Not every villain who opposes Batman can be as iconic as The Joker or Scarecrow, but that doesn't mean they can't be memorable. When crafting the Arkham games, developer Rocksteady knew just how to make the most out of the Dark Knight's diverse rogues gallery, applying smart redesigns where necessary to match the series' darker, grittier atmosphere. It's impressive when B-list bad guys like Calendar Man or The Mad Hatter can be made menacing, and WB Games Montreal later mimicked Rocksteady's style in Arkham Origins to elevate underachievers like Copperhead and Anarky into worthwhile adversaries.

With the release of to pursue new projects. That means there won't be any in-game criminal makeovers for the legions of forgotten weirdos who've made the mistake of trying to terrorize Gotham. The following villains are generally thought to be some of the least threatening crooks Batman has ever beaten up - but I'd like to think that the patented Arkham style could've scored them a spot on the caped crusader's Most Wanted list. Just imagine the possibilities of fighting the virtual, redone version of someone like...

He's ridiculed because: Poor Crazy Quilt. This petty criminal underwent an experimental procedure to restore his vision after going blind, but the results were less than optimal: Crazy Quilt could see again, but only in a wild kaleidoscope of bright colors. This constant, prismatic assault on the eyes drove him insane. Now, he cavorts around Gotham wearing a garish multicolored costume and a sight-enabling helmet, which can also hypnotize his enemies or zap them with lasers. Try as he might, nobody - least of all Batman - seems to take him seriously.

But in an Arkham game: If you've played , which employs dazzling visual effects that fill the screen with neon and corrupt pixels. Imagine seeing Batman transported into a similarly disorienting, intensely hued world when he's zapped by Crazy Quilt's beams of weaponized color. Given how gorgeous the graphics are in Arkham Knight, this kind of experimental aesthetic could look absolutely stunning.

He's ridiculed because: If you think The Riddler overestimates his own importance, just wait ‘til you meet this toga-clad gangster. Ol' Maximillian here is absolutely convinced he's the reincarnation of the Greek gods' head honcho Zeus, which spurred him to rise up through the ranks of organized crime. Even though he's got no superpowers or inherent strengths to speak of, he's somehow persuaded legions of gun-toting goons to obey his every command. Batman: The Animated Series has him fighting back with a thunderbolt-shaped electric rod, which helps makes his motif seem a little less dorky.

But in an Arkham game: Though he never shows up in-game, the unlockable character bios in Arkham Asylum depict Maxie as a beefcake with a deranged sense of superiority who went haywire after too much electroshock therapy. What if all that shock treatment left him with 10 million volts of electricity surging through his veins, not unlike a certain Metal Gear Solid villain by the name of ? It wouldn't be too much of a leap to think yourself a reincarnated god when you can shoot lightning from your fingertips and flash-fry your enemies in an instant.

He's ridiculed because: When you're a supervillain wearing a white leotard spotted with multicolored polka dots, getting any kind of respect is going to be an uphill battle. But don't judge this crook by his cover, because his power - the ability to morph any of the dots on his suit into a wide assortment of weapons - is actually a legitimate threat.

But in an Arkham game: Arkham's thumpy, trademark brand of fistfighting goes a lot deeper than merely punching and countering, thanks to the variety of enemy types you encounter later on. Throughout the series, Batman has had to deal with rioters, mercenaries, and assassins wielding swords, bats, electrified clubs, miniguns, and remote-controlled drones - but no one soldier combines all the tactics needed to deal with these assorted methods of assault. Enter Polka-Dot Man, who could use his suit to become an all-in-one foe that would demand mastery of all your gadgets and counter techniques to take him down.

He's ridiculed because: You know you're in for a treat when an original character is excessively campy even by 1960s, live-action Batman standards. Played by horror legend Vincent Price, Egghead's shtick is that he's obsessed with eggs. That's pretty much it. He's got a gargantuan bald head, wears a suit of white and yellow, chucks hazardous chicken eggs that can emit radar waves or noxious gas, and makes egg puns at every available opportunity. His greatest peace-disturbing accomplishment was instigating a food fight with Batman and Robin, who then proceeded to smash his face with eggs and fists.

But in an Arkham game: Let's go extra dark and disturbing with this one. Instead of chicken eggs, this twisted Egghead would be obsessed with stem cell research, plundering human embryos from Gotham's hospitals to fuel his own research for developing a genetically perfect henchman. Of course, there'd be many failures along the way - leading to an army of horrific, mutated fetuses viciously crawling at Batman like the . It'd be a scene right up there in the 'mind-warpingly disturbing' department as the infant Crawlers from Dead Space 2.

He's ridiculed because: Just look at him. Charles Brown (likely a reference to the kite-tormented protagonist of the Peanuts comic strip) decided that the best way to distinguish himself in Gotham's crime community was to soar through the air on a gigantic glider and wield miniature kites as projectile weapons. Without any updrafts or wide-open spaces surrounding the things he wishes to steal, Kite Man is completely useless. Unless you feel threatened whenever you hear "Let's Go Fly a Kite" from Mary Poppins, Kite Man is about as intimidating as, well, a kite.

But in an Arkham game: Batman's gone up against other high-flyers in the Arkham series, like Firefly and [minor Arkham Knight spoiler redacted], but they've never involved any test of your combat abilities. The AR flight challenges push your cape-gliding skills to their limits, but their presentation is simply boring. A fight against Kite Man could address both problems, testing your capacity for sharp aerial maneuvers while you fistfight in midair, weaving between Gotham's skyscrapers and divebombing to avoid Kite Man's attacks.

He's ridiculed because: Just as Bizarro is the polar opposite of Superman, Batzarro is the cartoonish negative of the Dark Knight. For starters, he wields dual pistols (which he may have used to shoot his own parents), calls himself the World's Worst Detective, and... has fangs and no eyes, for some reason. In an amusing flip of Batman's constant inner monologuing, Batzarro usually just blurts out whatever he's thinking (all styled with the same grating 'opposite day logic' as Bizarro-speak). Unfortunately, he's a little too goofy for many readers' tastes.

But in an Arkham game: The Arkham series rarely gets to flex its humorous muscles - but as your exchangers with The Riddler (and, on occasion, The Joker) prove, there's value to having bits of laugh-out-loud comedy amidst all the doom and gloom. As with his counterpart Bizarro, Batzarro's more unpredictable than outright evil, causing chaos whenever he tries to assist his idol Batman. Battling Batzarro could be a boss fight where you have to subdue him and a group of thugs before he kills them in an attempt to help out, all while he spouts ludicrous, laughable dialogue.

He's ridiculed because: Ever see a kid getting picked on because they take too much pride in their fancy calculator? Calculator (the Batman villain) takes that kind of regrettable preoccupation with number-crunching to the nth degree. His master plan revolved around preliminary failure: Calculator would dress up like a TI-83, get beaten to a pulp by various superheroes, then use his costume to analyze the do-gooder's fighting style in the hopes that he'd outsmart them the second time around. Unfortunately for his schemes, those calculations never seemed to pan out.

But in an Arkham game: Calculator has turned his criminal life around in the comics as of late, ditching the geeky getup for a job as a tech-savvy information broker and hacker for the criminal underworld. That effectively makes him the evil equivalent of Batman's close ally Oracle, who plays an important role in the Arkham games. Going up against an in-game Calculator might involve counter-hacking his attempts to take over the Batcomputer, assisting Oracle to help shut him out or misdirect the Calculator away from crucial intelligence related to the Dark Knight's next move.

He's ridiculed because: With a name like that, you might be expecting a terrifying Grim Reaper type who wields a scythe, but no - he's just a guy dressed like a skeleton who's really good at playing dead. By inducing a full-body yoga trance, Lord Death Man can fake his own passing, which apparently aids him in committing crimes. Then, somehow, he developed the power to actually reanimate himself after taking fatal damage. Though he's not much of a supervillain, you've got to give him points for sheer willpower.

But in an Arkham game: Lord Death Man's unique ability could push Batman to the limits of his 'no killing' rule (even more than running over thugs on the streets of Arkham Knight). LDM could create a scenario in which Batman would have no choice but to inflict lethal harm in order to prevent further calamity, forcing the Dark Knight to 'kill' him with the knowledge that it wouldn't take (this is actually something that The Joker has tried in the past). It'd also make for a pretty memorable 'Gotcha!' moment when Lord Death Man miraculously shows up later in the game.

WARNING: This article contains spoilers. Pretty much all of them.

Batman is practically a gargoyle in . He spends the night in a predatory pose, his cape lashed by rain, far above the dire avenues of Gotham City. Such is life for the wrathful vigilante born in … CRIME ALLEY. Ok. so the only Gotham people who work harder than Batman are the real estate agents.

One man’s urban decay is another’s open-world activity, though, giving Batman the ideal setup for a crime-punching superhero game. There’s just one problem with Gotham’s crime in particular. Let's go over some of the major events in Arkham Knight to find out what it is:

Commissioner James Gordon is an overachiever when it comes to abduction, getting himself captured twice in Batman: Arkham Knight - once by the title villain and then by Scarecrow. Eh, you know what? Gordon seems like a nice, hard-working guy, and since the Arkham Knight is partnered with Scarecrow we can knock his capture to a count of just one, but with joint custody between two supervillains. It’s kind of sweet if you don’t think about it.

Either way, the true indignity of Gordon’s problem comes from cutting ties with loose-cannon Batman. After Gordon storms off to finally sort things out himself, he bumbles into super-villain clutches and learns the hard lesson of Arkham Knight’s plot: only Batman can save us, because we’ve probably been kidnapped.

Oh, ok, another kidnapping. Sure. Gotham’s most belligerent botanist gets kidnapped and locked up in an improvised greenhouse before Batman’s even left his starting perch. She escapes almost coincidentally once Batman arrives, proving that she is immune to Scarecrow’s toxin and to any sort of clothing a normal woman might wear, like pants.

The fact that she’s dragged off to prison immediately without anyone even putting a sweater on her is a lousy fate to suffer, though perhaps not as bad as being played by Uma Thurman.

Arkham Knight rewards Oracle’s whip-smart advisory role to Batman by having her … hmm … abducted off-screen. Barbara Gordon’s technical skills allow her to hack and retrieve any information from within Gotham’s clock tower, granting her an immaterial freedom after Joker paralyzed her Batgirl career, but the game prefers to dangle her like a squirming carrot throughout.

The Joker’s earlier attack on Barbara is depicted in grisly detail, but her return to Arkham Knight isn’t given the same treatment - instead, we see Oracle getting shot in two different ways, thrown off a building and then dumped in the GCPD where she gets to hack some drones from afar. Her return from the dead isn’t even spun as triumphantly as the other thing that gets killed and resurrected: The Batmobile. You know, the non-person car?

Let’s give it up for the firefighters of Gotham City, who are essentially running around a bubbling volcano with just a handful of ice cubes and the constant fear of being mugged by lava from a bad caldera.

Though Arkham Knight reduces them to a percentage of game completion to be extracted from various parts of the city, these grounded city saviors deserve the help, not to mention the savage descent of Batman upon their captors. I mean, yeah, they also get kidnapped in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not like they’ve had a lifetime of combat training to defend against that sort of thing.

Hang on, Catwoman gets kidnapped? The acrobatic, masterful escape artist with nine lives and ten witty retorts per minute gets kidnapped by… The Riddler? The same disheveled anti-Layton designing Mario Kart tracks from his mom’s basement? Ok, fine.

Though Catwoman dismisses the ‘damsel in distress’ label, she says it while having an exploding collar strapped to her neck - and she can’t get the numerous keys to unlock it without Batman’s help. So, nice attempt at self-referential dodging there, writers, but nope. To be fair, though, Bats and Cats fighting through The Riddler’s abandoned orphanage is one of the highlights of Arkham Knight, even if a collar makes Catwoman less cool than she should be. At least it doesn’t have a bell on it.

After the world’s greatest detective concludes that Scarecrow is manufacturing his spooky chemicals at Gotham’s big, huge, unmissable chemical manufacturing plant - it’s a whole thing - he swoops in to save the workers being forced to work late (in the service of evil).

Alright, this one makes sense, even though it’s yet another consolidated kidnapping. Nobody living or working in Gotham would willingly help produce a fear-inducing toxin. It’s dangerous, evil and - depending on which neighborhood you live in - kind of redundant.

The flashback to the imprisonment and torture of Jason Todd - the second person to become Robin under Batman’s tough-guy tutelage - gives you a big clue to the Arkham Knight’s true identity. And by “big clue” I mean full-on confirmation, because why else are we flashing back to this now?

Though the Arkham Knight persona isn’t the one who’s kidnapped, it’s his drawn-out and humiliating captivity that leads to his festering lust for revenge against Batman. Maybe that’s why Batman’s running around rescuing everyone properly, hoping to avoid a small army of Arkham Knights nipping at his cape.

Aww, man, Lucius Fox gets kidnapped? Fox stays behind in Wayne Tower, despite a city-wide evacuation notice, working late to beef up Batman’s gadgets and deliver new Batmobile upgrades. He’s charming, he’s enjoying the absurdity of designing toys for a billionaire vigilante, and he’s collected. Later, though, he’s collected at gunpoint in the office by Thomas Elliot, a Bruce Wayne doppelgänger going by the name of Hush.

Batman doesn’t tolerate kidnapping, of course, and with barely a biff or a pow he manages to negotiate Fox’s freedom.

Whoops. In negotiating Fox’s release in Wayne Tower, Batman reveals his face to Hush as a reminder that they used to be childhood friends, and that one of them grew up to be an armored weirdo who breaks arms and probably doesn’t appreciate hostage situations in his damn office.

After bludgeoning him into unconsciousness, Batman decides it’s probably best not to send Hush straight to the Gotham lockup. Instead, Hush is locked up somewhere in Wayne Tower. An unsanctioned, corporate acquisition of a person against their will and without the police’s knowledge? Suuuure sounds like a kidnapping, Mr. Wayne.

Le sigh. Batman’s initial protege, Dick Grayson, graduates from the role of Robin to pursue a career as Nightwing in a town called Blüdhaven (it sounds lovely). The pair briefly team up to foil a weapon smuggling plot by Penguin, and are then separated when Nightwing gets kidnapped off-screen.

Being bailed out by your master could be some kind of spandex-clad Karate Kid moment, but the snappy dialogue between Batman and the former boy wonder clearly just serve as a smokescreen for embarrassment. Being rescued from a waddling man with a semi-automatic umbrella is worse than having your dad come get your sorry shoplifting self from a Hot Topic backroom. Oh well, at least Robin doesn’t get kidnapped.

Well, here’s an ironic case where Batman actually helps out in the kidnapping, locking Robin 3.0 up in a futuristic cell in order to protect him. This not only leaves him in a prime spot to be collected by Scarecrow later, but acts as prelude to the future Batman who has to worry about empty nest syndrome.

To be fair, this is one of the more sensible kidnappings in the game. Batman makes a mistake for once, blinded by his fear of losing another partner in the collateral damage of all the supervillain crap he has to deal with, and has to fix it in a way that echoes Arkham Knight’s overall message: being friends with Batman is the worst. It would have been better to let Robin decide and act on this point, though, rather than being appended to a staggering list that relies far too much on one kind of peril. But that’s it, right? We’re done with kidnappings, surely.