The Adventures of Batman and Robin (InstanceTopic, 10)
From Compile Worlds
The Adventures of Batman and Robin is a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis game, starring the famous comic book character Batman and his sidekick Robin. This game is now one of Keiji's favorite games, because it is basically a SMD technical demo with added gameplay and an amazing soundtrack that totals 80 minutes of play time over 18 tracks. The game has several epic graphical effects dotted throughout it's levels, including giant textured lasers that fill the screen, a scene where three planes rotate independently and simultaneously in realtime, and a pseudo 3D pathway in the Mad Hatter boss battle. The same can't be said for the final boss, however, which is an anticlimatic failure with boring music and no special effects whatsoever.
Notable Effects
- "Two planes for the price of one"
- the same technique used in Sonic 3 and Knuckles during the Flying Battery Bomber scenes in Angel Island Zone and Mushroom Hill Zone
- Pseudo-rotation
- used all over this game, and in many others
- Using the previous two effects simultaneously
- Cookies for anyone who can find this combination used in any other SMD game!
- Bendy ladders
- like the AIZ vines in Sonic 3, but with added crosspieces!
- Software row offsets
- the technique used for the water surfaces in Hydrocity Zone and Launch Base Zone in Sonic 3. In this game, it's used for the top-down section for the sides of buildings, and combined with ordinary hardware hscroll for the Mad Hatter boss
- I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT
- How the hell do they do those fully-textured tetrahedrons rotating in 3D in realtime that take up at least 30% of the screen area for those enormous lasers?! Having technical knowledge of the Sega consoles and seeing this would make anyone go check that this isn't a 32X game in disguise! (Somehow... you check, but nope, it's still a Mega Drive game! O_O)
Notable Music
- Space Boss
- The most epic song on the whole soundtrack, and not to mention one of the most impressive SMD songs period. Much of Compile Worlds' new content, including the front page, Zeta, The Neptune and this very page was inspired by and written to this song. And, at a whopping four and a half minutes long, how could you ever run out of epic music to listen to with this on repeat?
- The Lab
- Sounds extremely similar to Sulfur.mid from Eggman Hates Furries, and just goes to show that the latter track is just begging to get a YM2612 port!
