Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis

***Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis*** is the eleventh episode of Just Bad Games, released on November 28, 2019.

## Transcript

**Shane**: *Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis* was released in 2003 for the Xbox and GameCube. It was developed by Lucky Chicken Games, because when I think of chicken games, I think of luck!

**Adam**: This game has you controlling the one, the only Aquaman!

*(Picture of the original Aquaman shown)*

**Shane**: Haha, no, no, not him! At least, not at first. *This* Aquaman.

**Adam**: He looks like something that washed up on the beach.

**Aquaman**: Little help?

**Shane**: That's right! The world finally gets a standalone Aquaman game, and they use his divisive 1994 redesign. This saw Aquaman's left hand eaten off by fish, and then he got sad and forked his stump.

**Adam**: But hey, on the bright side, it's still Aquaman. Arthur Curry himself. You have total access to all of his amazing abilities, each one making this iconic superhero an established member of the Justice League.

**Shane**: Let's see, that includes powers like, uh, swimming, uh, breathing underwater, and uh, talking fish into doing things they really don't want to do.

**Adam**: Hold on, swimming, underwater breathing, fishy talk? Is that all the powers he has?

**Shane**: Well, no! As far as the comics are concerned, he has powers like the ability to speak ANY language on Earth, near invulnerability, and even the power to manipulate the world's oceans!

**Adam**: Holy Neptune! Do we get any of that in this game?

**Shane**: No. You see, much like that Batman and Superman game we looked at, this game doesn't establish the lore or background of its main protagonist.

**Adam**: Now, look, we get it. Batman, Superman, these are very established characters. Even at the cost of bad storytelling, we at least know that-

**Batman**: I'm a little orphan boy raised by a butler, and I grew up to dress like a big bat! I scare criminals, but criminals don't scare me! My parents are dead!

**Superman**: I'm a little orphan boy who fell from space and was raised on a farm by two humans who taught me to embody justice and grow corn. My original parents are dead.

**Batman and Superman**: Orphan brothers! (cry)

**Shane**: But you see, Aquaman is a little confusing. He has multiple variations of background stories.

**Adam**: Oh, and this game was released a decade and a half before the *Aquaman* movie, so John Q. Public had little to pull from.

**Shane**: So far, everything about this game is a bit of a mess, right? Well, I say we all calm down and experience the game for what it is. Let's dive headfirst into *Tetris*-

**Adam**: No.

**Shane**: Come on, I don't really-

**Adam**: We can't. We have to actually do this.

**Shane**: Fine, fine! Let's play *Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis*.

**Adam**: Now, normally we would start off with glimpses of the first level of the game, but we gotta be honest: we were immediately distracted by the main character.

**Shane**: Look at that glorious coiff!

**Adam**: It's majestic.

**Shane**: It's free-flowing!

**Adam**: It's totally- covering his eyes.

**Shane**: And clipping through his face. I wonder if that hurts?

**Aquaman**: It certainly does.

**Adam**: Sometimes, if you're lucky, his hair will part, revealing a yellowish patch of skin.

**Shane**: Was Aquaman in some kind of hair-related accident?

**Adam**: Looks like he might wanna join the Hair Club for Fish. We're kind of impressed by such creatively reactive hair. But then we get to the first cutscene of the game, and there's a huge dip in the game's attention to detail.

**Shane**: Wow. This might be one of the most simplistic cutscenes I've ever seen, especially for this generation. It's a frame-by-frame comic book page played out with no voice acting, no sound effects, and absolutely no animation.

**Adam**: I'm really starting to think that most of the budget went into his hairdo.

**Shane**: Oh, I think you're right. Look closer at the hair in these comic pages.

**Adam**: What the- is his hair painted on?

**Shane**: Yes! It would appear that the complex underwater hair simulation of the in-game model wasn't something they could accurately capture in a still frame, so they likely just made a bald model of Aquaman and painted over top of every frame.

**Adam**: Why wouldn't they want this hair in every cutscene? Such a missed opportunity.

**Shane**: Speaking of missed opportunities, let's talk about the music in this game. In the cutscenes, you get generic-sounding tunes.

*(Generic action music plays)*

And in-game, it really doesn't get any better.

**Adam**: In fact, it's usually the only thing you'll hear while swimming around the briny depths of the ocean.

*(The music continues)*

You won't hear water sloshing by Aquaman's head, you won't hear the sound of underwater crafts the size of airplanes whizzing by, heck, you won't even hear Aquaman make an Aqua-fart.

**Aquaman**: (farts) 'Dya hear that? Of course you didn't.

**Shane**: The only sound effects you will hear are the basic sounds of punching, kicking, collecting items, and sometimes explosions- which by the way, they all sound like they're happening on dry land, which is incredible seeing how this entire game takes place **underwater**!

**Adam**: Oh, did we not mention that?

**Shane**: No! But we're gonna mention it now.

**Adam**: This whole game is a sequence of underwater levels. The bane of every gamer since the dawn of *Turtles* on the NES.

**Shane**: So of course, you'd wanna make a complete game around just that one concept.

**Adam**: Every stage is bland and colorless. It feels as though everything is lacking life. An incredible feat for Atlantis, a city that should have an enormous population.

**Shane**: That feeling of emptiness is furthered by all the levels in the game being incredibly dark. The designers probably did this purposely because we're all the way at the bottom of the ocean, I suppose.

**Adam**: I think they were inspired by looking inside a trash can with a few disheveled soup cans in it, all gray and hollow. Oh, while we're here-

*(The game falls into the trash can on screen)*

**Shane**: Okay, you do see massive submarines and underwater vehicles passing through the city, but they don't make any noise, they don't have any lights, and heck, even when they are clearly supposed to be animated- like this ship right here with an obvious propeller sticking out the back- they remain static, as if nobody on the animation team realized that the propeller thing here was supposed to twirl around.

**Adam**: It's all lifeless, besides the very few times you witness sea life kind of just passing through.

**Aquaman**: Ah, Dolpho! How's life, my perky aquatic chum?

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles)*

You think your wife may have been unfaithful?

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles)*

With a shark?

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles)*

Well, friend, you know what they say: there are plenty of mammals on the surface, and-

*(Dolpho phases through a wall)*

-OH! Holy shells, Dolpho! What just happened? Where'd you go? Dolpho? DOLPHO??????

**Shane**: Oh yeah, that happens a lot. The massive unanimated sea vessels we talked about earlier do the exact same thing if you watch them after a while.

**Adam**: If the sheer emptiness and visual jank hasn't scared you away, what does the gameplay have to offer?

**Shane**: Very little. Aquaman controls with one thumbstick to steer, and the right trigger to propel forward. This means if you go upside down, you don't have any controls to reorient yourself. And by the way, that happens a lot, so you'll have to wait for Aquaman to slowly kind of do it himself.

**Adam**: This becomes a major issue when combined with the dark visuals in these very confusing levels. You'll be given a compass to steer you in the right direction, but you'll likely get lost very easily.

**Shane**: That compass will guide you time and time again into the wrong area, smacking up against wallsor getting caught in corners.

**Adam**: It's massively frustrating.

**Shane**: Oh, that's frustrating? We haven't even gotten into the worst part. Let's talk about the combat.

**Adam**: Well, it's done with a trident, right? Like on the cover? Trident!

**Shane**: (whispering) Come over here, get real close...

**Adam**: (whispering) What is it?

**Shane**: **Aquaman never uses a trident in this game!**

**Shane and Adam**: Lie-dent. (laughs)

**Shane**: Instead, you flail your arms about as you threateningly doggy-paddle towards your enemies. And really, you just punch buttons randomly until the enemies just sort of disappear. Oh, but if that's too complicated for you, you can try out the combo system, which completely breaks the game.

**Adam**: Yeah. Just look at this move. You paralyze an enemy with a kick, toss them into an enemy, and then that enemy becomes paralyzed. Oh, toss that enemy into another enemy, and then that enemy becomes paralyzed. Toss that enemy into another enemy, and then that enemy becomes paralyzed! You toss-

**Shane**: Y---- you get it? You just continue using the same move again and again, and the enemies have no recourse. But hey, let's say you're sick of all that movement and strategy- well, Aquaman can use his special fish-whispering powers to call his underwater friends for help. They just kind of pathetically headbutt enemies away, never to be seen again. There's a shark, a hammerhead, and-

**Aquaman**: Oh! Dolpho! Oh, you're alive! I was wondering where you went. I-

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles, then impales an enemy)*

HOLY SH\*T! DOLPHO, JEEZ!

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles)*

I knew you had a lot of pent-up rage, man, but-

*(Dolpho clicks and whistles)*

I think you may need to see a therapist.

**Adam**: About all you do in *Aquaman* is awkwardly swim around picking fights. So you'd assume that maybe the levels themselves would change to keep your surroundings fresh, but they rehash the same few levels over and over again.

**Shane**: Even the roster of enemies you face seem to be the same characters, same moves, same attacks, same animations- but they're just reskinned. So you fight them too!

**Adam**: Oh, this was only the first instance of seeing duplicated assets. The worst offender was the submarine levels.

**Shane**: Yeah, don't get excited. There are real, playable sub levels here with controls that SOMEHOW are more difficult to control than the already-impossible Aquaman himself.

**Adam**: Steering, shooting, and the simple act of not getting blown up are a marathon challenge. You lose health fast, but you'll lose your special attacks, like torpedoes, even faster.

**Shane**: The first submarine level is all about defending a building. Get rid of all the enemies and you're done.

**Adam**: The next three sub levels?

**Shane**: They are ALL THE SAME.

**Adam**: Each level has a big enemy in the center that you need to destroy, but the rest of the level is the same location every time! It's such a lazy reuse of assets!

**Shane**: And that big thing you need to destroy in the center offers the same, identical gameplay, even if it looks just slightly different. Destroy a bunch of small power packs to disable a shield that is hiding something else that you need to destroy. Rinse and repeat for each boss.

**Adam**: Eventually, boring, reused assets became the least of our worries, because when we got back into a normal fight, this happpened:

**Shane**: Aquaman's spear hand just kind of glitched off.

**Adam**: This is amazing! We don't know why this happened, but for the rest of the level, it never came back. So every enemy that Aquaman fought in the game was just clumsily bludgeoned by a stump.

**Aquaman**: Hey, what did the one-handed superhero ask the face? Stumped?

**Shane**: This hilariously awful glitch might've been a sign of things to come, as from this point forward, the game seemed to become less and less stable. We had the game crash to blank screens with some of the HUD still visible and the music still playing, but you couldn't do anything but restart the level.

**Adam**: Despite all of this, we kept playing through *Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis*, barely treading our way through the whole experience. And eventually along the way, both of us got to thinking that all of this seemed shockingly familiar.

**Shane**: Floating around and beating up enemies? Well, if you took away the water and brighten things up, it would look like you were flying around, beating up enemies. In fact, it would look exactly like *Superman: Man of Steel*!

**Adam**: But there's no way at all that the development team behind this Aquaman game was related to *Man of Steel*, right?

**Shane**: Wrong! We dug through the credits of both games and made a shocking discovery: senior people at DC Comics were involved in not only both of these games, but also, get this, *Batman: Dark Tomorrow*.

**Adam**: While companies shifted, the DC brand remained the same, with largely the exact same people running it. And these DC folks are not involved in every DC game ever made- just a few, and they happen to include these ones. Whether they had a creative role in these games, we likely will never know.

**Shane**: But what we do know is that these three titles are bound together by a cursed fate: each one showcasing some of the worst elements to have ever graced game adaptions of these enormously popular superhero franchises- and Aquaman. Every entry is a testament, an example, of just how awful a game can become when no love, effort, or time is placed into them.

**Adam**: *Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis* had an uphill battle. Taking a superhero deemed lesser by some, and twisting it into an awful game. It might've had a chance at one point in its development, but now?

**Shane**: **IT'S JUST BAD.**