How heartening it would be to think that all game designs started out with wonderful, outlandish ideas and then eventually got watered down by the demands of practicality into something less interesting.
The truth, however, is that many games start out in the realms of irredeemable banality and never have any intention of stepping beyond that first hackneyed circle. Monster Madness is one such game.
For reasons too rudimentary to explain, four teenage archetypes (freaky geek, skate-dude, mall-hottie and goth chick) are at a suburban house when it is attacked by zombies. This backstory is voice-acted in an off-the-shelf "DUDE!" American teen style, and illustrated in fairly competent quasi-animated comicbook storyboards. Then you pick your teenager and make war on the undead.
You fight in a third-person 3D-Gauntlet style, hacking and shooting the monsters until they are gone, before moving on to the next section. Sometimes there is even a tough boss character, but mostly the enemies are merely moving scenery. Oh, my aching dreams.
But wait! That's not all: you can collect tokens to buy health, and nuts and bolts to buy new weapons! From there you fight room after room, and street after street of baddies. You run back and forth throwing bombs and swishing swords or firing nailguns and the zombies obligingly explode. No precision, no puzzle, no skills to master or challenges to overcome. It's a conveyor-belt of predictability, devoid of joy or energy. You can play multiplayer co-op with friends, which mildly improves the overall experience, but then friends improve any experience. And why would you want to subject them to this?
Initially I imagined I might love Monster Madness. I routinely gorge on American pop culture cleverness, and I'll even tolerate their processed burger-cheese. I'm a sucker for comicbook presentation and, well, for sarcastic goth girls... But this, it's all delivered with such formulaic exhaustion that you can't help shuddering at the idea that some wide-eyed kid might spend money on it.
The worst part, I think, is that this is the kind of weightless, brainless, gormless rubbish that many people believe videogames to be. A few moments alone with this and all those ugly stereotypes about what games are (and how cliché-stricken they might be) are confirmed and rubber-stamped. Worse still, the game itself, the endless monster-splattering, is so charmless and limp that it fails to fulfil even the most base sensationalist expectations we have for this kind of game.
Zombie slaughter was never meant to bore us, never meant to turn our lives into a vast conforming suburb of the soul. Yet that's exactly what happens if you play Monster Madness.
The truth, however, is that many games start out in the realms of irredeemable banality and never have any intention of stepping beyond that first hackneyed circle. Monster Madness is one such game.
For reasons too rudimentary to explain, four teenage archetypes (freaky geek, skate-dude, mall-hottie and goth chick) are at a suburban house when it is attacked by zombies. This backstory is voice-acted in an off-the-shelf "DUDE!" American teen style, and illustrated in fairly competent quasi-animated comicbook storyboards. Then you pick your teenager and make war on the undead.
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But wait! That's not all: you can collect tokens to buy health, and nuts and bolts to buy new weapons! From there you fight room after room, and street after street of baddies. You run back and forth throwing bombs and swishing swords or firing nailguns and the zombies obligingly explode. No precision, no puzzle, no skills to master or challenges to overcome. It's a conveyor-belt of predictability, devoid of joy or energy. You can play multiplayer co-op with friends, which mildly improves the overall experience, but then friends improve any experience. And why would you want to subject them to this?
Initially I imagined I might love Monster Madness. I routinely gorge on American pop culture cleverness, and I'll even tolerate their processed burger-cheese. I'm a sucker for comicbook presentation and, well, for sarcastic goth girls... But this, it's all delivered with such formulaic exhaustion that you can't help shuddering at the idea that some wide-eyed kid might spend money on it.
The worst part, I think, is that this is the kind of weightless, brainless, gormless rubbish that many people believe videogames to be. A few moments alone with this and all those ugly stereotypes about what games are (and how cliché-stricken they might be) are confirmed and rubber-stamped. Worse still, the game itself, the endless monster-splattering, is so charmless and limp that it fails to fulfil even the most base sensationalist expectations we have for this kind of game.
Zombie slaughter was never meant to bore us, never meant to turn our lives into a vast conforming suburb of the soul. Yet that's exactly what happens if you play Monster Madness.
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