Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
In my two—count ’em, two—2026 playthroughs of Batman: Arkham Asylum, I’ve found a lot of things to talk about. There’s stuff I remember from 2010 (when I bought my Xbox 360, not when it came out). There’s stuff I think about now as a games journalist. There’s comic book details that read differently in 2026, game design tropes that read differently in 2026… I mean, this is an excellent game and just as good of a time capsule. But the thing I keep coming back to is this: why all the electrified floors?
There are multiple sections in the game in which Harley Quinn or the Joker or whoever will electrify the floor. Sometimes that’s with a pool that has a breaker thrown in it; a couple instances read as inexplicable tributes to probably the least-problematic part of The Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which Lex Luthor traps the Flash in a room with an electrified floor. Now, if that’s a reference to an extremely controversial and largely deeply unpopular comic that was the start of Frank Miller really losing it, that’d be one thing. And if it’s only there as an easy hazard to keep Batman moving around, that’s also be fine. But it’s weird, and it made me realize that this relatively prevalent in non-Batman interactive material. Like, literally, just this month, I played The Thousand-Year Door and Astro’s Playroom…
…Goddamnit, why didn’t I take today’s prompt to talk about Astro’s Playroom? Stupid, Wolfman, stupid!
Anyway, both of those also have rooms or platformers that shock you if you don’t move with precision. And so does Mario Kart 8, which I replayed for the first time in over half a year yesterday (though I didn’t go on Cloudtop Cruise; I strictly raced on ice courses). And so, I guess, today’s prompt is: what are your favorite and least favorite examples of a game threatening you with an electrified floor? So this is like, platformers set in lightning worlds or incorporating electrical hazards, or stealth games having floors that shock you, or… look. Things have been busy. You want a conventional prompt, wait three days. But you wanna party with the weird, bug-eyed, in-deep crazy ideas and needlessly overwritten page titles, here you go.
Wow, that was needlessly passive aggressive. Remember, you just gotta stay calm and relax. Things have been hectic lately, but this too will pass. What did you play this weekend?