#scrotus needs more content

[kamakrazeeee]

scabrous scrotus's no good very bad day

[paragonrobits]

I’ve been playing a LOT of the Mad Max game and hoo boy I am having a lot of thoughts/feelings, but perhaps one central one is that this game works absolutely fantastically as a prequel to Fury Road, in many ways:

1. It sets up the place where Max IS at the beginning of that movie, where he is hallucinating dead people crying after him, people’s he’s known or lost, or is just trying to flee; he doesn’t even seem to remember what his name is. And this is important because the game directly sets this up:

The game features Max at his lowest point, his most selfish and least moral. He isn’t heartless, but he is so focused on survival that he sincerely contemplates leaving the most noble of the settlements to die while he is content to work for a potential slave trader, simply because the latter has something to offer him, and only changes his mind when he’s told that the attackers will destroy all the tools he needs if they overrun the settlement.

He gets better. And then he crashes. He comes close to having a family again, and seeing the value in people, and then he loses it all, and succumbs to blind rage, killing his only friend (?) in the process. So he goes through all that and fails, only speaking his name but a single time, and by the end, his steps towards improvement are gone.

But he LEARNS from all this; it’s the set up for his character arc in Fury Road, showing us how he got to the point where he’s genuinely feral.

2. A big point in Fury Road is that Furiosa contemplates going a specific direction that Max advises her not to; with nothing but death in that way. And that’s because it’s almost certainly the direction he came from, in the events of the game. There’s just a wasteland there, as tough as anywhere else, and beyond that is the remnants of the sea, with nothing beyond it (so far as he knows).

3. The antagonist of the game, Scabrous Scrotus, is something of a beta baddie for his father, Immortan Joe. Not only is he specifically identified as such, and you visit the site of Gastown in person (thus showing a bit more of that triad element), but he and his legions of fantacal thrill killers also give a broader view towards the average War Boy. Nux was, apparently, an extreme outlier. The society they would have built is a grim and terrible one.

4. The game would be a lot more depressing and awful if not for the knowledge of the good things that result in Fury Road, so they honestly work best as a story viewed in a pair.

[casualarsonist]

Max Max (2015 video game) review

God bless George Miller - the patron saint of ballsy old men. I don’t think anyone expected the best action movie of the decade to be directed by a 70-year-old man returning to a franchise that hadn’t been touched since 1985, but that’s exactly what happened when Miller revisited the Mad Max universe with Fury Road in 2015. Bigger and bolder than any film in the series before it, to some it became THE Mad Max film - where Mad Max 2 was arguably the only really good one (quieten down - Mad Max was a proof of concept and Beyond Thunderdome was a clusterfuck), Fury Road became the new benchmark for quality. Oversaturated blazing orange desert and bright teal skies marked the new vision of the apocalypse, shying away from the genre-typical washed-out visuals in favour of bold colours (he would later go on to release his preferred version of the film in super-apocalyptic black-and-white, but that’s another story). The sandy desert scrubland of MM1, 2, and 3 became a dry ocean floor, marking the remnants of the seabed where bountiful water once covered the earth before the cataclysm that ended civilisation as we know it. The traditional masked freaks of the raiding parties became the bald, white-painted war boys; insane and out for blood. Avalanche likely couldn’t have been happier that they decided to take influence from the visual design of the newest film, nor would they be upset that it became the big success that it did, and neither could I, for that matter because, for what it is, Mad Max (the game) is a wonderful addition to a franchise that I hold dear to my heart. 

For those new to the series, Mad Max is a series of films revolving around the episodic adventures of Max Rockatansky (stifle your laughter, please) – a former police officer who lost his wife and young daughter to a gang of murderous motorbike raiders not long after an as-yet-unidentified event depleted the earth of most of its natural water. Civilisation has gone to shit and its every man for himself on this new desert planet as Max, mad with grief and dead inside from the horrors he has seen and endured, wanders aimlessly in search of some intangible release. His only remaining instinct is to survive, although to what end, he does not seem to know. There is a flicker of humanity still left in him that we see manifested in his various exploits helping other wastelanders in their time of need, but in the end he is always alone, having lost everything he held dear to him. The key to understanding the series is that the films are never about Max – he is simply the vessel through which we see the world. Instead they are about the greater story of the people he helps, and he is simply the axis upon which their fates tend to hinge. Max Max (the game) necessarily gives the player a more hands-on role, placing us in the boots of Max himself and ostensibly on a quest to reach the fabled ‘Plains of Silence’. He seems to believe that he will find peace here, although whether the location even exists is uncertain, and it’s suggested early on that he won’t find whatever it is he’s looking for. We’re dropped in media res and Max is being attacked by the war boys of Scabrous Scrotus – warlord of Gas Town, whose black smoke and burning chimneys can be seen ever-present on the horizon. Max is defeated and left for dead, his iconic car stolen and cut up for scrap. He comes upon a hunchbacked mechanic ‘Chumbucket’, who worship cars as gods and sees in Max a literal angel come to save the world. Max is then dragged into a series of events that see him working with Chumbucket and the various local settlement leaders to reconstruct his vehicle and make his way to Gas Town to dethrone Scrotus. It’s in keeping with the theme of the films that Max becomes involved in the story through chance and fate, and then stays until its conclusion for his own personal reasons, and one could perhaps spend a while musing on the deeper existential connection behind Max’s choice of actions and the player’s dutiful response to the commands we’re given; why do we venture out to destroy this particular enemy stronghold, because we’re told to, because it will help, or because we enjoy the act of fighting and destroying? Maybe all of the above. It’s not a tale of redemption as such, as Max never tempers his savagery in the face of opposition, but in his actions we see the way he does his best to make the terrible world he lives in a little better, and lightens the load on those who can’t defend themselves against the ruthless.

The narrative is flimsy, however deep the thematic suggestions might seem to go, and loses a lot of the urgency due to the fact that it’s an open-world game and filled with a solid amount of busy work, but its heart is in the right place. Mad Max (the game) seemed to infuriate a few critics, who are understandably likely to be appalled by a lack of innovation, and MM isn’t going to reinvent the wheel when it comes to open-world games, but I do find it falls on the better side of the trough that the industry was making its way out of at the time (leaving a clutter of Ubisoft collect-a-thons laying at the bottom to decompose).

Functionally, it plays like a Frankenstein’s monster of late-2000s open-world games featuring a simplistic version of Arkham’s fight mechanics, open-world driving, vehicular combat, upgrades, and (sigh) collecting, so there’s not a lot here gameplay-wise that’s going to stun you. It all works though, the only gripe I have with the gameplay is the brainless fighting. Hit Y when it tells you, and hit X at every other point and you’ll make your way through most battles easily enough. There’s a distinct lack of finesse and variation in the hand-to-hand combat – you can pick up weapons but these will break after a few strikes and you can use your shotgun but ammo is scarce – and when it’s all over you’re back to pummelling X again. This is exemplary of the game’s biggest failing and one could quite reasonably critique MM by ranking the various activities and features by how well the mitigate their repetitiveness.

Which is the primary point of contention for most people – the world tries its hardest to invest you, while the gameplay works to take you out of it. It’s a balancing act that so many open world games play, and one that MM just falls on the winning side of, in my opinion. You can run and punch and roll and drive, but you can’t jump, which is insane for an open world game, especially as some of the locations require you to traverse open gaps or inclines. Every time you collect water or eat food or loot there’s a few seconds of a cutscene or an action that you have to watch. It’s one of those things that was included for immersion’s sake, but the frustration adds up steeply over time. The icon-littered map and the reliance on a minimap for navigation serves as a constant reminder that you’re the player, but these negatives are countered by some solid world building that a love for Fury Road and a nostalgia for the Mad Max series will foster. For sure there are plenty of locations, hundreds even, to investigate for scraps of…well…scrap…but there is a thrill to be had venturing into each new cavern, hut, clifftop hideout, or scrapped ship’s hull, and encountering the delinquent denizens within. Most of the icons on your map are going to be these lootable locations, and you’re looting scrap which contributes to your upgrades. These upgrades make an appreciable mark on your quality of life in-game, so the compulsion to attend to these locations is quite strong, at least for the first little while. There will be a point later on in the game where you don’t have to worry about the small amount of scrap from these places, but for those that don’t mind taking the time, there are plenty of little things to be seen and found in each of these little areas. They’re not all mind-blowing treasure troves of detail and mystery, but there is enough variation and attention to detail to make it worth doing.

The upgrades themselves don’t feel too frivolous; almost all of Max’s personal upgrades come with a visual change and you can see his evolution with each additional unlock. Your car can be upgraded as well, and while you may think at first glance that you’re simply working towards having the biggest and best of everything, they’ve balanced the upgrades with positive and negative effects – bigger rams and stronger armour will weigh more and reduce your handling, top speed, and acceleration – and these changes will have real repercussions in-game, so if you simply want a bullish battering ram you can make one; if you want a light and manoeuvrable racer, so be it; if you want a balance, you can customise as you see fit.

The wasteland is dangerous, of course, and the hazards you’ll encounter are numerous, although you’ll primarily be tussling with bandits of various factions, either on foot or in your car as you come across patrols racing about. These factions are largely similar in function, if not in look - of note are the Buzzards, a mysterious, chaotic group of psychopaths who inhabit dark underground caves and emerge only at night driving cars crudely adorned with spikes, wearing masks with glowing red eyes, and they remain supremely unnerving throughout the entirety of the game. One of the most impressive of the wasteland dangers are the sandstorms. Chumbucket will usually spot them before you and warn you of their impending onset, and on the horizon the great wall of sand will bear down. You can enter a stronghold to find it having passed when you leave, or take shelter somewhere otherwise and wait it out in real time. But it’s far more fun to brave the storm and take your car out to find rich scrap rewards, tracking down and snaring boxes of scrap, and braving the lighting and flying debris to break them open and collect their loot.

Vehicular combat is enjoyable, and it’s rarely a hindrance when you come across patrols of bandits on the road as the engagements are spaced out enough to make you hungry for the fight. Depending on your weapons, armour, and health you may prefer differing tactics, but if you’re tired of ramming them, you’re equipped with a shotgun and a harpoon that can disable vehicles, kill the occupants, and destroy fuel tanks sending the offending vehicle spinning through the air in a shower of flame and debris.

But as I was saying, this is standard fare for the most part. It’s the sandbox within which all these things sit that sets it apart from other games in the genre. Whilst Avalanche’s most well-known series, Just Cause, isn’t known for its nuanced and detailed world, MM excels at creating a believable and lived in landscape, with plenty of small and hidden details that activate your imagination. MM’s wasteland is comprised of surprisingly rich and varied terrain – sandy roads and dune-filled deserts transition into rocky plains, oily marshes, dry white coral ocean beds, and grey, craggy passes. Rotten hulls of long-abandoned ships lay half-buried, and lighthouses and bridges erupt from the earth and soar into the sky. Generally speaking, you can travel as far as the eye can see; if you’re expecting invisible walls, you’ll be hard pressed to find them, and what the game lacks in verticality it makes up for in vast ‘horizontality’. In each of the major areas of the map lies a hub which is visible for miles around, and provides a helpful landmark that can occasionally remove the need to rely on the minimap, which is a rare occurrence but a welcome one because the game is at its best when you get to look around; the visuals are quite stunning - screenshot fodder if ever I saw it, and standing on a high ledge and staring at the vista before you is mesmerising. The day/night cycle is modelled accurately and the colour palette of the landscape changes as you venture to different areas; there’s nothing quite like tearing along the remnants of a bitumen highway as the sun sets, casting and orange glow through the plumes of sand kicked up behind you, the lights of Gas Town burning in the distance. The underground Buzzard hovels are cramped and the sound is muffled by the dirt walls, so you never quite know where the enemies you can hear scrabbling about are coming from. Vehicles explode with an ear-popping bang, and dance through the air spewing orange and yellow flames. Metal parts and debris fly from the wreckages and litter the area around them, and the destroyed hull of the cars grind to a halt, burning grimly by the roadside. The game performs exceptionally well, although I’ve noticed some occasional visual glitches particularly in the shadowing in some of the dust plumes, but there’s little lag, even when you’re tearing around the landscape. There are nice little attentions to detail, such as tire marks and footprints in the dust, the way sand spits up from your wheels, the way convoys are visible from afar by the dust clouds they stir up, and the detail in the wrecked vehicles as they blast apart and then lay destroyed. It helps with immersion, which is something the game sorely needs to balance out the in-your-face-edness of its mechanics.

And that’s probably the core observation I have to make about the game – the quality of Mad Max (the game) in the eyes of the player is going to rely on how you weight each of the variables on the scales. I can see the frustration and validity of all the criticisms, but I’m also wooed by the qualities and intensity of the game world, and by the little details that show that, for every thing they got wrong, they got something quite right as well. If you want to play ‘Fury Road: The Video Game’, then you’re in the right place. If you want to brawl and blow up, if you want to run and drive, then you’re in the right place. If you want an beautiful post-apocalyptic world, then you’re in the right place. However, if want nuance and subtlety, if you want a complex narrative, if you want an innovative game that will relieve your Assassin’s Creed fatigue, then, like Max in his search for peace in the Plains of Silence, you’re not likely to find what you’re looking for here.

8/10 

Very Good