Ahhaaa… well this one is surely awesome news for all the fans of Batman. Zotac International a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards has announced it own Nvidia GeForce GTX 285-powered graphics card based on the batman theme.

Not that Batman: Arkham Asylum has any less fans, but with the launch of this the fanbase is surely going to increase. With every purchase the buyer will get a free copy of the game. Touted to be the best game this year, this one has batman fighting all his old enemies including Joker and Poison Ivy.

Mr.Berger marketing director of  Zotac feels that the Arkham Asylum is an awesome platform to show off the power of the ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 285: Batman edition.

Well things just keep on getting better… this limited edition version could be yours for just £259.99 and without any premium. However, you got to be quick because only 900 have been made.

The inclusion of the Nvidia Ion means that this one could easily play a 1080p video and could make a decent attempt at gaming. A game of Batman: Arkham asylum could be played decently on this one, obviously with reduced details. According to the people at Nvidia the Ion enabled nettop balances power in a much better way as compared to the Ultra-Low Voltage segment  offered in the markets by the likes of MSI X-Slim and Samsung X-series.

According to Jeff Fisher head of the GPU department at Nvidia this move by HP is surely going to create huge waves in a market where just until the last month, netbooks were considered to be inappropriate for playing games.

Apart from the gaming features this one has a lot in store for every netbook fan and we would be coming up with a hands on review over it soon.

Thumbs up: brilliant gameplay, excellent visuals and voice overs, immersive story mode, in short you wont want to stop playing the game even after you are done with solving al the 240 riiddles.

Thumbs down: a few supervillains just make their entries but you never actually get to fight them, also it is really alluring to play the entire game in the detective mode.

Inside the trunk:
•  Genre Action
•  Number of players 1 Player
•  Connectivity Scoreboards
•  Customization Downloadable Content
•  Sound Dolby Digital 5.1
•  Resolution 480p,720p

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Well, there would be hardly anyone who has not heard about the Batman, but if you’re not into comics then surely you need to know what the Arkham Asylum is all about. This immortal psychiatric ward had housed most of the villains that Batman has ever come  across. And now this same psychiatric hospital is the background for some fantabulous third person action gaming. Moving ahead, if you are an ardent batman comic reader you will come across many familiar faces at the asylum and if you are not, no worries. This game has the history of every character related to it along with their motivations for being there.

As far as the story is concerned, batman has captured joker and is being returned to the arkham asylum under the watchful eyes of the batman. Well, as always joker surely has something going on in his mind and seems to be least bothered by this imbroglio. Infact, he makes up a plan of a grand party at the asylum and voila… the guest of honour is none other than our hero batman. This definitely is a trap but then again being batman you cannot avoid it or probably run away from it. Who would want to anyways eh?? As soon as batman enters the asylum he is informed that he is the chief guest at the asylum for the joker’s homecoming. And then all the combat begins with joker throwing a lot of goons at you.

Now, donning the suit of batman you get to do almost everything that you would ever want to do for maybe except getting behind the wheel of the batmobile. You solve riddles, get into tiffs with thee goons, use incredible gadgets and also do some amount of detective work. Yeah, now that’s the stuff the batman is made up of.

Coming back to combating the goons, you could use all the basic attacks and counters and with the use of just probably two buttons, the batman performs innumerable fight sequences which would probably give Hollywood’s best action choreographers a run for their money. Individually none of these goons pose much of a threat but the meaty part here is that you ll  probably never have to encounter them individually. They always attack you in a group of five to six people. Plus as the game advances, these goons are accompanied with guns, cattle prods and even knives forcing you to take your fighting skills to a totally different level itself. One of the most hair raising and funniest parts of the games are the boss battles between supervillains Scarecrow and Harley quinn. They are quite a few of them to add more flavour to the game.

As the combat gets more and more complicated the number of attacks and gadgets at your disposal goes on increasing as you progress through the story mode and earn more and gain more experience points and later on refund those points too get more and more gadgets. The biggest winning point of this game is that even in the most complicated combats you won’t have to use more than two buttons simultaneously. Well, though not most of the thugs are not smart enough to pile up on you all at once ,they are not too idiotic too. They pull out pipes to attack, throw boxes at you and also recover weapons from their injured accomplices. But one thing that these fools are unaware of is that the Batman is amusingly comfortable with the environment and that is definitely your strong point. You can hide around, mount yourself at high points and still attack the thugs and remember, though you can see them they just cannot see you so continue with your attacks. Initially your enemies would roam around as if they are the bosses of the universe but gradually as their number decreases they exude less confidence and slowly when joker starts taunting them it almost feels like they would start crying any moment.

This game surely kicks in the feeling of being a superhero into you. For example as the number of your enemies goes on diminishing their accomplices get visibly scared and start moving around in pairs, leaning up against walls etc. That feeling is absolutely killer.

This game is filled with loads of riddles, 240 to be precise being blurted out by Edward Nigma a.k.a the riddler. These riddles play a very important role in the game and solving them is absolutely necessary to gain experience points,unlock character bios, challenge mode maps and character trophies. These riddles come in a variety of flavours and sometimes they just don’t involve riddles at all but they never fail too reward you nonetheless. As an example, if you find out any of the hidden patient’s interview tapes you will be rewarded with an additional insight into the history of these patients. Now something which really excited me was solving the riddles which lead you to the photographic question marks which are painted all over the island. Now coming to the exciting part these question marks are in pairs which are situated in different directions. The difficult part here is clicking the pictures from such a direction that both the pictures line up accurately. And well, these question marks could be viewed using only the detective vision mode and these photographic riddles make the mode more interesting.

Though the detective vision mode doesn’t sound enticing enough you would probably spend most of your time in this mode even if your not looking out for the photographic question marks. I have been blabbering about the detective vision mode but I guess I need to first clear differentiate between the detective vision mode and the real vision mode. In the real vision mode all you see around is outstanding animations and killer graphics, but when you use the detective mode you can spot out the destructible surfaces as well detect your foes through the walls too.
There is also something which is even more exciting and comes in the form of challenge maps. There are a total of around 16 maps ranging from easy to extremely difficult. The challenges are easily balanced out between being solely combat-oriented sequences and stealth based ‘predator’ gameplay. In the challenge mose you have too win more and more medals too raise your ranks on the leaderboard. But still it’s the combat oriented gameplay which takes the cake.

Nitty- Gritty: Whoaaa.. this is one heck of a brilliant game. I still cant get myself out of the game. The visuals almost leave the screen ablaze. The hard-hitting combat sequences, the stirring soundtracks everything about this game is bloody brilliant. I am actually falling short of words to describe the resplendent experience. A must have for everyone batman fan and for every ardent gaming fan. Kudos to the makers of this one “Rocksteady studios”… outstanding work guys… The best part of this game is that it lets you be the “BATMAN” woohoo…
My rating : 4.5 on 5