by Matt Casamassina @ ign.com
May 15, 2008 - In Mad World from Platinum Games, the main character tears through a hyper-stylized black and white city and impales his enemies on a wall of spikes... five or six times in a row, puling them off to fleshy, sucking noises and then tossing them back on again in a gruesome display of blood and gore. He hurls an opponent into a nearby dumpster. The man falls forward, his upper body hanging out of the receptacle, and then the lid comes slamming down, cutting his torso in half as blood rains down upon the streets. He grabs hold of a nearby sign post, which reads, ironically, 'caution,' and he stabs the bottom end of it through another character's eye, walking the agonized foe around the street before launching him into the air and against a nearby wall. And then he fires up a chainsaw, which just so happens to be connected to his right arm, grinding the blade into the head and then body of an unlucky antagonist. Suddenly, a gigantic dartboard rises from the street and the main character begins swinging away with a baseball bat, violently knocking foes airborne and at the board for points. "Splaaaaaaaaat!" reads a comic-book-like font as characters are sent spinning toward the giant target. This is a mini-game and it's called Man Darts. No -- seriously.
You may not know the name Platinum Games -- not yet, anyway -- but you definitely know the people behind it. Tatsuya Minami. Hideki Kamiya. Atsushi Inaba. Shigenori Nishikawa. These four alone have backgrounds with Capcom and Clover Studios and were integral in the development of some games you might have heard of. Viewtiful Joe. Okami. Resident Evil remake. Resident Evil 4. Kamiya created Devil May Cry. Nishikawa helped design Resident Evil 4. We can keep going, but you get the point. Today, Minami leads the ex-Capcom and Clover personnel as Platinum Games, a company which employs 130 people working on four projects: a PS3 / 360 game called Bayonetta. A DS science-fiction RPG called Infinite Line. A still-unnamed title by another person you might have heard of -- his name is Shinji Mikami; he created the Resident Evil series. And Mad World, helmed by Nishikawa, who is on hand at a SEGA event in San Francisco on Wednesday night to pull back the curtain on the Wii-exclusive -- yes, built from the ground-up for Nintendo's console -- action bloodbath.
A couple of days ago, a blurry video of Mad World leaked to the Internet and within minutes it was duplicated 10 times over on YouTube. Platinum Games' Inaba is on the stage now and he's just shown that same video -- running in widescreen glory on a gigantic projector screen set up in the middle of a trendy oceanside bar / restaurant. The room is packed full of journalists, all of them cheering, as Inaba introduces the project lead. "Nishikawa has worked on Dino Crisis 2, Resident Evil remake and Resident Evil 4," he says and pauses. "Sorry. I forgot Dino Crisis 3. But I think he would like to forget that one, too." Nishikawa takes the stage, everybody laughing, and adds, "I wish I could forget Dino Crisis 3."
"Mad World is made up of two concepts," says Nishikawa. "The first key concept within Mad World is the stark black and white graphics. This is to further emphasize the violence, as represented by the stark red blood. The other key concept is that we didn't want to create a game that was depraved or perverse, but rather, featured comical, over-the-top violence so that anyone could enjoy it." At this, there's more laughter in the audience.
Inaba interrupts. "Perhaps some of you guys have already seen this trailer." By this time, we've already watched it on our computer monitors, squinting, a dozen or more times. "So today, I have prepared a special demo exclusively for San Francisco." Our jaws drop as Nishikawa picks up a Wii remote and nunchuk and begins to play. The aforementioned carnage ensues.
Mad World's black and white visual style has clearly been inspired by Frank Miller's Sin City, a truth that Nishikawa admits. The look is beautiful and boldly different than any other videogame presentation, hardly surprising from the talent pool responsible for such artsy graphic styles as those powering Okami and Viewtiful Joe. What strikes us immediately is just how can be seen and identified within the industrial city streets despite the monochrome color scheme. There's a great deal of definition to the bulky main character, Jack, and his foes. When Jack walks into a well-lit area, his face becomes white with the illumination. In the darkness, its black with white outlines. Even with massive particle bloodshed and camera sweeps, the framerate is rock solid.
Later, when we have a chance to sit down with all four on-hand Platinum Games employees and we ask Inaba if Wii's inherent technical limitations had anything to do with Mad World's ultra-stylized look. "It actually had nothing to do with the limitations of the Wii hardware," he explains. "In fact, we're not using the Wii hardware to full capacity just yet. It was unrelated to technical limitations, but more of a lineup issue. On PS3 and 360, there are a lot of action games, but on the Wii we felt we could really make a difference in the lineup and provide something unique to the user."
We ask Inaba about the Mad World's storyline. We've seen an incredibly amount of blood and guts, but we don't know yet know why chainsaw-equipped Jack is on the gory rampage. "It's a story that we feel will motivate the player to move forward and keep the same comical, over-the-top nature and while we are preparing a very fun and interesting story, we will talk more about that in the future," he offers, holding back on further details for the moment.
Nishikawa adds a little more. "The game is not just about killing people. We're looking to create the most interesting and unique gameplay experience that we can. One of the key elements in the game is an entity called the Death Watch and within that context, we're trying to create the most interesting rule structure so while you're going around beating the hell out of people, you're also fitting in with the game world itself." He can't just bring up this 'Death Watch' and leave it at that. We press him for more on the subject and he pauses for a half minute as he tries to explain it. "It's difficult for me to explain without going into a lot of depth about the game itself. But a very simple analogy is to compare Death Watch to a baseball game and the key player is Jack, and the actions that he makes fall within the realm of this sport activity. So there are people watching and there's a scoring system involved." We ask, like the movie Running Man? "Something similar to that, yes."
So what is Jack's motivation? How did he get himself into this predicament? These are details that Nishikawa guards a little closer. "Jack himself doesn't just jump in and start killing people. There's actually a story involved and he does have a personal motivation for why he's in there. And there's a certain element that he's in there because he has to be and not necessarily because he wants to be."
In the demo we've just watched, Jack seems highly destructive with melee weapons, but we haven't yet spotted any guns. We ask Nishikawa if the character will be able to use projectile weapons and if so, will he be able to dual-wield them? He doesn't yet know. While the staff has bombarded him with ideas, he's still considering the possibilities. "One of the things that's really guiding my decision process is, whatever weapons Jack uses, how will they be seen within the game's context? So for a gun, you're just going to shoot it but you won't really see anything necessarily. So I think there's a gravity toward melee types of weapons. Not just melee weapons for the sake of it necessarily, but something that is a little more visually appealing."
This answer jives with a detail Inaba adds -- specifically, that Mad World will focus on using the Wii remote's accelerometer. "The game actually does not use the infrared pointer. We didn't want it to be a game where you had to very carefully point and click. Because it's an action game, we felt that the motions were much better suited."
Controls are being tweaked, but from the looks of it, Jack is controlled through the world with the nunchuk's analog stick. The camera follows him via a traditional third-person behind-the-back viewpoint. As the characters draws closer to enemies, players can press the B-trigger to kick-start violent death sequences. Some of these waggle. For instance, gamers will flick the Wii remote forward to send bodies flying in Man Darts. (That really is what it's called.) Meanwhile, we presume taps and combos influence other stand-offs. Jack approaches and dukes it out with another foe during the demo. He punches the character twice in the stomach and on his third blow, his fist rips through his enemy's chest, where he grabs the beating heart inside, pulls it out in a disgustingly gruesome showcase of blood splatters, and then squashes it in his hand. And from what we've been told, this exaggerated level of violence is only the tip of the iceberg.
We've often stated that Wii developers need to push the console from a stylistic perspective since they will not be able to compete with the sheer horsepower of systems like Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Having seen Mad World up close, we're thrilled that one of the best software houses in the world completely agrees. Platinum Games has with its first official Wii effort created not only one of the console's most beautiful games, but one with real gameplay substance and seemingly smart controls. Here is also a project unabashedly centered on the hardcore audience. Mad World has skyrocketed to the tip-top of our most wanted list and we are officially putting all Wii owners on (blood) red alert: prepare to go 'Mad' sometime next year.
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