Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is the future of kusoge

destructoid.com:

Batman Beyond was an awesome cartoon series. It’s like if Spider-man was mentored by Batman in a cyberpunk future. Batman’s latex bodysuit is filled by a teenager who has to manage being a super-hero, life, puberty, and a secret identity. Plus, you get to see what happened to some of the rogue gallery from Batman: The Animated Series. It was schway.

There was a straight-to-video movie for the series in 2000, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. It was no Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, but it was surprisingly dark and enjoyable. There was still some Saturday Morning goofiness at the wrong moments, but definitely a good complement to the series. It was, at the very least, a dark epilogue to Batman and Joker’s troubled relationship.

Then there was the game; 2000’s Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker for the N64 (also PS1 and Game Boy Color). Back in the day, it came out a few days after The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and there was no way it was getting my attention. Going into it for this article, I knew two things: It was so horrible it got a score of 1.5 out of 10 from EGM and it’s a beat-’em-up. Now I know too much. That did not adequately prepare me.

So, there’s this belief about the N64 that it didn’t get as much shovelware as the Playstation because of the prohibitive cost of publishing on a cartridge compared to a CD. That might be true because it didn’t get singular versions of every Hasbro board game. It got Monopoly, but I thought that was a decent translation at the time. That doesn’t mean it didn’t get bad games, though. It definitely got plenty. It got some of the worst.

Batman has had a shaky relationship with video games. There are some great standout titles, but a lot of them have been guano. I can’t claim