MadWorld

When the Wii came out, I camped out for some 18 hours outside of Circuit City in freezing weather in order to obtain one on launch day, with Twilight Princess. It was worth it for a time, certainly, the Wii was a sound investment. Miis and Wii sports were greatly appreciated around these parts. After coming to terms with the fact that Twilight Princess wasn't anywhere near as good as Wind Waker however, and until Super Mario Galaxy, it collected dust (unless I wanted to play Gamecube games). Galaxy was great, and so was Brawl but the later can barely be called a Wii game, and the former came out like a year and a half ago. To the point, when I heard about Madworld I was very excited. When I was camping out on launch day I thought mainly of the Wii's potential for extreme gratification in violence. Snapping peoples necks and such by pantomiming the fucked up acts in the real world.

Madworld is the fulfillment of these prophecies.

Firstly, Madworld joins a growing number of games that are basically perfect, graphically. It wanted to look like Sin City with a dose of Japan and it does, pretty flawlessly. I'm tempted to call it the best looking game on the Wii because it set its bar and achieved it almost to perfection. I was worried that in the black and white world it may be really hard to see what the fuck is going on but it is surprisingly coherent, more so than a lot of games I can think of that use color, actually. It's also just stylized enough that the intense violence is still awesome and visceral but still comic enough that you don't feel like a terrible person.

The story is that you, as Jack (voiced by Steven "Spike Speigel" Blum) are on a gameshow that takes place in an entire city. If you kill someone in more and more extraordinary/violent ways, you get more points. That's about it. Also: You have a chainsaw arm.

God of War has some great violent cutscenes and quick time events (essentially in game cutscenes that prompt timed button presses) that really get you into the ultraviolence, but when you play Madworld there is some other force at work. For example, when you use the daggers (there are multiple weapons, each with their own combos and finishers), one of the finishing moves is straddling a man on the ground, and stabbing his chest over and over and over and over and over and over in rapid succession, and in order to do this you pantomime the act with the Wiimote and nunchuck. The first time I did this I actually started screaming/laughing uncontrollably and had to pause. It's kind of hard to believe. There are a ton of finishers in this game, all unbelievably violent (you can remove a man's spine with a chainsaw and hit him with it)


Madworld's stages are pretty much a series of sandboxes that you get to do whatever you want in, and in traditional Sega arcade style, all of them are replayable at any time. It's not terribly long (I'm at about 2.5 hours through and I think I'm like half way) but the sheer variety in killing different people with different things throughout the different stages makes for a very replayable game. I don't think I can ever get tired of how awesome the finishers are for some of the bosses either. You basically accrue points until you unlock the minigame (which can be anything from tossing people onto train tracks to hitting them onto a giant dart board), unlock weapons, and then finally the boss of the stage.

Here's some fucked up shit I've done to people in this game:
1. Thrown a man in a flamming oil barrel, impaled him with not 1, not 2, but 3 sign posts, then slammed him repeatedly onto a meat hook on the wall.
2. Ground a man to paste on a passing subway
3. Shoved fireworks down someone's throat and watched him explode, killing 2 of his friends.
4. Stabbed a wok through a ninja's eye, then tossed him into a deep fryer.

This list could go on for much longer.

The controls are a little unresponsive, and as ridiculously gratifying as the quick time events are, when they don't work it can be really frustrating. This has been rare however. The bike levels are also kind of shallow but over all, if you have a Wii, this is a sound, sound purchase. I have like 4 Wii games now, and I am getting comfortable with the idea that this was the title I was camping out for.