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This hack falls in the typical fanmade recolor pitfall: by trying to make sprites look more accurate to official artwork palettes, the main character blends into the background, rendering the action unreadable. In the heat of the action, you can't easily tell where your character is at any given moment, resulting in cheap deaths. Not what I would call a good design decision nor an improvement over the original game.

There's a reason why character sprites don't always have the same color as their official artwork. Action must be readable, first and foremost.

Batman is one of the best NES games, despite being a licensed title, and this hack breathes new life into it. The new layouts in this hack are creative and fun. It's cool to be able to revisit a favorite game and experience new surprises. While not overly difficult, this hack does use the game mechanics in interesting ways to make it a fresh experience. The new visuals are fun, too!

I was so excited to enjoy this hack when I read up on it. Bullet by bullet I grew more hyped. New graphics, rebalanced difficulty, new life.

But the product is literally too dark. You can't make out the platforms from walls and girders because they are all in DARK grayscale. Sometimes you'll wander through tile after tile of black gunk only to find a dead end.

Everywhere they made changes, the game chugs to 15-20 fps. Probably using an editor or superficial hacks, I can't imagine they wrote any new 6502 assembly code for it the way it just dies with more than 5 sprites.

It's like all of the life was systematically sucked out of the ROM; there's nothing left but irrelevant "balance" changes (always 99 ammo, irrelevant boss fights). Also, I think wherever an easy change could be made, was made, to an overall confusing and amateurish effect.

The artificial difficulty and inscrutable nature of the hack make it much much harder than Batman (NES).

That being said don't let this review keep you from trying it! And thank you to the content creators!

The platforming challenges are fun, the bosses are easier than the NES original. The game is fairly well made and an enjoyable playthrough.

This hack is the definitive way to play Batman: The Movie. The new character, boss, and most level palettes reflect a more modern Batman tone that really captures the dark and gritty work that Batman does in the night. This hack is worth recommending on that aspect alone, and I had a great time with it. However, there are a few levels where the author decided to go with neon green and purple colors that just didn't fit the rest of the aesthetic and left me wondering why they were included at all. If this is fixed in the future, this would become the perfect Batman experience on any console, not including those stupid jumping enemies of course :( .

Excellent improvements! It's playability improved! The change of platforms gave good result! but it needs improvements in the color palettes, since there are many levels that look like a color circus, there is a lot of uniformity in the application of the palettes of the level backgrounds. Improvements are needed!

So, let's get the changes not mentioned out of the way:

• Hearts recover at least 4+ health, possibly all your health, and seem like rarer drops compared to bonus points/ammo. I was never lower than about 4 health, so I don't know for sure, but each time I found a heart I recovered to full health.

• Ammo respectively gives you 20 ammo, not 10.

• All the bosses are drastically lower health and have been made easier. Some, rendering the challenge obsolete. Yes, The Joker was a bit of a pain in the original, but now he takes 2 punches to kill.

• For some reason, all the text in the game, outside of 3 words in the prologue have been removed ("Gotham City", "Rachel" and "Joker"). Claiming the story now centers around "The Dark Knight" while boasting "new scenarios" and removing all forms of text and not mentioning anything about the new universe our caped crusader has found himself in is I think weak writing. Even the credits were removed.

So, why am I not recommending this?

I actually speedrun Batman now and again. I can beat the original game in about 11 minutes, so imagine my surprise when I was poking around romhacking and saw someone messing with it. I've browsed this site for years, and rarely does Batman pop up on the feed. The biggest gripe I think I have with this hack as it struggles heavily to make itself unique. Yes, the colors are different, but I'd say a good 80% of the design is still the original level(s) from the original game. The other 20% is awkwardly placed blocks, and some which aren't polished or finished (for example, some overlapping of two different sprites in the first stage with the two jet pack enemies on top of the stage.)

It's amicable you tried, but the production values of this scream that someone learned an editor for the NES Batman existed and spent 3 hours fooling around with it, and then decided to upload it to romhacking for people to check out.