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Slice Each month a new artist; each image a new angle. This month: American Suburb X.
Autumn A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
The Modern Materialist Almost everything you want.
Paper Airplane Crush A San Francisco photographer on the eternal search for the girls of summer.
Rose & Olive Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other's lives.
chase The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island Hooksexup's TV blog.
61 Frames Per Second Smarter gaming. Date Machine Putting your baggage to good use.
Date Machine Putting your baggage to good use.
Unlike Bayonetta, Sega were all too happy to let me try out MadWorld yesterday. After a quick tutorial in the controls, I was thrown, for lack of a better phrase, into the deep end of Varrigan City. I walked away from the game thinking three distinct things: One: Ultra-detailed black and white games are as cool in practice as they are in theory, but I can see why there aren’t too many of them. Two: Platinum Games took Suda 51’s No More Heroes combat model and improved its accuracy and versatility in significant ways. Three: MadWorld’s kind of… boring. For clarity’s sake, I’m saying that my fifteen minutes with MadWorld were boring. I walked away without an inkling of what it will be like as a complete game. I got a good feel for its combat in one portion of one stage only. That combat is solid and the controls responsive, like a slowed-down, more deliberate variation on No More Heroes’ manic swordplay. A button makes protagonist Jack punch in combos and swing weapons picked up from the environment, shaking the Wii remote does an uppercut, holding the B-trigger brings out Jack’s chainsaw and you swing about the controller to make a mess of thugs wandering about town. There’s also grappling, throws with flicks of the remote, and all sorts of context-sensitive environmental violence. Looking at it all written out, MadWorld’s controls might seem a little overwhelming, even more complicated than those on a more traditional, dual-analog stick controller. They are when you actually play the game, but it’s not difficult to settle into the game’s rhythm. I say that as someone who’s played a ton of No More Heroes, so MadWorld may have something of a learning curve for players new to 3D combat on Wii that’s more than just wagglin’ the remote. Unfortunately, the game’s mechanical competence is besides the point since the combat doesn’t feel very substantial. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen what MadWorld has to offer. You bludgeon all sorts of Sin-City-meets-Manhunt badguys with your fists and whatever else is around, throwing them into bizarre death traps wherever you can find them. MadWorld’s carnival freak aggressors don’t put up much of a fight though, and therein lies the problem. I’m a glutton for exaggerated cartoon violence in videogames. MadWorld’s is very satisfying, a perfect mix of funny and grotesque, as a visual spectacle, but it never demands anything of you as a game. If there’s no threat to your own well-being in a game like MadWorld, the violence loses the thrill of tension and release. It’s that exact balance that made the Platinum Games team’s other action games God Hand and Viewtiful Joe the so memorable. MadWorld’s presentation — intricate black and white environments and characters accented by washes of red blood and yellow sound-effect words — looks great, bellying the Wii’s meager horsepower. The characters are huge too, much bigger than you usually see in the genre, and the camera stays close to the action. The characters are so big though that I found myself losing track of what was even happening. If the enemies were even remotely aggressive, I think I would have died more than a few times. The black and white compounds the confusion because it’s hard to discern what’s what on screen – if the game didn’t have a GTA-style radar as part of its HUD, I wouldn’t have even realized there was a path leading to the level’s objective. Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba admitted to the inherent problems of MadWorld’s visual style, and it was troubling to find that all the kinks hadn’t been worked out yet. Platinum Games’ track record is enough to convince me that there’s a lot more to MadWorld than you can experience in fifteen minutes. Still, I was a little disappointed that its play was nowhere near as instantly gripping as its looks. Related links: The Contrarion: Madworld - Color Me Unimpressed Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.
Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Hooksexup, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.
Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.
Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines. Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.
Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.
Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.
Cole Stryker is an American freelance writer living in York, England, where he resides with his archeologist wife. He writes for a travel company by day and argues about pop culture on the internet by night. Find him writing regularly here and here.
Peter Smith is like the lead character of Irwin Shaw's The 80-Yard Run, except less athletic. He considers himself very lucky to have this job. But it's a little premature to take "jack-off of all trades" off his resume. Besides writing, travelling, and painting houses, Pete plays guitar in a rock trio called The Aye-Ayes. He calls them a 'power pop' band, but they generally sound more like Motorhead on a drinking binge.
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