 I remember seeing Batman Forever in theaters when I was a kid, and it was a good time. The Batman movies back then had kind of a sillier vibe to them back when Joel Schumacher was the director, and they were much different than the Christopher Nolan Batman films that came later. They weren't as ridiculous as, say, the 1960s Batman TV show, but they were decidedly, eh, I'll say less serious than what we're used to now. Sadly, Batman Forever's accompanying video games for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis did not match the vibe of the movie at all. Instead, they were a dark, dreary, unintuitive mess of a game that's easily one of the ten worst games on the Super Nintendo in particular. What I did not know until recently is that there was a completely different Batman Forever game simply titled Batman Forever the Arcade Game made by Probe Entertainment and Iguana Entertainment, the latter being best known for the mega popular NBA Jam series. It's yet another arcade game I had never seen before, and yeah, as you can clearly see, this game is what the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games should have been from the get-go, just a simple beat-em-up, kinda like what Batman Returns was, just set in the Batman Forever universe, so to speak. You can play as Batman or as Robin, and you walk to the right and smash bad guys on a playthrough that lasts eight levels, and of course, this being an arcade beat-em-up, this game is two-player co-off, and you can both play as either Batman or Robin at the same time, which is kinda cool. This game features typical beat-em-up controls, punch, kick, jump, land consecutive hits to do a combo, and yeah, I get it, some folks may think that's a bit boring, but Batman Returns Arcade does put its own unique spin on things. I like the interactive backgrounds, like being able to smash enemies into windows, or having wrecking balls drop down from nowhere to smash you or an enemy, then that same wrecking ball can also smash stuff in the background that falls on you. There's also hilariously goofy power-ups here, the same you'd find in most other beat-em-ups at the time, but I guess it's just kinda funny to be seeing them used on photodigitized characters like this. Hey, what the heck happened, I shrunk? What, did somebody use the lightning bolt from Mario Kart or something? I love that he's tiny and can still unleash tons of damage. It's like watching Frank Reynolds in a Batman costume go to town on some goons. And it's not just you that shrinks, you can also shrink enemies if you find a certain power-up. Now, that's funny. You can also collect Batarangs, you can use his weapons along with a bunch of other stuff, and good God, this game is so freaking busy with so many different notifications and power-ups and Batman logos that you collect, and half-damage and 100% damage and what the hell is even happening? I mean, it's fine if a game wants to be this fast and this crazy, but what makes it kind of a bummer for me is the constant camera shaking. It makes me feel like my eyeballs are gonna come loose from my skull and just fall out. It just really gets old. Still, I do appreciate the ridiculousness this game brings to the table, like throwing this guy into the background and, uh, did he just explode? What the hell was that? In the fourth level, you can send dudes flying out the window, wee! I also love how some of the enemies talk. I can't speak to how closely this game follows Batman lore, occasionally you do hear what sounds like Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. I know a little bit about Batman, but not that much, and when I got to the third level boss here named Tassel, I googled Batman Tassel to see if this was someone from the comics or the movies, and all I could find were actual Batman Tassels. Oh well. What's interesting here is that for each token, you get not one life, but three lives, and that's because this game is absolutely positively brutally difficult. Classic arcade cheesing for quarters. I mean, you can lose a life in a blink of an eye, it's a little ridiculous. If you're gonna play this one, you're gonna have a way better time with the second player, just because you have a much better chance of seeing more of the game that way. Plus, with two players, you can do some pretty cool combo attacks that are a lot of fun. Batman Forever Arcade was developed on Sega's Titan technology, which was essentially the basis of the hardware for the Sega Saturn, so naturally this game did receive a Saturn port, as well as ports to PlayStation and DOS, but as usual, the best way to play this one is gonna be the original arcade version. So yeah, ultimately, Batman Forever Arcade is pretty good, but not nearly as good as some of the other arcade beat-em-ups I've touched on over the past few months. To put it simply, this one's just not as fun. It definitely has fun moments, but this game's difficulty is absurd. It's such a grind to play this with just one player, and there's so much going on with tons of crap to collect, and I don't even know what the hell is going on or what does what, and the constant camera shaking definitely does not help. Still, this can be a pretty fun one with the second player, and yeah, I would recommend other games ahead of this one, but if you played all those games to death and you're really into arcade beat-em-ups, then this one is still worth checking out any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.