From the Brow of Zeus

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is the latest video game spoof to be critically panned for including very types of cliches that it parodies. Or as Gamespy put it, Eat Lead "points out some of the worst parts of gaming by example."

But if Bart Simpson whines about jumping puzzles during a jumping puzzle is that an automatic failure?

Ironic imitation is central to parodies. Without it, you'd only be left with word-play, slap-stick, and other hyphenated forms of humor. And yet time and time again, titles which spoof cliche game mechanics are hit with the same complaint:

The Simpsons (360/PS3) review by Game Informer:
"The biggest problem is illustrated through one of the game’s funniest features: the cliché. As you jump and punch your way through each mission, you will encounter hackneyed video game traditions like giant saw blades and pressure pads. Then the Comic Book Guy pops up and calls attention to the blatant unoriginality of these devices (“Ah, the crate. As seen in everything.”). While this almost always gets a laugh, pointing out clichés doesn’t make them any more fun to play." [Link]

My World My Way (DS) review by Game Informer:
"Tongue-in-cheek attempts to lampoon the RPG genre are littered about, but they fizzle out in the face of the game’s design; just because a game pokes fun at its own generic quests and characters doesn’t change the fact that players have to deal with them. A chuckle here and there doesn’t make up for hours of tedium." [Link]

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard comments by Robert Ashley on the Gamers With Jobs podcast:
"...they take you into a tutorial, and the guy makes all these snide comments like, 'oh god, another tutorial.' It's like, yeah, but you're doing a tutorial. Making all kinds of snarkey remarks about your own game is kind of ridiculous." [Link]

When Spaceballs mocked Star Wars' scrolling yellow title sequence, they kind of had to have one of their own. It was exaggerated, sure, but it's there. The whole first scene is a classic example of comedic excess. They ridiculed Star Wars' long, quasi-pornographic shots of ships flying through space by giving you the longest, most exaggerated flyby in sci-fi history. And it worked, not because they were making fun of something their movie didn't have, but because they were making fun of something they had in excess.



How is this any different than Bart Simpson cracking wise about his own extended jump sequences? Hey, if the joke flops, it flops. Say you didn't find it funny. But poking fun at cliches by including them is a staple of parodies.

Here's another example: This clip from UHF, with Weird Al Yankovic spoofing Rambo.



Weird Al spoofed Sylvester Stalone's one-man army by exaggerating Rambo's every ridiculous aspect. Another option would have been for Rambo to settle his differences peacefully, challenging the enemy to a quiet game of chess. That'd have worked too, but instead Yankovic had Rambo blowing up a bajillion bad guys -- imitating, including, pointing out how ridiculous Rambo gets by example.

Now, I don't think high challenge and comedy go hand in hand. If you're going to throw a lot of jumping puzzles or endless waves of enemies at the player in the spirit of parody, don't make things too hard, or they'll be too busy chucking the controller in frustration to laugh about it. Keep things breezy, keep it fun. Imitate, but never frustrate.

Gaming has yet to have its own Princess Bride or Shaun of the Dead, satires that transcend the genre they're poking fun at. Give it time; the medium is young. But in the meantime, don't cripple the genre by panning hilarious games for daring to parody cliche gameplay.

One of my favorite takes on video game spoofs comes from Gamespy's review of Eat Lead:
No one is going to mistake Airplane! for a fine disaster movie, or Spaceballs for a science fiction classic, but they sure were funny. Gamespy makes no excuses for Matt Hazard's cliched gameplay but concedes that, yeah, maybe the cliches were there for a reason.

Labels: videogames

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Matt Hazard is back! The 80s video game hero has returned from retirement in the aptly named Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. This third-person shooter, voiced by Arrested Development's Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris, just might be the best Matt Hazard game yet.

What's that? You've never heard of Matt Hazard? Well there's a good reason for that: Hazard's entire twenty year history is a hoax.

Vicious Cycle Software did a great job photoshopping everything from NES side-scrollers to the Wolfenstein-esque Matt Hazard 3D and Haz-Mat Carts, a super-deformed kiddy racing game.

There's just one problem: They totally botched the character design.

Hazard is supposed to be an action/adventure anachronism; a relic from the era of pixels and powerups. So why the hell does he look like every modern buff bald space marine in body armor out there?

I could paste Matt Hazard on the Gears of War 2 box and no one would notice. You couldn't do that with Duke Nukem. If you did, people would think Duke Nukem Forever was finally coming out and then a mob of 30 year olds would scream for your blood.

"Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a real life video game hero from the 1980s?"

- Eat Lead trailer.

Let's examine everything wrong with ol' Jet Brody John Sheppard Matt Hazard's character design:

1. Sci-Fi Football Flak Jacket: Body armor? Please. In the 80s, people had a total disregard for personal safety. Rambo took on the entire Vietnamese army and the only thing covering his chest was a bandolier of high caliber bullets. That's right, his only protection from bullets was more bullets. If he had taken a direct hit to the chest, he would have exploded.
2. Bald head: No self-respecting 80s action hero was bald. Even Bruce Willis had a little hair back then. I dare you to name a bald star of an 80s action game other than Karnov. They either had crew cuts or jungle mullets. End of story.
   
3. Matt Hazard has absoloutely nothing in common with an 80s video game hero: Look, do I really have to list every conceptually flawed detail? In the 80s, action-movie-style game characters fell into one of two categories: Blue Jeans Brawlers and Jungle Rambo Warriors. Blue Jeans Brawlers favored white wife-beaters, dark shades and inexplicable forms of American kung-fu. Jungle Rambo Warriors preferred headbands and chainguns.

So why make Matt Hazard look so contemporary when he's supposed to be a classic?

I could understand if this bland baldy was the ass-end of some heartwarming character arc. Early Hancock trailers only showed Will Smith as a bum, even though he cleans up his act later in the movie, because that's what set it apart. They could have done the same with Matt Hazard: start him out looking like he stepped off the claymation cover of an early Nintendo Power, then show him adapt to today's market by shaving his head and bulking up on body armor. That might have worked. But according to the Eat Lead mythos, Matt Hazard is, was, and always will be a bald headed body armored space marine. They even faked the pictures to prove it.


Maybe by designing a character so utterly modern and lacking appeal -- I'm looking at you, Jet Brody -- they were trying to suggest Matt Hazard was the template on which all football-shoulders-space-marines are based upon, crediting him with single-handedly kicking off the Bald Person Shooter (BPS) genre back in the 80s.

Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

Comedy games are always a tough sell; they rarely score over a six or a seven even from the most generous of publications. Their only hope for success is to appeal to people with a sense of humor, who can forgive technical flaws as long as the jokes are good enough. So why market Eat Lead to die-hard Gears of War junkies, the kind of guys who become enraged when their favorite FPS scores a 9.4 rather than the 9.5? Matt Hazard's appearance alienates fans of quirky comedy games by trying to appeal to the sort of review-aggregating, Mountain Dew Game Fuel chugging, over achieving gamers who wouldn't play anything that scores less than a 7, let alone buy it.

But I'm not ready to give up on this game just yet. Look past the obvious flaws and Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard actually looks like a pretty neat game. Neil Patrick "Doogie" Harris M.D. and Arrested Development's Will Arnett are naturals, and one gag in particular caught my eye:

One of the bosses you face is Altos Tratus, a white-haired Japanese RPG character from the Penultimate Illusion series. He's turn-based (even though you move in real time) and communicates via blue text box, which Matt Hazard has to press to advance. When Altos Tratus casts a heal spell, you can snipe the floating green hearts before they touch him and restore his health. You can even keep an eye on Altos' on-screen MP meter to figure out when his next attack will come and which it will be. They took a funny gag and made a memorable boss battle out of it. Pretty damn good.

Eat Lead may have its flaws -- some of which I've just listed in meticulous detail -- but if the rest of the game is half that clever, I'll pick it up when it hits the bargain bins.

Labels: videogames