How About That Thing?

Ah, the Nintendo Wii. Remember when people were actually hyped for this console? While their competitors over in Xbox and Playstation were going for realistic graphics and oversaturating the market with first person shooters in hopes one might be the next Halo (for some reason), Nintendo decided to go the opposite direction. The Wii may not have given the world the PRETTIEST games on Earth, but they were definitely banking on the motion controls being able to compensate. Nobody else really had motion controls for their console by comparison. Playstation would eventually come out with the PS Move halfway in to the PS3’s lifespan, but it didn’t last, and a lot of the Wii ports to PS3, most notably the first No More Heroes game, played like shit.

By contrast, Nintendo was hoping to make their “WiiMote” the most innovative control system out there. And… In a way, it was. Granted, it didn’t really break the illusion that Nintendo was that radical third party in a two-party system dominated by Playstation and Xbox, but for a while, Nintendo really had something.

The WII came out in 2007. I didn’t get mine till about 2008, after I’d gotten a job at a second hand retailer, and blew my first real paycheck on it. I was originally hoping to get a PlayStation3… But yeah, that legendary $600 price tag that made up a lot of mid-2000s gamer memes kind of put a stop to that.

SIDE NOTE: yeah, remember when $600 for a gaming console was considered outrageous? Good times.

The Wii is one of those consoles that’s remembered more for being a fun novelty at best, and Nintendo not really seeing the big picture till it was too late at worst. Those motion controls grabbed everybody’s attention for a couple years… Until people started realizing that, outside of Wii Sports, or a couple Nintendo exclusives like Smash Bros, motion controls kind of sucked.

But for that brief one or two years when none of that mattered, The Wii was a pretty intriguing console. And one of my favorite games for it was, hands down, MadWorld.

There weren’t a whole lot of games that screamed must-own for The Wii, but back in those college years of mine, MadWorld definitely stood out as one of them.

It also didn’t hurt any that the art style gave me some hardcore Sin City vibes. And I fucking loved the first Sin City Movie. Actually, I love BOTH of them, but the second one didn’t come out yet. All the same, I was a bit on a Frank Miller kick at that point.

Madworld takes place on Jefferson Island. All the bridges to the mainland have been severed, and someone has infected the entire populous with a deadly virus that… Whew boy. Every time I hear a game from the past bring up a deadly pandemic, it gives me flashbacks to COVID-19. No joke. We were so naive back then, believing that people would be smart, decent human beings and follow instructions from trained medical professionals instead of being assholes who’d rather ingest word salad from some nameless, faceless entity they found on a certain image board that was probably just some fifteen-year-old kid who figured out how to fuck with stupid people for teh lulz. But I digress.

Anyway, something something politics, something something commentary on desensitizing people to violence, can we hurry up and play?

Yeah, suffice to say, the plot is secondary at absolute best. Your character is a marine with a chainsaw arm, and you go from level to level butchering hordes of enemies in the most bloody disgusting ways possible in order to earn points. Earn enough points, and you earn the opportunity to fight the boss of that level.

FUN FACT: male and female bosses get different boss themes. The one for the male bosses is pretty standard “let’s fight!” kind of music, and the one for female bosses is about looking hot. Just in case I haven’t said it enough in this article, or implied it, or whatever: man, 2008 really was a different time.

The game is not only bloody as shit, but it actually ENCOURAGES you to be the most sadistic fuck you can possibly be. IE, you COULD just throw randos at the oncoming train, or into spinning fans, or spike walls, but you won’t get NEARLY as many points for it. If, meanwhile, you stick a trashcan over a dude’s head and bodyslam him into a spike wall over and over again, or if you impale him on a lamp post and his barely-alive ass into the traintracks, you get significantly more points.

As you go through this bloodstained black and white mayhem, commentators Howard “Buckshot” Holmes and Kreese Kreeley (Greg Proops and John DiMaggio respectively) make smartass remarks about everything happening. Not going to lie, the commentators are both the best, and the worst thing about this game.

They were the best because they had really good chemistry, and a lot of their banter was actually pretty hilarious. I actually found myself looking up boss battles I’d already beaten on Youtube just to hear some of the commentary I’d missed out on while in the zone.

Unfortunately, they were also the worst because the one-liners I DID get to hear really got old in a hurry. Really, though, that wasn’t even their fault. That’s just the curse of having a commentary team.

You only get one life, but you also get three continues by default. I think you can collect more throughout the levels, but don’t quote me on it. When you run out of continues, it’s game over, you lose all your points, and you have to go back to the VERY BEGINNING OF THE GOD DAMN LEVEL! Which, if you’re anything like me, you hated, because you didn’t want to go through all that bullshit of earning points all over again.

Naturally, the boss characters were the only characters with any real oomph put into them. There are minibosses you encounter later on, and they put up a bit of a fight in their own right, but compared to the full-on bosses, they’re still glorified punching bags. The minibosses are just punching bags that occasionally punch back. Meanwhile, the randos you end up killing all throughout the game are so weak, you wonder why they even bother trying to fight you half the time. Naturally, they’re designed for you specifically to earn points, but do you really want to mow through all these losers more than once?

Ironically, like the very console it was for, the novelty of MadWorld wore out pretty quickly. I didn’t hate this game by any stretch of the imagination… But I got bored with it pretty quickly. Especially when bosses began eating my continues like I ate Hot Pockets.

But for that brief period of time where everything was shiny, and reality had yet to truly rub its butt in your face Rikishi Phatu style, this was an amusing little game that gave me plenty of entertainment while I waited for the next installment of No More Heroes. If you have a Wii, and are curious, I say give it a try.