By Alec Meer on March 31st, 2009 at 10:37 pm.
Presumably as some sort of reaction to The Month Of Infinite Strategy Games we’ve just enjoyed, today I was gripped by a strange and peurile urge to go shoot an awful lot of men in the face. And in the game. Eventually, that urge turned out to be best scratched by Defense Grid: The Awakening, which made for a rather ideal halfway house between relatively cerebral RTS and the wanton killing of FPS et al.
En route to that though, I spent a cheerfully blood-crazed couple of hours with freebie flash games the Thing-Thing series. Blood-Drenched Rag Doll may have been a better name for it.
While sadly it devolves from Thing-Thing 1′s likeable bubblemen-in-top-hats look to the irritatingly teenage Final Fantasy-esque characters and overcooked exposition of the later games, more happily it does also massively increase the death toll, gore and array of stupidly overpowered weapons at the same time. Budda-Budda-Bam-Bam-Splat, etc.
There is really very little to it. You move, you shoot, you double-jump. That is, though, kind of the point. It is only really about escalation; the significantly more challenging Alien Hominid is perhaps the best touchstone. Come Thing-Thing 4 and the just-released Thing-Thing Arena 3 (it’s a sprawling little series – Thing-Things 1-4 are platformy, story-based games, while the Arenas are high score attack variations), the amount of on-screen blood and the inventiveness/brutality of the weapons is really quite impressive. Not big, not clever and certainly not very grown-up then, but quite frankly it was just the tongue-in-cheek ultra-violence my tactic-tired brain was looking for. You may feel the same.
31/03/2009 at 23:44 Gladman says:
Eh, madness combat is far better.
01/04/2009 at 00:07 Lukasz says:
@Gladman.
nah. as good.
game is so much fun. simple fun maybe but still great.
01/04/2009 at 03:01 anonymous says:
No. Madness Combat is one of the greatest 2d shooters ever made on any platform. This is a timewaster.
01/04/2009 at 03:19 Filipe says:
This sort of game is usually up my alley, but every time I load up a new one in the series, I’m disappointed. It’s a pretty pure distillation of shooters, but I think it boils things down too much. You get the essentials without any flavour.
01/04/2009 at 03:35 Max says:
Looks like a madness ripoff.
01/04/2009 at 05:45 vinraith says:
“Month of infinite strategy games?” That sounds marvelous, but I can’t say I feel like I just went through one. Other than Empire (good, but needs some patches and mods to be great) and the supremely mediocre DoW2, what else was there?
01/04/2009 at 08:01 dartt says:
@vinraith Men of War!
01/04/2009 at 08:20 SlappyBag says:
Madness > This
01/04/2009 at 11:29 x25killa says:
played at least 10 hours on this flash game. Managed to get 25/26 achievements.
Not sure if it was time well spent.
01/04/2009 at 14:17 T-B0N3 says:
quite fun :).
but i remember there was a flash movie based on these thing things. It was kinda based on the matrix i think. it might not have been this series but it sure looked alot like it. but i cant find it anywhere anymore :( anyone knows what im talking about?
01/04/2009 at 14:29 T-B0N3 says:
ah nvm, it was madness combat what i was thinking about.
01/04/2009 at 19:57 Nameykins says:
Agreed, feels like a badly polished Madness Combat clone.
01/04/2009 at 20:40 SlappyBag says:
Alec has bad taste in games…
… you call yourself a games journalist…
02/04/2009 at 00:04 Scalene says:
At all those arguing over the similarities to Madness Combat – Thing-Thing, the original, came out a year after Madness Combat (from memory, Newgrounds is just in April Fool’s Day mode and I can’t actually view anything). And it was inspired by madness.
That said, it’s the closest you can currently get to the ACTION that is madness. It’s fun, and it’s frantic, and far better than Madness interactive.
(In short, it’s not really fair to compare the two. One is a Flash Movie, the other a Flash Game. It’s like saying ‘OHMIGAWD, WATCHMEN FILM HAD ACTORS, NOT COMIC BOOK PANELS.’)
[cue counter-post]
02/04/2009 at 07:04 Starshot says:
Needs multiplayer, to be honest =/
03/04/2009 at 15:52 asdf says:
low blow, slappybag
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