My initial impressions of: Monster Madness

Monster Madness Characters

My initial impressions of: Monster Madness

I found Monster Madness for $20. Not too bad. Came in handy earlier this evening when some friends were over who wanted to play some 3 player co-op on the same box that wasn’t Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

Not too many choices after that.

Initial Impressions: The game is fast. Movement speed is like that of an old school snes game. But the camera isn’t static, and there is too much movement on the screen at once. Bodies are all ragdoll. You can’t really tell what is going on, even WORSE than Marvel Ultimate Alliance (I know…hard to believe). Still, any reference to Neighbor being eaten is a plus in my book, so I stuck with it a bit.

It seems the tutorial is pretty much horrible. It mentions things about item switching that you can’t do until much later in the game when you finally buy a new weapon. Until then you are stuck with a melee weapon that is either Thumbs Up or suckage. No real indicator as to which it will be (well, there is, but you can’t SEE the damn thing, especially if there is a fight going on). No melee weapon appears better than another in the Thumbs Up category for your specific character, but that’s probably because it is hard to tell if you are dealing damage, being hit, etc. Oh, and the voice acting is AWFUL. ears bleeding bad. And they felt the need to have jump and dodge noises on top of that.

That, and I can’t reach a DAMN thing on the top of roofs. You see collectible items everywhere, but the jump mechanic is pretty awful. That makes the platforming to get these items luck, or a missed hit detection lets you pick it up through a wall. Either way, as a “gotta collect them all personality” I’ll need to look up if there is a double jump in the game. Overall, I’m going to have to read up on it a bit.

Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia has a great sense of humor. The initial house is on an Indian Burial ground (of course), you fight Zombie Dogs, Granny, and others that I won’t spoil for you. It seems to even have a fairly robust party mode where you and friends can kill each other on the same system, live, or link. What I could not find was Xbox Live coop play. Says you can “team up on one system, or take the battle online” on the back of the box.

Overall, doesn’t seem to be a candidate for pLayday, but fun co-op for when I have some friends over.

Why reviews can’t mention the IMPORTANT things like if a game has split-screen, xblive, and/or a COMBINATION, or if subtitles are available, but talk about stupid things like if a game giving graphics a numerical value (WoW and GTA San Andreas were not 9’s or 10’s at launch…) is beyond me.

While on the subject: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 NEEDS to have co-op combination of Live and Local. If I have 2 friends over, and a 3rd at his home, I want to play with all of them, dammit. Hell. This gets its own quick post. Maybe someone will google it.

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