With next-level bloodshed, Madworld is definitely more splaaat than biff or pow.

hey’re both kind of messed up… and both will leave you feeling kind of… well, not exactly ripped off, but….

I thought to draw parallels between the film Donnie Darko, and the Wii game MadWorld in part because the Donnie Darko soundtrack features the Gary Jules cover of the Tears for Fears song, Mad World (made popular again, more recently, by its use in the commercial for the Xbox game Gears of War) and the association was already rolling around in my head. But before you mention it, yes, it’s a weird thing to do. Just roll with it.

Because I also believe that Donnie Darko and Madworld will amount to footnotes in pop culture history, for which the text will read similarly.

“But Donnie Darko is not a cartoonish blood orgy,” you might be thinking. “How can you compare these two? One is loud, and the other quiet. One is a touching, slightly off-kilter coming-of-age story and the other is one long over-the-top dystopian gangland fight sequence.”  And you’d be right; in fact 2009′s Madworld and the 2001 Richard Kelly film have no aesthetic, theme or message in common. But I stand by the title—Madworld is the Donnie Darko of Wii games.

Now, this article is really about Madworld and not Donnie Darko (apologies to DD fans who found this post through its technorati tag “Donnie Darko” and got excited) but I’m hard-pressed to find a better example to illustrate a point. Because like DD, Madworld is dark but funny and not without its irony. It’s sprawling and original, showing glimpses of brilliance.  It’s one of those rare combinations of intangibles that makes a subset of people love it, and the rest of us want to love it. Yet, in spite of all this it just doesn’t quite work.

But many adult gamers, along with everyone else, have been wondering how Madworld plays and whether it’s worth a look. I wasn’t all that excited about testing it when Platinum Games designers were doing pre-launch press, truthfully. But when I found out they’re the same studio that developed Okami, it changed my tune.

So I gave it a go. And Kevin VanOrd at Gamespot nutshells Madworld perfectly when he calls it “an overload of the senses that wallows in both its tastelessness and its striking black-and-white visual design.” While tasteless may be new territory, everything from Platinum Games (formerly the core at Clover Studios, which made Viewtiful Joe as well as Okami) is striking, it seems.

But Madworld is really tasteless… and proudly so. While playing you’ll slap around women, murder unarmed captives, and commit horrific acts with a chain saw, literally painting the hand drawn black-and-white town red as you run amok; while Grand Theft Auto fans might be yawning right about now, on a Nintendo console this is pushing the envelope.

But if you’ve seen previews and promos you already knew that Madworld looks like a comic book and that it goes next level, violence-wise. What you might not know is that Madworld, with its slamming hip-hop soundtrack comprised of 100% original material, its dark, surprisingly deep storyline (which centers around a “Running Man” style game show called Death Watch, an evil corporation, and a trained killer named Jack) and great voice acting, is a well-polished game as well as a novel one, and more obnoxious than even you imagined. Yes, Madworld treads well beyond the fringes of common decency, and right into the scuzzy industrial area near its airport. You’ll endure innumerable body fluid, smelly crotch and “I slept with your wife” jokes. But in spite of its unapologetic crapulance, it’s also a groundbreaking beat ‘em up with some challenging levels, some fun boss battles and some foley work that few will talk about, but is nonetheless brilliant; as much as the visual gorno it’s the accompanying sounds —the wet, gurgly, organic crunching noises—that make the murders so hard on the stomach. To say the game is hardcore, or has a style all to its own are enormous understatements and even though there’s lots about Madworld which rubs me the wrong way, I have a hard time dismissing it.  There are indeed a lot of good things about this game.

For starters, controls. They’re near-perfect in truth; a great balance is struck between button-mashing, twitch, comboing, and creative use of the Wiimote (the waggle is satisfying, not gimmicky).  Also, Madworld is built using the Havok physics engine, used for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Fallout 3, F.E.A.R. 2 and other noteworthy games.  It just feels good moving Jack around in Madworld and while there are camera problems (more on that in a minute) the controls themselves work well.

Graphics and sound: Great. Nuff said. The game looks and sounds unlike anything I’ve ever played (in a good way).

What kind of emotional problems does your dad have?

Now, the bad… and another tangible parallel between this game and Donnie Darko: even though you’re captivated and can’t turn away, it’s bit muddled. Madworld’s combination of busy, two-color mattes and sketchy textures (an art style which makes for wonderful stills but problematic animations) lose it some bigtime game play points. As mentioned earlier it’s rendered in the style of a comic book or graphic novel—except it’s full motion and fast-paced and people are trying to kill you—and you can seldom stop to drink it in and key objects can be difficult to see. It’s just a little too much at times. Coupled with some unfortunate, unnecessarily jarring camera work, playing Madworld can be disorienting, hard on the eyes, and even exhausting to a point, and spotting the way out when you’re stuck in a corner in a cheap beatdown loop can take a second or two longer than it really should.  Also when Jack is carrying an enemy (which is about a third of the time) he moves too slowly, and it interferes with combo momentum.

Which, incidentally, leads us to my biggest grievance. It’s my contention that, as is the case with movies, pacing can truly make or break a video game and unfortunately, in this regard, parts of Madworld are straight-up broken. And unnecessarily so! I can think of a couple of spots where a mid-level checkpoint might have easily fixed a serious pacing problem. (Just like I think that a clearer, simpler ending would have improved Donnie Darko…)

For Madworld contains at least one difficult section which could have become one of those intense, tricky and maddeningly delightful (and possibly even legendary) video game sequences—the kind that forum threads get written about, the kind where your friends lean in close and feel the lumps along with you (“Ohhhhh!! SOOO close!”) but is instead just winds up being frustrating, because when you get killed you have to replay almost half an hour. All of the intensity goes down the tubes and by the time you get back to the moment of truth, your friends have disappeared, to root through your fridge or poke some co-worker on Facebook.

Specifically the dungeon, and boss battle with ‘Frank’ could have been truly great but instead I came to hate the level. [SPOILER ALERT] First, there was the anti-climatic non-event when I finally stuck Driller with 5 signposts and he was still standing (there were no on-screen congrats, no death throes, nothing), and I had no idea whether I still had to finish him off; I subsequently lost multiple lives figuring out that I was wasting my time. And second, discovering that I had to replay the ENTIRE dungeon if I died on Frank; and a couple of game overs are inevitable on Frank. Most players will gimp around and take their lumps for at least 3-4 lives before they get a sense for the rhythm of Frank’s windups and smacks, figure out the electrified water, discover by trial and error (or by reading spoilers) that they can enter the water and slash and punch Frank during his health recharge and largely neutralize it, etc.  So basically a couple of seemingly minor issues turned a great level into a lousy, tedious one.

Ride, Zombie on a Crotch Rocket, Ride

And on the subject of tedium… the ‘witty and outrageous commentary’ (provided in part by Bender, from Futurama??) which admittedly made me laugh out loud a couple of times, repeats itself a fair amount even if you play a level only once, and it can get pretty old. Fast. When you’ve heard some of the worse groaners and one-liners for the 20th time, you might just come to hate ‘Kreese and Howard’, the game’s play-by-play commentators… but all in all, the humor in Madworld is more tailored (and much better suited) to teenage boys than it is to ‘mature’ players… how about a little subtlety? “A hundred sword attack… wasn’t that a gangbang movie?” isn’t exactly high comedy. Neither are “close your legs” jokes. Though it made me all nostalgic for childhood insults to hear the word ‘fuck-tard’ …for I can’t even count how many times I’ve been called one.

Replay? Well, Madworld should take you less than ten hours of real time, including time spent repeating level).  And when I finished regular mode and unlocked ‘hard’ (zero extra lives, smarter enemy AI and a couple of other twists), for the first time in a long time after finishing a video game I was actually looking forward to replay.  For stringing together methodical and intricate combos, using combinations of found objects, weapons and environmental hazards (train tracks, dumpsters, jet turbines, you name it) is part and parcel of Madworld’s scoring system, and the ability to dispose of your enemies in creative and convoluted ways is your bread and butter.  So replay promised to allow me to experiment with new possibilities, methods of murder I overlooked the first time around before I was any good at the game.

But oddly and disappointingly, replay only proved interesting for a few minutes. A quick retracing of the opening level’s steps, and I soon remembered that there really weren’t THAT many different ways to kill enemies; actualizing how many more times I’d be ramming limp bodies against rose bushes, resignation to the fact that that sticking a garbage can on someone’s head was not as funny as it had been the previous night, and—the real trade off of replay—the prospect of listening to ALL of the game’s puerile commentary all over again… was just too much. This game may be replayable but I didn’t want to be the one to do the replaying.

Cartoon violence in Madworld: Um… yeah? The shock value elements are Madworld’s hook, its “big sell.” But they actually are shocking at times, and may throw even the most goatse-hardened net veteran for a loop. I’ve probably played too many video games in my life and watched too many splatter flicks and have been MSNed too many horrendously appalling links; and have for years been concerned that I’ve become a de-sensitized weirdo. Well, this game puts my fears to rest, because I apparently still have a decency threshold; it actually churned my stomach when the main character impaled an enemy on a spike, rectum first, the spike emerged from his face and he died, screaming and gurgling blood.

Who's on brain detail? Yes; this is some repugnant shit.

The game is honestly beautiful (how’s that for a segue?) and without a doubt game art directors and designers will be studying every pixel of it, making notes about what shone, about what didn’t work so well, and which elements of Madworld they want to blatantly cop for their next project. But as it stands I can only suggest that people rent it, or skip it and wait for better, derivative titles. Because this one is too short, sections of it are in my mind broken, and the infantile commentary gets really old really fast. I feel that with some modifications it would have made a perfect arcade game; I suspect a great many would pour in a few bucks for some sensory overload Death Watch style, a game within a game which practically guarantees to draw a crowd of rowdy spectators who would crowd three-deep around the cabinet, yelling “now run him through with the sign!”.  Yep, as a quarter-gobbler it could hypothetically do for beat ‘em ups what NBA Jam did for sports games. But 50 bucks for a home console game which won’t get more than a couple of days’ play in a veteran gamer’s house? Not so much. Nonetheless I predict that Madworld will spawn some trends and all in all, the game industry will be better off because it exists.

It reminds me of (yes) Donnie Darko, for a few reasons; I wanted to like it, it took risks, it exhibited its creators’ talents, it shows flashes of genius, and as mentioned earlier, it’s somewhat muddled. Despite showing brilliance it didn’t come to fruition as a brilliant all-around product… it’s sort of the one that got away.  Roger Ebert lamented that in experiencing Donnie Darko, his hands felt nice and full for a little while and then closed on emptiness. And I say if that’s true, then MadWorld is its videogame counterpart.

Donnie Darko still feels worth revisiting, though—years later, people respond to it.  But something tells me Madworld is ‘special’ enough that it will get its own legions of die-hards, college seminar room discussions, and fan fiction. It’ll be interesting to see where it stands in 8 years.