A Cure for Madness? Part One

Monster Madness: Battle to Suburbia to low review scores and abysmal sales. Gamespot called the game, “ a severe pain” in their review, while IGN remarked that, “ every command felt loose and unresponsive”. Recently, the Target retail chain dropped the price of the game to $19.99, from the original MSRP of $59.99. Other retailers are selling the game at significant discounts, also. Despite an infusion of capital, Southpeak endured and recently released a patch to address many of Madness’ problems. The myriad of changes include:

GENERAL REVISIONS
•    Additional camera options and speeds have been added.
•    Top down Camera zoom is gradual; not as fast.
•    The players turn speed has been increased globally.
•    The frame rate issues have been fixed for render targets and in-game menus.
MONSTER UPDATES
•    A transparent Health Bar has been added to all enemies with health greater than 300 hit points.
•    Stun attack effect on players has been shortened.
•    Zombie Bikers amount of health has been decreased significantly
CONTROLS
•    Camera and character turn together with left stick.
•    The A button is for Jump, while the B button is for Dodge. Or you can click the analog sticks as in the original controls.
•    The controller vibrations have been toned down.
WEAPON CHANGES
•    All Level One Weapons will be slightly more powerful.
•    A new “random” weapons option has been added to Multi-player gameplay.
ACHIVEMENT EDITS
•    Golden Zombie Achievement has been fixed.
•    Dojo Achievements are easier to accomplish.
•    Highest grade will be updated in achievements.
NEW MULTIPLAYER OPTIONS
•    The Auto-target option has been added to arena battles.
•    Frames Per Second is improved with up to 4 players.
•    Cooperative Dojo waves have been re-balanced.
•    Werewolf attacks will not cripple the player completely.
•    Several multiplayer game options have been added.

This is the first console game that has significantly changed its gameplay, camera, and graphics, resulting in a major overhaul to the core gameplay. Most other patches fix relatively minor issues concerning multiplayer matches, hosting and the like. Rarely are major changes made to the single player game. This raises a number of interesting questions to members of the game community:

–    Do reviewers have an obligation to devote manpower to re-review the game?
–    Since game patches are ubiquitous, at what point can critics let their reviews stand?
–    Can a bargain-bin title be ‘saved’ with a mere patch?

In order to answer the last question, we purchased Monster Madness today, and will be playing the pre-patch version tonight. Tomorrow, we will continue this article and examine whether the patch is indeed the cure for Madness.

About Robert Allen

Since being a toddler, Robert Allen has been immersed in video games, anime, and tokusatsu. Currently, his days are spent teaching at two southern California colleges. But his evenings and weekends are filled with STGs, RPGs, and action titles and well at writing for Tech-Gaming since 2007.

2 comments

  1. It makes curious to see how the game is, an updated demo may be a good idea. Great piece, I will be back to read more

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