deal with the bad guys and clean up the city as quickly as possible.
Is any of this good for us? Scientists in Germany have recently claimed that playing video games augments grey matter in the sections of the brain used for spatial navigation, strategic planning and working memory. On reading this erudite study, my immediate thought was, in an Alan Partridge voice, take down for Mr Keith Vaz. Video games are good for the brain. Gamers win; Daily Mail lose.
Cognitive science may be rebalancing the argument in favour of video games being good for humanity but I’m afraid Batman: Arkham Origins is not. The stimulated grey matter that results from the latest offering by Warner Bros only applies to those sections of the brain usually associated with frustration, intolerance and, well, grumpiness.
The good news: the game, which is a prequel to the successful Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, contains all the old features we’ve come to love from this franchise. The combat system is as graceful as a ninja at the Darcey Bussell dance school. Batman’s tech is all there: batarang and grapple hook, smoke pellets and explosive gel. He gets some new kit too, enhancing but not significantly altering gameplay for loyal fans. If it were a second album, the game would be More Specials – still memorable and loved by fans but less edgy, raw and lacking the shock of the new.
And here’s the bad news: I couldn’t do it. I just could not get beyond the first proper boss level, a dual with Deathstroke. Not being able to kill Deathstroke after 20 hours on a single level says more about my ability than the game but there’s a lot of grumpy gamers out there. Boss levels are by their nature tough to get through but surely it represents a failure for the developers in making the level so hard that you just can’t get past it?
In the end, I reset the game and started from the beginning on “easy” level. This was irritating. Even on this mode, I could not deal with Deathstroke without the advice of Bruce, the teenage son of a friend, which was humiliating. I played it 70 or 80 times before grumpily seeing Deathstroke get his comeuppance. The last time I played a game this punishing to user error was Manic Miner on the Spectrum. Then, nothing could prevent me from being pixel perfect until victorious.
This time round, it’s different. Batman dies but the grumpy gamer is born.
Tom Watson is the Labour MP for West Bromwich East
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