Madworld a Worthy Play, but Not for Children
In Madworld, you take control of Jack, a very buff, very badass trained killer who has, and this is key, a chainsaw built into his arm. Yes, you heard me, a chainsaw.
By: Sarah Alli Brotherton
Okay, so let me just say, I’m not a violent person. While I don’t buy into the free love and even freer drug use of the hippie movement, I am at my core a wimpy little pacifist. I don’t step on ants, I cry when I see those ASPCA commercials with neglected animals, and I have indeed participated in a peace rally.
But put a game controller in my hand and suddenly, I become a sadistic killer, deriving massive amounts of sick pleasure from thinking up the cleverest ways of torturing and/or brutally murdering the denizens of my virtual worlds. It’s a strange form of stress relief, I guess, but it works for me, and is also, incidentally, one of the main reasons I probably shouldn’t play MMORPGs.
Madworld was released at the end of March, the latest in a parade of over-the-top gory games to be made for or ported to the previously family-friendly Wii console. A lot of family-advocate type groups are quite upset about this game and once I played it, I learned why.
In Madworld, you take control of Jack, a very buff, very badass trained killer who has, and this is key, a chainsaw built into his arm. Yes, you heard me, a chainsaw. Jack has been entered in a TV game show in which the point is to kill your fellow players in the most brutal and demeaning fashion possible. It sounds pretty straightforward and well, it is.
The graphics in Madworld are probably the most striking part of the game. It is rendered almost completely in black and white with exception paid to the massive amounts of bright red blood that quickly coat the floors, walls and pretty much every other surface, including you and your weapons. It looks really cool, but all the textures used to make up for lack of color gave me a pretty swift headache and made it difficult to focus on the task at hand.
Madworld also makes heavy use of the Wii’s motion sensing capabilities but thankfully for me, and my utter lack of hand-eye coordination, you don’t actually have to use the pointer. You do, however, spend most of your time shaking, swirling or stabbing with your wiimote, and it actually wore me out fairly fast. I also got so into it at one point that I accidentally ripped the nunchuck right out of the wiimote.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward, you only use two buttons for most of the actions and for special moves it shows you what motion to make with the wiimote. To get the most points for a kill you basically have to stack moves, the more you do to a person before you kill them the more points you get.
For example, the first combo-move they teach you is to ring your victim with a tire, stab them through the neck with a signpost and then impale them on a giant spike. In the game, people don’t die until their head is physically separated from their body, so you have to get in as many non-decapitating moves as possible before the finish. You are also scored based on the violence level: kills are rated “first blood,” “routine violence” or “extreme violence.” The catch is, once you’ve done something the rating for it goes down; something that got you an extreme violence rating the first time will only rate routine the next time, so you have to keep coming up with new combinations to max your score.
All in all, I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Madworld, but after about an hour I did get bored. It’s hard to imagine getting bored playing such a game, but it’s fairly repetitive and after the initial shock and amusement wore off, I lost interest pretty fast. In other words, this is a rent, not a buy. I also strongly recommend playing with a buddy; the multiplayer mode is an un-lockable that I didn’t get a chance to try, but I did play it with my similarly blood-thirsty cousin looking on, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as amusing if I was playing it alone in my room.
This game is rated M and there is a very good reason for it. It is exceptionally gory; there is strong language throughout and a fair amount of sexual overtones from the somewhat annoying announcers. If you’ve played an M rated video game before you’ve probably got a fairly good idea of what it is going to be like. I would strongly recommend against playing this game if there is a child within a five mile radius. For adults, this is a unique and certainly stress-relieving game that I promise you won’t soon forget.
