International-ish Batman

So I’ve been looking for Batman based things and more specifically Batman: Arkham Asylum / Arkham City based stuff since we left the UK and have to say it wasn’t going too well for quite a while. In China I saw a person with a Batman T-shirt in the Forbidden City in Beijing but that was about it. As they were a tourist I figured they probably didn’t count anyway.

Interestingly there was almost no presence of games at all. I managed to find a stall in a market with a Wii and a PS2 for sale but that’s about it. I didn’t ask if they’d been chipped but think they probably were (that would explain the lack of games shops!)

In Mongolia I found a small selection of PC games in a supermarket in Ulaan Baatar but again no Batman. In the toys section I did find these ‘generic’ super hero figures though:

I couldn’t find any games in Russia either which surprised me, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg which are both full of very rich people. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places?!

However, we’re in Finland now and Batman is back on the scene!

Firstly games shops exist again and I had no problem finding a copy of Batman in one such shop in Helsinki:

That particular shop sold electronics, games, DVDs and cosmetics which I thought was pretty strange combination.

We also found this picture in a media photography museum (it also had a Moomin exhibition, which is what we had actually gone to see!):

I have no idea what it says but he appears to be selling some kind of ‘Bat-juice’?!

Finally while we were in a supermarket (also in Helsinki) we found this:

Result!

Woohoo go Rocksteady! I couldn’t understand the words but the pictures looked good (especially the massive close-ups of Jamie and Sefton – Rocksteady directors!) I thought Harley’s pig-tails looked particularly physically realistic in the screenshots too! I’m really looking forward to reading up on the game’s progress once we’re back in the UK.

Since we first saw that magazine cover (shortly after getting into Finland) we can’t seem to get away from it as it’s for sale in just about every shop with magazines in it!

Is was interesting to see that games aren’t yet as truly global as film and music but, as pirated copies of most CD’s and DVD’s are readily available in all the Asian countries we visited, I’m not sure how much revenue the film/music publishers are actually getting from the region anyway!

For example, in China where IP and copyright laws exist but are largely ignored. While showing us around a busy market full of fake goods, mainly clothes but also things like ‘VAIO’ laptops, our guide was proudly telling us that the fake goods manufactured there were of a higher quality than the originals so most people preferred them! With attitudes like that stopping piracy is going to be pretty difficult.