-As before, the welcoming party consisted of armed thugs swinging chains and spikes, meat grinders waiting for fresh juice, walls of spikes, and all other manner of death traps eager to paint the town red all over again. In short, it reaffirmed my long running suspicion that cities are intent on killing us, or at least hurrying the speeds at which we kill each other.
-The city is where we need to go in order to make a name for ourselves as well, where we can fight to claw our way ahead and raise our rank and edge ever closer to the prize that eluded us everyplace else.
-Is it any fun?
-It explores the idea of what happens when you cram too many rats in a sealed box, but what it has become much more about is making lab rats out of us as players and experimenting with our threshold tolerance for repetitive actions.
-Because we live in a world of 1’s and 0’s, putting buckets of blood on the Wii and producing poor sales numbers speaks to the inability of mature titles to do well on the system. But beneath that glib wisdom is a game that is as much a cult classic as it is a smart ass kick in the crotch to gamers.
-It cuts out all the crap and offers up the blood, making games within games, and very much giving us all the killing we could ever ask for, a gluttony of gore if you will. It puts the WiiMote and Nunchuk to use in a way that makes us feel tired after swinging our arms with brutish movements to slaughter and play, leaving us physically and mentally exhausted from the event.
-Would it have been any different if the game had been an open world rather than a series of contained arenas? Is the game not more honest for throwing everything into a big pit for our enjoyment. Or did it go too far in asking us to play its games in a way that asked us to make our own within it all?
-Intentionally or not, these are the most valuable question the game brings about. Sure there’s the whole punk argument, but where do you want to start with that? Is Suda51 making games in his garage? Give me a break. As much as I love this industry, development costs of a major Wii title, even if cheaper than the two other consoles, slightly outweighs the cost of recording with your band on the weekends.
-But because the Wii does require developers to think differently, it does create experiments similarly noble in the pursuit of doing something legitimately different, of going all in against the norm.
-The game does this in a strange way, giving us everything we’ve always figured we wanted and allowing us the chance to decide if it was worth the wanting. And yes, the child in me would have busted over what this game offers up when skewing thugs with a pole and carrying them around to slap others with their flailing bodies.
-But where does that leave us? Still asking if the game is any fun seems to be the answer – the million dollar question, and the one we can’t answer with any certainty that could apply to everyone.
-There’s numerous ways to kill a man, but the differences can often be slight. And this leaves me feeling all murdered out long before the game is finished with me.