Stolen Pixels #116: An Existentialist Crisis

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 14, 2009

Filed under: Column 11 comments

I’m now playing games faster than I could ever hope to review them. I used to have to make each game last for six weeks, sometimes more. Now I have to change titles every other week in order to feed the comic mill. This is good, because it means I get to play a lot of games.

But it’s also bad, because some games will get played without being reviewed. Today’s comic is basically my entire review of MadWorld. It’s a competently executed effort, more or less killed by a single idiotic (and easily fixable) design decision. I got about halfway through the game and realized I was tired of the looping announcer messages, tired of doing the same thing over and over, and tired of indecipherable two-tone images. Alas. The game had a few promising notions and a lot of voice talent, but those attributes can’t rescue fundamentally broken gameplay.

EDIT: Too bad I didn’t write a review. I never got the chance to describe the graphics as “urine-soaked line art”.

Oh wait, I just did.

 


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11 thoughts on “Stolen Pixels #116: An Existentialist Crisis

  1. Neil Polenske says:

    Soooo….youuuu…didn’t like it?

    Hmm…maybe if ya gave it an arbitrary number value…

  2. HeadHunter says:

    It doesn’t do any good to make “hardcore” games for the Wii when they’re ugly AND they suck. All that would seem to do is to reinforce the opinion held by many other console owners of the Wii’s inferiority and inapplicability as a game console for adults.

    Seriously, are there any good Wii games that are intended for someone over 12?

  3. Ahluka says:

    Did anyone else buy their Wii for the sole purpose of playing Gamecube games (because they never got a GC)? I can’t be the only one… can I?

  4. TehShrike says:

    Unrelated: Do you know what you would do if you were *really* cool?

    You’d alter the RSS feed so that it contains the full content of the post, instead of just the beginning.

    Seriously – that’s how you tell the difference between a Good Blogger and an Awesome Blogger!

  5. SatansBestBuddy says:

    I loved MadWorld.

    I never bothered with the score system, and actually tried to avoid “that one big point combo” in order to go looking for other things to do.

    The thing that did it for me was the announcers, who are easily the best in any game I’ve ever heard; the humour was exactly my kind, and commenting on everything meant that I was trying out new combos and environmental kills just to hear what they’d say about it. (my favourite was the blue-pill, red-pill bit, but honestly, I laughed at pretty much everything they said)

    Turns out the writers for the announcers are the guys behind Happy Tree Friends, which explains a lot, really.

    I agree with your point about points, the game actually rewards you for ignoring the variety it offers in favour of “that one big point combo,” which is a shame, really, since doing the same thing over and over is why beat-em-ups died, and since this game is a beat-em-up with variety, it kinda defeats itself.

    Anyway, this game has a lot going for it; a working camera, well done Wii motion controls, a lot of depth, dispite “that one big point combo,” and a focus on one thing, entertaining you by giving you a sandbox, a bunch of guys, and lots of creative ways to kill them, and it does it well.

    Also, why do your screen caps look like they’re from an old school GB?

    Maybe you need to adjust the colours on your monitor so it looks less like somebody took a piss on the screen and more like Frank Miller drew on it.

  6. A Gould says:

    @TehStrike I suppose you also think Awesome Newspapers don’t charge you and don’t have any advertising in them?

    I bet you don’t take a paycheck, because that makes you an Awesome Employee!

    (For the sarcasm-impaired: you click so you see the ads. Ads pay for the server and his time. Please don’t insist people give you their time and effort for even cheaper than they already do.)

  7. Also, surely if you put full content into the feed you’d annoy people who want to scan through many news items and pick which ones to read?

  8. RodeoClown says:

    @AGould – you can put ads in RSS just as easily as on a page (and I would imagine many people using RSS have an ad-blocker anyway).

    @phobiandarkmoon – with a full-text feed you can choose to skip it if you don’t like the intro, whereas with a partial-text feed the option to read the full thing in one hit isn’t there.

    Anyone who grabs feeds for offline reading and then reads them while commuting (for example), can’t read the post while offline.

    It’s also possible to have multiple feeds – one full text, and one not.

    I’d rather a full-text, but Shamus’ writing is one of the very few partial text feeds I keep around, because what he writes is worth clicking through to. I’ve dropped pretty much every other partial text feed, because I just couldn’t be bothered.

  9. Needs a link to the Diablo 3 controversy. Now I’m curious.

  10. TehShrike says:

    @Stephen: http://www.petitiononline.com/d3art/petition.html

    @A Gould: RodeoClown speaks the truth. For those who experience large amounts of internet through RSS readers, dealing with sites that force you to click through is annoying.

    And I do have Adblock installed – I don’t see any advertisements.

  11. Hipparchus says:

    Looks an original Game Boy game. Green n’ black and very fuzzy.

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