Somewhere around June, a little game called Monster Madness was released, it was hyped up to be in the vein of Zombies ate my Neighbors, it did actually deliver on that promise, same quirky sense of humor and even the unsual weapons.

Sadly the game had a bit of an uphill fight, mostly the fault of the playtesters(or lack thereof), the game was buggy as hell, missing save files, weapons vanishing, getting stuck on shit, bad camera, and the fact that you could not even finish the game on the highest difficulty. Outside of this the game wasn't all that bad, it offered a very intense challenge and many of the scenarios presented to you where quite similar to things you would see in Snes game, it had some references to other titles as well such as an achievement titled "Are you related to a belmont?" And when the aliens show up they want to avenge their fallen compatriots while holding up a picture of the space invader alien.

The gameplay itself is top down, you can jump, quick dodge, you have a melee weapon and projectile weapons along with a wide variety of secondary tools such as a toy chimp that explodes or a soda hat that regenerates your health, through the game you also bump into different collectible items such as tape, gas tubes, batteries, pipes, nails and plutonium, you use to craft your weapons and they all that homemade look to them, they run the gamut of nail guns, pipe shotgun, a minigun, a radioactive flashlight and many, many more, though in this sense I feel the game overloaded with crap, you only really need the level 3 versions of the nail guns, shotgun, minigun and radioactive flashlight.

Your character are all horror movie stereotypes, the nerd, the goth chick, the blond cheerleader and the stoner/surfer dude and the mysterious guy who helps you build the weapons and get his truck in the most unsual places. No character has one advantage over the other, its a matter of preference really, the only thing they differ is on their unique melee weapon(of which there is one in every single stage), I find the cheerleader to be the best because of her moronic reactions to everything.


Stage are divided in 5 chapters, suburbia, the mall, school, a graveyard and a castle for 18 total stages.

Your enemies run the gamut of horror movie monsters, werewolves, zombies, evil clowns with some weirder ones tossed into the mix such as a chupacabra that looks like a pinata or mohawk wearing enemies that move around in wheelbarrows.

The game also has a multiplayer setting, capture the flag, standard deathmatch or the co-op dojo, one thing that really hurts the game overall the is lack of online 4 player co-op, the game could clearly use it and the devs overlooked it sadly, its simply offline co-op and a friend can jump in at any moment.

At this point you might be wondering why I typed all this out.

About a week ago Southpeak interactive finally released a patch to fix all the bugs and glitches, they added lifebars to the harder enemies and lowered certain requirements to S-rank the game, every level of the nail gun as auto fire and in general, Monster Madness is now fun and enjoyable.

The game has $30.00 or $22 if you find a use copy, its well worth the price, especially if you grew up during the Nes/Snes era and wish to challenge yourself.

If you a own a PS3 you can hold out for Monster Madness Ex which will in fact boast online co-op and other things 360 owners get shafted out of, as much as I hate expanded versions of games that we never see as I said in my previous blog post, I do like the game enough to support it and I will probably end up buying Ex if I ever get a PS3.

So there you have it, I urge anyone that reads this to at least give the game a shot that's its been patched, maybe you'll like it as much as I and a very tiny group of fans do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Madness:_Battle_for_Suburbia MM Wiki

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-_M6LiJrUg Trailer

http://www.monster-madness.com/site/index.html Official site