Arkham Origins is like Season 4 of Community..

Yeah, remember when Dan Harmon left Community? It was the same actors, same setting, but it felt, lesser. There were less risky jokes and plot lines and the same irreverent spirit was gone. Hell there were even some continuity issues along with retreading old plots. It was an ok substitute, but it wasn't the Community that was the best comedy on TV for the last 3 years. This is Arkham Origins, it's got a familiar style and setup to previous Batman games, and it does a perfectly ok job at imitating the previous efforts, but it's a noticeably lesser one, with virtually no risks taken, treading a ton of familiar ground and if you are a comic book fan, having some pretty big continuity errors. On top of that, nothing runs quite as smooth as it did in the previous Batman games, everything stutters just a little. In the end, do I like it? Yes, but I'd have a hard time recommending it at $60 to all but the most ardent Batman fans out there, who basically need a fix. Otherwise, you are probably better off waiting for the inevitable next gen entry most likely being worked on by Rocksteady as we speak.

This a huge release week in videogames, if your aren't counting the new consoles which will have a bunch of already-released titles, this is probably the last big release of multiple titles before the end of the year. There's Assassin's Creed IV, Battlefield 4, WWE 2K14 and Sonic: Lost World. Admittedly I'm not a huge fan of the AC series, but this change in direction means I'll at least give it a shot. The reviews for the new Sonic game are all over the board, I'm not hopeful but I plan on checking that one out too. I don't care about BF4, I just don't, so I'm not even going to bother, especially when the 360 & PS3 versions apparently run like ass, so why bother. Finally, as a wrestling fan, WWE 2K14 should peak my interest, but WWE games are sort of like Madden, yearly releases with little innovation. 13 was actually pretty good, but I honestly haven't played it a ton and see no reason to upgrade just so I can have official versions of wrestlers I downloaded. I'll be more interested when the next-gen version comes out and hopefully we can do things like survivor series matches, rumble matches with more than a few guys in the ring at once and competent AI, which was very present in the excellent N64 titles, but completely absent these last two generations. That's all for today, I will hopefully be back Wednesday with either a gamer cinema or some impressions depending on how my schedule works out.