I haven’t been playing a lot of video games lately; the current state of the medium, like the cock-teasing bitch that it is, has pretty much abandoned me to find pleasure through my own devices. MadWorld, in spite of general consensus, is no saviour in my eyes. While everyone else has been playing one of the best-ranked games on the Wii, I’ve apparently received something else: something vile and putrid, like the creature from a 1980s John Carpenter film or an unflushed theatre toilet.

I really can’t wrap my head around all of the positive reception. MadWorld is the laziest high-profile example of motion control mapping since Ubisoft’s Wii launch line-up. None of the motions you’re asked to perform make any sense when compared to the on-screen action—for example, violently shaking your hands in the air is not generally perceived to be an effective method of prying yourself free of an enemy’s grip. I have, however, begun to suspect that MadWorld is not actually meant to be a video game brawler, but a cleverly disguised Jazz Hands simulator.

Shake the controller to perform "Jazz Hands" finishing move

The motions that would pretend to necessitate a bit of dexterity are actually so loose that you could be suffering an epileptic fit and have just as much success. The game will tell you that skewering a man with a signpost or any other pointed object requires a downward motion of the remote; in actuality, any motion will suffice, making it entirely possible to wipe out a large group of enemies by performing lewd hand gestures toward your neighbour’s kids.

MadWorld has a lot of difficulty discerning horizontal movements from vertical, meaning that most of your attempted reverse punches (performed via a horizontal slash of the remote) will manifest as uppercuts. Just picture a monochrome scene of a man repeatedly fisting a group of other large men in spiked bondage gear, with blood spurting out from each thrust, and that is basically my experience with the game.

All of this makes combat, despite looking really cool, very unrewarding. Part of that can be attributed to the Sonic the Hedgehog effect: where the developers don’t want the player to screw up the experience, so they politely wrest control away from him or her and make the game play itself. This is most evident during MadWorld’s boss fights, which strip away all environmental tools and force the player to win by activating a series of quick-time events. On the Wii, these pre-scripted actions have become the very definition of the term waggle and need to stop before I’m compelled to gnaw my hands off at the wrists.

In lieu of crafting a decent set of controls, the developers at Platinum Games decided to focus on making a graphically stylish, mature game for the Wii in order to satisfy the untapped demographic of males over 17. Except that superfluous violence and swearing are about the most pre-pubescent notion of maturity that I can think of, and I’ll let the hypocrisy of that statement sink in for a little while before continuing.

From the classic article, "The 23 best horror games according to the mentally challenged"

There are a few other brawlers already on the Wii, the most notable being No More Heroes. It’s similar to MadWorld in a lot of ways: over the top violence, crude humour and stylized, cel-shaded graphics. However, I would recommend No More Heroes over MadWorld to anybody. It’s simply a better game because it makes sparing, intelligent use of the Wii’s controller and is a clear homage to gaming’s history. Comparatively, MadWorld is what it is solely to fill a genre gap on the Wii.

MadWorld, like all games, has its strong points. It looks good, even if it does play to every visual convention in Platinum Games’ history; John Dimaggio and Greg Proops are competent as the game’s announcers; and some of the environmental kills are genuinely funny the first couple of times you see them. But by the time you complete the tutorial level, you’ll have seen and heard the full depth of everything MadWorld has to offer, and by then it’ll be neither fun nor amusing.

The thought had crossed my mind that, maybe, the GameStop clerk had simply given me the wrong game, which would explain the huge disparity between what I and what every idiot on the Internet believes. Otherwise, it seems that the only reason I should like MadWorld is that everyone says I should.