What the Nintendo Wii is missing: violent video games
It's about time that violent video games made it to the Nintendo Wii.
Fortunately, Sega is stepping up with a new game that brings a comic-book sense of ultra-violence to the Wii's motion control functionality. Madworld is a new game scheduled for 2009 that brings blood and gore into your Wii-world.
Why is this cool? Because the Wii offers a whole new way to engage with games and other humans, unlike traditional console games. The notion of grabbing things in the virtual world and using them as part of the game is really cool as you can literally control the action of the game.
Often times, brutality is expressed in a spiteful nature. There are already plenty of games out there that hit this mark; however, we decided that MADWORLD's brutality should be aimed at providing the user with a sense of exhilaration during play.
To give you an example from gameplay, we have a scene where you can pull a street sign from the ground and shove it into a enemy's head. However, I thought that it is much more fun to stab someone with a sign that actually has some sort of meaning as opposed to a knife. We tried the idea out, and the reaction amongst the team was so positive, I knew this was the way to proceed.
While one type of action is already fun, one of MadWorld's most innovative points is the ability to link and layer these actions together. For instance, you can grab that enemy with the street sign through his head and throw him against a spiked wall.
I've gone up and down on video games as both a consumer and as someone who wonders how they really work. In general my big complaint is that video games are such an incredible walled garden that it's next to impossible to step outside the big studio domination.
The Wii has been a surprising success for Nintendo and all signs point to future innovation, all of it hidden from plain sight, even going as far as banning their creative leader from talking about his hobbies.
It would be great to see the big console makers open up to more (any?) third parties vendors to get content onto their machines.