Is Batman the Movie for the Atari ST the best development from Ocean?
 

The game is really impressive for the ST and you have to wonder why all ST games weren't coded this well. Superb 8 way scrolling on level 1, superb bitmap scaling on level 2 and 4.

The Amiga version was rushed probably because C= UK wanted to do the A500 Batman Pack, which my brother bought and I borrowed the game from him back in 1989/1990 so the minimal differences I suppose can be forgiven in this instance as it had to be finished by Xmas so Commodore could outsell Atari over the Xmas period.

I have no coverdisk previews of the Atari game to see if it was improved by the time it was released but this was a mighty bit of coding and some of the best 16 colour graphics I have ever seen.

Easily the most impressive ST game I have played, if this game had come out in 1987 when the STFM was £299.99 a hell of a lot of STs would have been sold to regular attendees of arcades back then. My friend who would bring round cracked copies of ST games to stop me playing C64 or Amiga games had moved away by then so I never got to see it but I would have been bowled over by this Atari game back then even as an Amiga owner.

I wonder why Ocean never used, or licensed, this 2.5D routine ever again (AFAIK).

Probably because the 2.5d routines were created and optimized exactly to work for the levels in this game with their specific gameplay and limited rendering requirements.

It plays better than it looks because of the high difficulty level of the first stage (who designs a game to have you simultaneously being shot at from the right and from the left, or a jump from under a hsotile position within 30 seconds, than it takes 20 seconds to get back to if you get it wrong? The next minute or so of the game is easier if you do get past those opening hurdles, by the way), but its technically pretty impressive for the time. I can't think of a better example of multi-directional scrolling (albeit still only one direction at a time) on a 512k ST. Not sure the Amiga version was 'rushed', almost no licensed games (or arcade conversions) were significantly enhanced for the Amiga as early as 1989.

As for Ocean's most technically impressive in-house development on any system (if that's what you meant) I'm thinking Chase HQ on both Z80 systems, both fine accomplishments within those systems. Their Amstrad stuff was generally very impressive actually.

It is doing parallax software 8 way scrolling for the background and the roadside objects are significantly larger than anything else seen before so regardless of these 'specific' conditions it is still pushing more pixels per second than anything else before it by a significant margin up to this point I would say.

Agreed, I don't like the first level much, it's not my kind of game, so on my A1000 I set the trainer to always start me at level 2 :)

I am really talking specifically about ST games by Ocean, the 2.5D level is pushing quite a lot of pixels and the scrolling is on a par with Leander by Psygnosis (which does slow down once you get some larger characters on Leander but most of the time is unexpectedly smooth I would say).

Smooth 8 way scrolling is rare, decent 2.5D before Lotus series on the ST is also rare, this game has both which is quite an achievement. To be fair I don't like level 3 at all and I can't remember what level 5 is like but the Batwing is so large it just stops you seeing enough to line up with the balloons. However, I feel these are game design problems, like having just an outline of the Batwing would help a lot on level 4, but the game's coding is top quality and it's not restricted to using less than 4 bits per pixel to achieve it.

In my view, a game with 'game design problems' can never be a company's best development for a system, impressively coded though it is. I bought games to enjoy them, not to marvel at the code in the bits I like and just skip the rest. I never spent much time with Batman: The Movie though, maybe I'm being harsh. Still, many of Ocean's better 16-bit games (both technically and gameplay-wise) were developed externally, though their in-house stuff wasn't all bad - Voyager, Parasol Stars, Addams Family, Hook, not to mention some of Ocean France's stuff?

Batman the Movie was first developed for Amiga, then for Atari ST.

Would need to see proof of that claim, from a dev point of view, that makes no sense whatsoever

I did spend quite some time with the game and I would agree. Batman the Movie is a game of cool tricks. The grappling hook mechanic makes up for the slow and predictable nature of the platforming levels. The zippiness of the 2.5d sections makes up for the extremely repetitive gameplay loop.

It's not a good game, to be honest. But it was really cool. So that made it way better than most other movie conversions which were both crap and lame :)

It does. They have added 5 interscene screens on the ST version that are not present on the Amiga Version, as they were added after.

I just have to voice my personal opinion here ;) I think it is an excellent game. It was one of the first games I got for my A500 and it blew me away. There's some trial and error to the first level, but once you get the hang of it and learn the mechanics that keeps you from getting hit (going down while grappling and thus making grenades miss and then continuing up), it all comes together. I am positive that I could complete level 1 in my first try, if I had a go at it today, even though it's been probably 15-20 years since I last tried it. All levels are good- except maybe level 3 that I never got the hang of. But that's probably on me... :-)

I love this game.

Not exactly hard evidence, but lacking any evidence to the contrary does make it more likely.

I love Crack Down because it was one of the very first games I got :) I don't think many people will agree with me when it comes to the Amiga version.

Well, if you change that to Crackdown for the Xbox 360, you are totally right. That was a freakin' awesome game! :)
And Batman being one of my first games is actually irrelevant - I think it held up very well over the course of the Amigas lifetime. Shadow of the Beast was also one of my first games, and even though sound and gfx in that also blew me away, I pretty quickly concluded that that was a bad game.

Not quite sure what you are refering to here...

They are not present on the Amiga version because they wouldn't fit on the disks Denis, ST version having chip music, Amiga version having samples meant ST had the extra room on disk.

Yeah I was too lazy and didn't quote dlfrsilver's post, then I got ninja'd.

You can also check reviews for the Amiga version (November/December 1989) and the ST version (January 1990).

This game is (imho) even more impressive on CPC. Probably one of the biggest and most polished productions for CPC of that era. Very faithful to the source material, with smooth scrolling, excellent tunes, great pixel art, colors and big sprites. They even (smartly) remade the batmobile and batwing sections in a sidescrolling fashion which stands out fine even today. Brilliant work.

indeed, I was impressed of the CPC version too before playing the amiga version (like with CHASE HQ CPC)