For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Chiasm's Batman (NES) maps.
With Michael Keaton returning to playing Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Flash movie opening this month, why not revisit the NES game "based" on the 1989 Batman film?
Though, when saying Batman (or "Batman: The Video Game") on the NES is "based" on Tim Burton's cinematic take on The Caped Crusader, it is only very loosely. It does share character designs with it, and the Batmobile looks like it should (in the cutscenes and sadly not playable), and the Joker is naturally the final boss, but there's not much else that is similar. Whereas the film is dark - both thematically and visually - this game has rockin' tunes and a colourful palette. Rather than just gothic architecture, jump (and wall-jump) through areas you might expect in a sci-fi adventure, like The Underground Conduit (Stage 3) and The Laboratory Ruins (Stage 4). In addition to the Joker, Batman will face lesser-known villains, consisting of Killer Moth, the Electrocutioner, and Firebug.
Despite the incongruity to the source material, this licensed game is actually very good, in the sense that it is quite a solid gameplay experience. Like Sunsoft's other film adaptation, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, it forgoes faithfulness to the film in favour of fun (when not frustrating) 8-bit action. Sunsoft did incredibly well with the music and graphics in their NES games at this time; see also Blaster Master! Thankfully, Chiasm has mapped out all of Batman, so we can appreciate these fine graphics anytime here on VGMaps.com.
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this good-looking and legitimately good licensed game, Chiasm's Batman (NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for June 2023.
