Batman: the Caped Crusader was unique for its time in both its gameplay and graphical style. In what was essentially a puzzle game, the player controlled Batman trying his best to foil the plans of both The Joker and The Penguin. But instead of punching people in the face and driving the Batmobile at lightning speeds, the game has more in common with the adventure games genre; forcing the player solve puzzles, match objects in the correct locations and solve puzzles which required backtracking to previously visited locations.
The graphical style was based around comic book panels. Enter a new location and the old area you just left didn't disappear, but rather it greyed out and faded into the background. The panels piled on top of each other, the top most being the current location.
One of the indirect failings of Batman: The Caped Crusader was to do with its complexity. Nowhere in the game is it explained what you have to do, or how you can do it. As for most games of the nineteen-eighties, the instructions lie in the accompanying manual. As the game spread on different platforms, the pirated versions appeared on the Commodore 64, Amstrad, and ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, games of these platforms and era fell victim to rampant piracy, with kids not buying games but getting copies from their friends. Batman: The Caped Crusader was one of thses and as a result, if the player was without a manual - the game became a series of trial and error exchanges as the player had no clue how to proceed in the game without repeatedly pressing keys on their keyboard in the hope of stopping The Joker and Penguin.
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