Hey everyone. Are you hooked on MADWORLD yet? If you aren’t, come back and read this blog after you’ve cleared MADWORLD ten more times. MADWORLD is now available in Europe, so this blog is going introduce some replay goals that will make your MADWORLD experience ten times more fun.

If you’ve already driven yourself mad by playing the game too much, this blog post might not be up your alley; however, for those who are keen to keep chomping at the bit, definitely read this blog and have an even better time playing MADWORLD again.

• Five Sign Impale

MADWORLD’s most famous kill has to be shoving a sign post into an enemy’s head, but did you know that you can impale up to five signs into a single enemy? When I look at some of the gameplay video that users have uploaded to Youtube, it seems that everyone is stopping at a single sign post. That’s just an unbelievable waste. If you use multiple signs, you will earn more points and a higher rating for your attack. Not to mention an enemy with five signs in his head is incredibly funny!

• Impaling a Bull with a Sign Post

Big Bull Crocker is the overbearing guy wearing a bull helmet and charging at you with a double chainsaw. You guys are probably all trying to take him out with Jack’s chainsaw or punches. And I figure that you have all had a power struggle with Bull at least once. After winning that power struggle, Big Bull will stand there winded. That is when you can actually impale Big Bull Crocker with a sign post! He is only standing there for a moment, so your chance to pull this off is small, but you can impale up to 5 posts into Crocker.

I’ll share another tip for dealing with Big Bull Crocker! Get Bull in front of a Rose Bush (Spiked Wall) and attack him. Any attack will do, so give it a try. You can actually impale Big Bull Crocker onto the Rose Bush. Depending on his health, he will either die or be disabled by the spikes. When he is disabled, you can use your chainsaw to cut chunks out of him and send him to an early grave. Give it a try! I love this technique, so impale him with a sign post, plant him on a rose bush, and let the Bull know who is boss.

• Use Enemy Lures

When you are in the Station portion of the first stage, there is an attache case in the area. The one that says “CASH” on the front. If you pick that up and throw it, all the money inside will fly up into the air when it hits the ground. The enemies who see that will lose all interest in Jack and head straight for the cash to gather it up, forming a pack of enemies all in one spot.

Throw the cash onto the train tracks and get all the enemies to gather there! A few moments later, a train will come blasting through the station and smash through the cash loving horde, wiping them all out.

There are the sorts of ways you can use the attache case cash to raise your kill efficiency and take out lots of enemies. In every stage there is a lure item, so once you find them make sure to take advantage of them.

• New DeathWatch Challenges!

Everyone is interested in the story, so they clear an area and move on to the next to see what will happen. However, MADWORLD may be a linear game, but you can revisit areas that you have completed.

Sure, playing the same stage the exact same way is OK, but it won’t stay fresh for long, so we’ve included extra missions. Each area has a different mission, with up to four missions added in one stage. As the missions change, it will give you a different sense of urgency in each area to complete the mission, so you really should give those stages another shot!

There are other things I’d like to add, but for now, I suggest checking out the MADWORLD strategy guide that is on sale in stores now. There is lots of great art featuring Jack and the enemies from MADWORLD, so everyone should own their own copy!

So here is your last bit of INSIDER INFORMATION!

In the 2nd stage area known as Bistro La Lusty Geisha, go to the tempura area and try to place as much tempura as you can on the plate in a single go, then ring the bell. You will find something well worth your efforts!

Now that MADWORLD is released, I can focus this blog on things like difficult periods during development, or how to get the most out of your MADWORLD experience. I’m also going to do something new at the end of the blog – Insider Information! If you read my blog and then play MADWORLD, it will be 10 times as fun as it was before! (I think…)

With that out of the way, let’s get to the topic at hand. Controls!

But since this is a Wii game, that automatically translates into how you use gesture controls in gameplay. Right!? I think we ended up with absolutely awesome Wii Controls, but it was definitely one of the biggest challenges during development. It was a long hard road to arrive at the final product.

At the start, once we decided to make MADWORLD a Wii game, we began to think about how we would use the Wii Remote. What we initially ran up against was that gesture controls and MADWORLD didn’t seem to match tempo-wise. The more and more you swung the Wii Remote around, the slower the game tempo became, and that feeling of visceral fun that comes with an action game fell by the wayside.

But you can’t just eliminate gesture controls entirely, so we would try various control schemes, and iterate upon them again and again. For instance, we tried things like using only the Wii Remote (no nunchuk) turned sideways (like Mario Kart)… Of course, all of these attempts were thrown out pretty quickly.

Amongst all these efforts, I found an answer. We needed to make the buttons the center of our scheme. Up until that point, we had been focused on how we would swing the Wii Remote, but we switched things up and focused on a button-based control scheme that maintained the tempo of “existing action games.” But that doesn’t mean that we abandoned gestures entirely. We turned it over to members of our team, the Bayonetta team, and Mikami-san’s team and listened to their opinions on where they would like us to introduce gesture controls, whittling down the possibilities.

Basically, we moved all of the player movement to the nunchuk, and let the Wii Remote handle all the player actions. The only gesture used in movement is the Backflip, which you execute by yanking the nunchuk towards you. With the chainsaw, you hold down the B button to activate it, and then swing it sideways or up and down. The chainsaw responds to that and cuts horizontally or vertically. We also added specific gestures for the finishing moves. There are also specific gestures for attacks used during the boss fights.

By doing this, we placed the basic controls on the buttons, but were able to get a good balance by accenting these controls with gestures. That’s when we knew MADWORLD’s controls were set. Controls are absolutely critical, and can affect the quality of a game, especially action games, and even more so action games on the Wii. Starting with our lead programmer, Tarukado-san, we were able to pull through thanks to our numerous talented staff. I’m not sure if the controls will please everyone, but I think that we are using the best points of the Wii and integrating them into the controls. I’m quite satisfied with the result.

Insider Information!

When you swing the Wii remote, are you swinging the Wii Remote with all you might? To make sure we maintained the tempo of the game, and also to make sure you arm does get tired, we adjusted the way we detected swing strength. So you don’t have to flail your arms around, please just flick your wrist and destroy all the enemies in your path! Of course, if you get into the Jack state of mind and want to swing for the fences, you are more than welcome to! However, just make sure you don’t destroy the room you are in by the time you are done…

The soundtracks have finally arrived at the office!

Finally! Finally! Today, users in North America can get their hands on their own copies of MADWORLD! We worked ourselves to the bone everyday, putting our blood, sweat and tears into the game so that this day would come, and we will never forget it now that it is here!

But this day also means that I’m incredibly nervous! I have no idea what I will do if people pick up and play MADWORLD and think, “This isn’t as fun as I thought it would be…”

Of course, we all worked really hard to make sure that everyone who buys MADWORLD is incredibly happy with their purchase and their game playing experience, so I am confident in that respect, but with confidence also comes anxiety.

So everyone in North America who is playing MADWORLD, let us know what you think! Even just a simple one word comment to this post is fine. (Just make sure you don’t post spoilers!)

(Hideki Kamiya playing some MADWORLD.)

MADWORLD will be released in Europe and Australia on March 20, 2009!

MADWORLD had started to slowly coalesce as a game for me. I could see its core. However, I still had this nagging impression that we were a bit too rough in how we were handling violence.

I began to wonder… “Hmm… There has to be a way to make this more over-the-top and comical.”

Around the same time, we were preparing the points system that increases a user’s score as their kills become more and more complex and violent. With this system, if there was a way to have someone watch the game and react with comments like, “That was a high scoring kill!” or “If you would have f%&^ed him up a bit more, the score would have been higher,” the user would be able to go after brutal kills or more complex ways of dispatching enemies. They would know instantly whether their actions were being rewarded or weren’t up to snuff. I took this idea to the team, and after much talk and deliberation, everyone came around to the idea of having someone talk during the gameplay, and we decided to add play-by-play announcers to the game.

However, we knew that only having one announcer would seem a bit weak, and wouldn’t really get people excited. So we decided that they should be like Japanese Manzai comedians, with the play-by-play man joined by a color commentator, bouncing lines back and forth between each other as the game played out. I thought that if we could pull that off, we would definitely make the game even more comical. (By the way, Japanese Manzai consists of a straight man and a funny man bouncing jokes back and forth to get laughs.)
So once we were set with our announcer pair, we needed to figure out what they would say. So I went to two important team members, our resident American and Canadian, to figure out where we should go with things, and then we recorded some announcer tests in our in-house recording studio.

Of course, since I don’t understand English, I let them take care of the finer points of writing the lines; however, when they were recording the test lines, they were laughing and having a good time, so I became more confident that we could use this idea to make the game more comical.

Once the recording was done, we put the data into a development build of the game, and presented this version of the game, containing Jack’s gruesome kills with the announcers talking over the action, to the staff of SEGA of America with a bit of trepidation.

They watched the actions of Jack on screen along with the announcers talking away and everyone busted up laughing!! “They are laughing! The announcers work!!” I was able to take my suspicions that it would work and turn it into definite proof. From then on out, the announcers were in the game.

There’s another important purpose the announcers serve in MADWORLD.

The announcers performances help you get into the universe of MADWORLD and understand what it is all about. Jack has joined a murderous game show called DEATHWATCH, which makes this a world completely out of the ordinary. Thus, we needed the announcers to talk during the game to make you feel how different this world is. Even though we had really different graphics and over-the-top ways to kill enemies, I thought that we weren’t getting this across well enough, and we could have the announcers aim to fill this gap.

I gave the announcers some backstories to fill in the gaps.
Announcer 1: He is a man hired by the DEATHWATCH organizers to explain the game. A typical sports announcer.
Announcer 2: A champion of DEATHWATCH, he can add color commentary from the perspective of a former contestant, and follow up on what the first announcer is saying.

With those two characters in place, we could get across the atmosphere of DEATHWATCH and really bring people in and explain the MADWORLD universe. I had the announcer tests work off these character descriptions, and when we went to final recording, the descriptions didn’t change at all. The actors understood my ideas and created their characters.

Announcers are usually only used in “sports games,” like soccer or baseball; however, with MADWORLD, we had a great reason to add them in, and it became another way we challenged ourselves to add the icing on the cake and make the an even more interesting, catchy game. Anyways, that is how I feel about it… But you guys have seen the trailers so far. What do you think?

I hope you all enjoyed my blog entry last week, and I’m happy that you are interested in our little game called MADWORLD. I think for this blog, I’ll continue from where I left off with my first post.

Our team developed MADWORLD here in Japan, and almost all of the staff were Japanese. I was constantly worried with the question of how my Japanese team would understand what makes people overseas laugh. It is a tough thing to do, and I worried if they were up to it.

However, as all the foreigners who had seen the signpost or the rose bush would bust up laughing, I came to believe that if we made the game on that level, other people overseas would be laughing with us as well. That’s when I instructed the team to, “Create gameplay situations and cause user reactions that we think are over-the-top, but don’t ever aim to get laughs!”

Why? Because I’ve never heard of a Japanese comedian think of some kind of gag that will get laughs overseas and have it actually work out. I thought that if we as a group simply don’t get what is funny in these cases, we shouldn’t be trying to get laughs, because we will just end up making something that falls flat.

In truth, the reaction to the signpost from the team was awful. Everyone thought it was mean-spirited and left a bad taste in their mouth. However, I think that was just the standard Japanese reaction to things. When foreigners saw it, they laughed out loud. Their completely opposite reaction, that over-the-top brutality = laughs, was the moment I really realized that people, countries, and cultures are truly different. So it would be pointless for my Japanese team to suddenly declare, “We are going to make a game that makes westerners laugh!” What I did think was that we could make what had already gotten laughs the focal point and began to imagine what else might get laughs. So that’s what I told the team to do.

I figure for the non-Japanese who have read this far, a lot of you must be thinking, “What is really so brutal about this game, anyway?” That is the difference in reactions that I was discussing. Of course, I’m the only member of the team who thought the signpost was funny… Maybe I’m not really Japanese after all.

And now for something completely different… Some users on a site (NeoGAF) got organized and made some MADWORLD posters. I was really surprised by how awesome the design sense was. The other thing that shocked me was just how many posters they made.

Everyone took time out of their day and tried their hardest to make a cool MADWORLD ad. It really shot our motivation through the roof and made the team and I want to make an even better game for everyone out there! Thank you all so much for making these!!
(The poster below is the one I thought was the best out of all the designs!)

By the way, have you guys checked out the first episode of PGTV? I was interviewed for the first episode, and one of the questions was what were my favorite games… But it seems like I forgot to mention number 1! I think I screwed it up because I had a couple of drinks and I haven’t been playing Brain Training on the DS lately. So now is as good a time as any… My favorite game is… Grand Theft Auto.

I started playing GTA with GTA3, but then went back and played everything before and everything after. Right now I am playing GTA4. When I was at Capcom, I worked on the localization of GTA Vice City Stories for the PSP.

What makes GTA appealing to me is probably something so obvious I don’t even need to explain, but that is the amount of freedom in the game. It is so much fun! Even MADWORLD references elements of GTA’s level of freedom in its gameplay as well as in the on-screen map we use to help you get around. Of course, MADWORLD isn’t nearly as expansive a world as GTA, but I’d like to think that we’ve made a Wii game with the most amount of freedom found on the system. Everyone pick up a copy and enjoy our own special brand of freedom!

I was planning on continuing my story from the last post, but it is going to have to wait until next time. Why? Because from February 2-8, I went to New York to present MADWORLD at the New York ComicCon!

I had been looking forward to the event, filled with incredibly excited and anxious energy because not only was it was my first-ever trip to New York, but also the first public showing of MADWORLD. And now it was finally here! The morning of the first day was reserved for official business, so the crowd was sparse, but once afternoon rolled around, the line at the entrance gate was ENORMOUS!!!! Even though it was something like -5°C (21°F), which I’m told is actually warm, it seemed there were anime fans from all over the US, and thus I saw tons of different characters being cosplayed in the crowd. I think the characters I saw the most of were Link from Zelda, and Obi-Wan from Star Wars. The sheer variety of Obi-Wan cosplayers was really interesting! It was almost like Tokyo Game Show.

SEGA’s staff worked really hard late into the night before the show started to get ready, and thanks to them we had four awesome demo stations for people to try out PlatinumGames’s very own MADWORLD. That’s right! New York ComicCon was the first time users were able to get their hands on MADWORLD themselves!

I came to ComicCon with two important tasks at hand – to sign autographs for fans and conduct interviews with the press. The first signing was during business time, but there was already a young guy lined up and ready to go… He was waiting to have Inaba-san to sign his copy of Okami for him! I was really surprised and also incredibly happy that there were fans this passionate in America.

This was really the first time for me to sign real autographs, so I was wondering what I should write when I sign things. I ended up decided on drawing a Happy Onion, one of the items in MADWORLD, and then signing my name together with the drawing. When I signed things for fans this way, I don’t know if they were in on the joke or not, but lots of them laughed and seemed really happy. It may have taken some time for me to sign things, but I am really glad I did it this way. I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet our fans up until that point, but it seems we were about to go beyond words and communicate somehow this way. It was incredibly fun for me. I really hope we get to do another signing someday.

I also did lots of press interviews.
The first day I talked with X-PLAY, GameTrailers, and Gamespot. All of the interviews involved me playing the game while explaining how everything worked, so if you want the inside details check out my interviews on those sites.

Thank you so much for coming to ComicCon and playing the game. I’d love to hear what you thought of it, so be sure to leave me some comments!

Hello everyone! Allow me to introduce myself. I am the ‘demented director’ of MADWORLD, Shigenori Nishikawa.

A few minutes ago, I was playing MADWORLD and shoving signs into enemies. I had sign-planted five enemies in a row, when my producer, Atsushi Inaba, came up to me and said, “If you’ve got time to play MADWORLD, you have time to blog.”

So here we are. I hope my blog will give you an idea of what it took to make MADWORLD, as well as what I think makes MADWORLD great, all from a game director’s perspective. Hopefully you will read it and think “I want to play MADWORLD now! I want to use the Caution sign!”

I think it is pretty obvious, but MADWORLD was a game of many challenges. I’d like to explain two of them here.

• The Challenge Of Making Original Action Game That Stands Up To The Black, White, And Red Style

We had decided on the black, white, and red graphics from the outset, so that hurdle was clear. Or so I thought. What was really hard was coming up with a fresh game concept that held up to the graphic style. Making an action game on the Wii is also a challenge in and of itself, but I was constantly running through my head how to make the game feel “fresh” and “original”.

What gave me a hint on how to proceed was one of the colors from the black, white, and red palette. You see, as the color of blood, red could be splattered around everywhere until the stages were literally dripping. The problem with that was, it would just end up being another crappy violent video game. So I hit another wall and had to keep on thinking… Instead of a game about killing, what if MADWORLD was a game where killing and being killed were made completely over-the-top and unrealistic? I thought, if we did it that way, then how would turning the stages red with blood come off?

If we made a game that was based around over-the-top, slapstick violence, you would be laughing as you did all these crazy acts. There’s never been a game like that before…

• The Challenge Of Making A Fun Game With Adult Humor

Just like I outlined above, MADWORLD is a game born from over-the-top violence.

Once I had that set, the first element that I put into the game was shoving a sign through an enemy’s head. In a regular fighting action game, you would use weapons like a sword or a knife. But that wouldn’t be over over-the-top, so I went back to my own special profound state of worry.

As I was taking a stroll outside in said worried state, I just happened to catch sight of a traffic sign. An idea shot out at me. If you pulled this thing out of the ground and shoved it into an enemy’s head, and they walked around all staggered, that would be really cool! So I pushed the team to make it for me.

When they were finished and showed it to me, I laughed and said “Cool!” But what worried me was that I could sense the team all looking at each other and saying, “Huh!?”

However, I realized that the signpost would get old after a while, so I forced the team to come up with ideas that we would make and test out over and over again. Their direction was to “come up with funny ideas that you’ve never seen in a game before now.”

This is where I think that MADWORLD really took form. But I have to admit that the team not being into it at first really shocked me. Even though they were Japanese like me, I wonder if I have my own special way of looking at things…

It made me really worried whether we could actually make a game that would make people all around the world laugh. But I’ll save that story for my next post.

A shot of Jack using the sign post from early on in development.