Greg wrote about how MadWorld disappointed him, so I figured I’d offer an altenate take.  If you haven’t read his take on the game, please do so.  I’ll wait.  Oh, spoilers will be included so if you don’t want to have things ruined, now is your chance to leave.

Ok then.  So here we go.  MadWorld is, so far, one of my favorite games to come out of this year.  I gave it pretty high marks at GameShark and generally think that it kicks a whole lot of ass.  I loved the style, the humor and the various ways in which you could dispatch foes.  Initially the level structure bothered me, but once I got into the groove of things, I quite enjoyed it.  In MadWorld, you have thirty minutes to finish the entire level, boss battle included however you can’t just stroll in and take on the boss.  The boss battle itself doesn’t unlock until you’ve scored enough points with points scored by not just killing but killing with style.  For example, simply beating a guy to death, while effective, doesn’t score a lot of points.  Stick three signposts in his head, jam a tire over his arms and then chuck the whole bloody bundle into a giant spike will net you considerably more points.  Along the way as you score points you’ll unlock new weapons, new challenges and new enemies.  Oh sure, it sucked when you died during a boss battle and had to do a level all over again but honestly, in this case, it’s not that bad.  Now, usually if I hear that a death during a boss battle means you start over, I won’t even pick up the game in the first place, so for me to say it’s not that bad means that it’s really not that bad.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I’ll speak to Greg’s various points as I’m not feeling particularly creative today and pulling my own opinions into a cohesive whole is tantamount to inventing cold fusion.

“After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.”

Yeah, for me, it never got old.  Part of that is because I thought it was hilarious, part of me was because doing all of those combos was necessary to get the boss battle to unlock so that you’d have enough time to beat the boss, so the combos become a necessary evil.  Plus, as you progress through the game, the levels start offering more and more variety as to what you can use to kill guys and the enemies start getting wise to your tactics, requiring you to change things up.  Everyone’s tolerance for repetition is different, especially if one person finds a game engaging and another doesn’t, but for me, I never got bored.

“It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.”

I can’t speak to this as I don’t think I’ve ever played Double Dragon 2.  Does Jack have a large set of moves?  Well, no.  He has a few chainsaw moves, some fist moves and a dash and a dodge.  Instead of moves though, he has the environment and there is plenty to use there to take guys out with.  Now, you can certainly say that picking up a lamppost and jamming it through someone’s head is no different than doing the same thing with a signpost and you’d be right, but it’s when you take what you can do with the signpost combined with what you can do with this weapon and this moving train and Jack’s weapons and there is a lot to do.  Is it really, really deep?  No, but there is a lot to do.  Personally, with a game like this, I want simple.

“But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

I found that the difficulty curve ramped up nicely.  Yeah, the roller skate guys were annoying, but they never killed me so I can’t speak to the annoyance of them.  I think there were two levels that I had to repeat and one was because I was being stubborn during the boss fight.  The second one was just straight up difficult, however things seemed to level out after that.  I never felt that the game wasn’t so hard that I couldn’t handle it, as long as I switched up my tactics and got creative, which is a big part of what the game was all about, killing creatively.

“Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.”

I think that Greg hit the nail on the head here.  The game’s entire purpose was violence, but for me, that only increased the impact of the story.  The basic premise of the game is that terrorists take over the city and infect all of the citizens with a virus.  They then tell the citizens that if the citizens kill each other, whoever does the killing will get an antidote.  In short, the only way to survive is to pick up a weapon and kill.  The terrorists have also released horded of psychopaths into the city for the citizens to fight as well.  Jack enters the city with the intial intent of rescuing the mayor’s daughter, but as the story goes on, his real motivations are uncovered.

I guess what go to me about the game’s violence is that as the player, we’re supposed to be appalled that the terrorists would do such a thing, after all, we’re in the city to stop it, yet we’re so eager, and happy to take part in it ourselves.  As the player you’re encouraged not to stop whoever did this horrible thing, but to enter the games and win them.  That’s an important distinction. Instead of getting into the city and only killing those that get in our way of investigating the attack, we’re supposed to win the game which means taking part in the very thing we’re supposed to be condemning the terrorists for.  To this end, the violence is important because by taking part in the violence, it makes us complicit. It shows us that if we’re willing to do these horrible things to these guys, even if they’re “bad” guys, we’re really not any better.

Finally, once you do everything you need to and you win the games and you find out who is behind the whole thing, Jack is standing over his enemy who is hanging off a building.  The guy asks for help, which Jack doesn’t provide, and then plummets to his death.  Looking over the newly smashed corpse, Jack delivers the last, and best line of the game: I don’t help people, I kill them.  For some reason, this line stuck with me for days and days.  It felt like almost like a condemnation of sorts of all of these violent games we play.  So much of what we play involves killing and while it may be done in the interest of saving the day or being the hero, what stands out is the violence, not the end results, which is to say nothing of the countless multiplayer matches played every minute where the sole objective is just to kill.  We don’t play games to help, we play them to kill.  There are very few games out there where the job is to work with another person towards a common, non-violent goal.  Most of what we do is kill, kill and then kill some more.

Now, I’m not saying that all of this is bad, although I’m sure that it ain’t entirely good, I’m just saying that between the violence, the premise and that line, it made me think about this hobby and about the types of games we enjoy and what that means about us.  It probably doesn’t mean anything.  Kids have been playing soldier or cowboys and indians for generations, shooting each other with their fingers or with sticks so all we’ve done is gussy up the stick, but at the same time, the game gave me pause and made me think, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.  Not from this game.

So yeah, I loved it.  I enjoyed it while I was playing it, but I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more when I was done and could take the time to think about it.  Based on the sales numbers, I’m one of the few, which is a shame because games that make you think and examine your actions are never a bad thing.