Batman Returns – The Driving Game is one of the most amazing 16-bit experiences I ever had. Sega positioned it as such, too, as there’s an option right from the start to play the driving levels exclusively (plus, choosing this option added an extra driving level to the end of the game). That the cartridge game was in there was more of a bonus. So basically, I bought the CD version under the pretense that I was buying kick ass driving game, not to mention a showpiece for my expensive add on. But the driving segments promised to put the Sega CD through its paces, with crazy amounts of scaling and rotating sprites (state of the art on consoles back then) that put the sheet of paper Batmobile segments of the SNES Batman Returns to shame. Yes, the main action game was just a repackage of the Genesis cartridge. The main selling point on the Sega CD version was the all new driving segments. Most importantly, though, was that it played like a very shallow, overly frustrating beat-em-up. The music was also prety awful (a bit of a trend in Sega’s Genesis games for a while there). The characters weren’t all that well animated, the colours were washed out and everything was very purple. The Genesis game, on the other hand, was pretty darn ugly. The SNES game was a gorgeous looking beat-em-up in the vein of Final Fight, where an impressively big Dark Knight dismantled the Penguin’s Red Triangle Circus Gang one latex-covered punch at a time. Batman Returns on the SNES was a completely different beast than the game found on the Genesis (published by Konami and Sega, respectively). The Batman Returns games are another example of the strange – and wonderful – place movie license games were at during the 16-bit era. While Sega was so busy trying to show the world the benefits of their CD add on through full-motion video games like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, the released Batman Returns and showed gamers just how much horsepower this much maligned system really had. Anyone who’s listened to our fine podcast likely knows that I count this game as one of my all-time favourites.
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