Play Diary: Madworld

Session 1: Player 1.

Comic book intro was ok (subtitles or even better, speech bubbles, would have been good. I like the sound effect text, like "Kapow!")
Liked the change to animated 3D.
Monochromatic style looks great (presumably really low texture budget too.)

Map / Options screen is a bit incongruous. No explanation of why I'm at this screen.
I can't read which button it is for "Return" (presumably B) - Note I have a widescreen SD CRT TV. Maybe it looks ok on LCD or HIDef?

Controls look straightforward, but I'm not sure I can remember them all right away. Would have preferred to have them introduced one at a time, in-game.

There is a Subtitle option which is good.

On the map / Stage Select screen it's quite hard to read the Information text. Also, there's an icon for the D-pad with the word "Select" next to it, but it doesn't do anything - maybe later on you open up new areas and this feature becomes active then, but wouldn't it be better to only display it when it's active? At least ghost it out? Or perhaps this was only applicable to choosing either "Map" or "Options" (and not with the full D, only up / down)? Either way it's misleading.

Combat tutorial was ok, though I did panic a bit when the first enemy came up to me - perhaps it would be better for him to stand still. I quickly hammered some buttons to dispatch the oncoming enemy, but this inadvertently skipped through a couple of the help-text screens. Might be nice to have the ability to 'rewind' them? Mind you, the tutorial was really straight forward so it might not be such a big deal.

I do like the Manhunt 2 style "B Finish" moves. Really over the top, grotesque stuff :) Also reminds me of No More Heroes where you stun an enemy before swinging the Wiimote to finish them off.

I fought the respawning enemies for a while until I realised that I might have missed something - in the heat of the battle I hadn't been watching the help text, or had assumed it was something other than what it really was; I should have been doing A finishes instead of B finishes, and presumably nothing else would have indicated that I was doing it wrong, so I could have been there for ages! It was fun for a while, but I would have liked more direction.
In general I don't like the way help-text automatically disappears after a short duration, or if you move and some other help text appears in response to a closer object. This makes it easy to miss the text, and requires the player to constantly be monitoring it, which distracts from the action. Better would be player-controlled advance through the text, or a pause when the text first appears to allow undistracted reading.

Rose Bush was really fun- "More!"

Quite hard to listen to the spoken commentary, read the help text, and fight off the enemies all at once, especially as moving around changes the help text in response to whichever item is nearest.

Turbinator was fun. I liked the intro sequence where the commentator got thrown in by the chick.

Don't really like the movement / camera controls too much. Would have appreciated additional D-pad control.

There's even a toilet execution! This is way better than Manhunt 2 :)

Game seems to have crashed! After Big Bull intro sequence, cut back to on the railway platform. Last section of audio loops forever, screen is frozen, controls do nothing, not even Wiimote power button or Wii Reset button (Wii power button does shut the console down though.)

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Session 2: Player 1

Didn't find an option to load my old game...? Rebooted. Damn! I have to go through all of that again?
Still, it didn't take long. Stopped playing when I'd finished the first level.

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