Batman: Arkham Asylum

• In regards to upgrades: Get most of the batarang ones, with the exception of the ones collar specific ones, Don't bother with the explosive spray upgrade stuff, get the health upgrades and grab whatever combat ones look nice to you. You end up able to get the vast majority, if not all of them if you look for Riddles and beat up alot of bad guys.

• Upgrades to the sonic batarang and the explosive gel (proximity detonation at top of stairs or ladders) gives you some stealth options for taking guys out without being near them at all.

• Learn to recognize the enemy attack animations. The faster you can recognize an incoming attack, and how to counter it, the higher you will string your combos and the more XP points you will get.

• The most important upgrades are the combo upgrades which allow you greater multipliers.

• The higher your multiplier, the more range Batman has, if your combo is sufficiently high, you can attack guys clear across the room.

• Work in various attacks, get good at knowing which are useful against what enemies.

• The upgraded batarangs are great in a crowded fight for instantly knocking down a few enemies in a pinch and keeping your combo going.

• The ground takedowns are worth a lot more points than the auto takedown ability you can purchase, but you are not immune while performing them.

• The Riddler maps really help if you dont want to use an FAQ for 100%.

• You cannot permanently miss out on any collectibles, though in some cases you might have to wait quite a while before the locale in question becomes accessible again and/or you acquire the gadget needed to get to the collectible. There are, however, two achievements you can miss; one is just before the end of the game and the other is fairly early on. If you consider Batman's general modus operandi (not let anyone die, and beat the crap out of any bad guys he encounters), it should be pretty obvious what to do. Beating the game on the top difficulty gives you the lower difficulty achievements, and it's not too hard, so might as well.

• The freeflow combat system is surprisingly intricate, and button mashing is something you'll want to avoid. Now, you can probably still get by doing just that in story mode for the most part, but three-starring the various freeflow challenges will require being familiar with building combos, the way variation bonuses work, and so on. Luckily there's a pretty good FAQ which deals with it in some depth, so go check it out if you want to get the most out of freeflow combat and feel as badass as possible.

• In addition to ground/silent takedowns, there also are ceiling takedowns (when Batman is standing on a glass ceiling), corner takedowns (when Batman is in corner cover mode), and ledge takedowns (when Batman is holding onto a ledge), all of which can be triggered when a thug walks past/beneath Batman as indicated by the on-screen prompt. Some of them are exceedingly situational, but the ledge takedown especially comes in handy a few times throughout the game. Do keep in mind that only the corner takedown is silent, though.

• Don't run around in detective mode all the time – while there's, technically speaking, almost no reason to play without it, it does tend to make you forget/overlook how good the game looks (whenever you're not talking to someone at least).

• When fireworks start going off in the sky, you're at the final part of the game. That's your chance to head around and clean up trophies.