As today's graphics come closer to approaching photorealism, our "realistic" games have become steadily more similar in appearance: The same gritty gray-and-brown environments, the same light-infused bloom. What really makes MadWorld a breath of fresh air is how neatly it violates the tropes of modern 3-D realism. The buildings looked like the Platonic ideal of buildings. I'd find myself noticing little things that would, in a regular game, just blend into the background: The fins on the junked 1950s cars lying in piles the way the glass scattered when I hurled a goon through a window. It's like playing beneath a bright moon, where the polarized light makes everything seem simultaneously super-real and oddly dreamlike. The sheer sense of contrast - the game is really black or white, since there's no gray - makes every detail in MadWorld pop out vividly. It actually changed the way I looked at the world around me. Many games unsettle me with their callous violence this stuff unfailingly makes me giggle.īut the effect of playing in black-and-white isn't merely about creating a camp sensibility.
But if you ring them with a tire, impale them with a street sign and then hurl them onto a spiked wall? Hey, 50,000 points!Īs you might imagine, the over-the-top gore has critics labeling MadWorld the " most violent computer game ever." But the game's visual style - including "Blam-o!"-type, written-word sound effects, and the fact that the copious spurting red blood is one of the few colors in the game - clearly marks it as part of the tradition of two-bit comic books, which have been tweaking prudes with Pavlovian precision for about 75 years. Cut someone in half with a chainsaw, you might get 2,000 points. This heavy indebtedness to comic-book aesthetics neatly suits MadWorld's narrative, which is yet another one of those "most dangerous game" conceits: You're a contestant in a televised killfest! Killing, like, tons of people! And you'll be rewarded not only for slaughtering anyone around you, but for doing so in the most grisly fashion possible. When he first wanders into the frame, all you see initially is the dancing plume of his cigarette smoke - a lovely bit of moody, and kitschy, chiaroscuro. A Frank Miller comic book, to be precise: The designers have talked about Miller's influence on their game, which is obvious from the moment you meet the gruff, chain-smoking and chainsaw-wielding killer, who embodies a lot of Marv from Sin City. The upshot is a game that plays eerily like a comic book come to life.