REVIEW: Total Carnage
Lisvender has sent us this review for your reading pleasure. You remember reading, it’s like listening to a podcast, except with with your eyes.
So we’ve got Wii Vitality Sensors and Jesus Christ even MORE Rock Band crap and Tonight on Alan Wake Prime-Time Dramas and motion-sensing cameras with motion sensing paintbrushes and creepy little Milos staring and for God’s fucking sake the bottoms of avatars’ shoes coming at us this year, and now I want to kill myself in even more horrid ways than I did after last year’s E3. With all this disillusionment pouring down on me like a rockslide, I had to ask myself: is there even one game I still like anymore? Is there still a game out there that can excite me and keep me entertained for hours on end? What game should today’s games be emulating? A few seconds later, I thought of the answer to those questions.
I thought of burly, muscley men with oversized guns blasting the shit out of mutant terrorists. I thought of air-to-surface missiles pounding into nuclear reactors. I thought of babbling dictators, heat-seeking missiles, and throngs of bloodthirsty beasts. I wasn’t thinking of Gears of War, though. I was thinking of Total Carnage.
Total Carnage, a Midway dual-stick shooter that is the spiritual successor to Smash T.V., is my favorite video game of all time. Honestly. I can play through it over and over and never tire of it. E3 ’09 didn’t have a single game that looked to match the verve and balls of this 1992 arcade title, and the gaming world is all the worse off for it. Even recent dual-stick shooters like Geometry Wars can’t compare to Total Carnage; they lack the character, the spirit, and the joy that this game sports.
The story of Total Carnage is a mockery of the first Persian Gulf War. The mad dictator of Kookistan, General Akhboob, has been building an army of mutants and holding Americans hostage in his “Baby Milk Factory,” and that’s just not cool. In response, the Pentagon dispatches “the Doomsday Squad,” two guys named Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem, to find and bring the bad General to justice. They’ll shoot their way through three giant battlefields, killing hordes of mindless drones spawned from toxic waste, grabbing weapons and powerups that materialize from thin air, rescuing chained-up women in bikinis who shout “My hero!”, dodging heat-seeking missiles that telegraph their launches by muttering “Excuse me!”, and disarming time bombs that drop in from outer space. Yes, it’s stupid. It’s really a big joke. The whole game is unapologetically corny, campy, violent, bloody, stupid, silly, and worst of all, patriotic, but as was Midway’s style at the time, there’s always a grin and a wink behind the nuttiness.
The game is gorier than an 80s horror flick, with crowds of baddies that burst into a goulash of goop and flying limbs, and it’s sure to satisfy anyone’s bloodlust. The first boss, Orcus, is a screen-filling behemoth with cannons for arms, a giant, grinning face for a body, and a devil’s head on top, and he can only be taken down a piece at a time. It takes at least five minutes of constant firing to beat him, and watching his parts explode and fly off, as he cries “My arm!” or “My eye!” or even “My head!” is an experience hasn’t yet been matched in video games, not even after seventeen years.
Things only get weirder after that. At the beginnings of the second and third battlefields, players are tasked with weaving their way down long highways, taking down passing armored missile transports with an infinite spread gun. All through these segments, little Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem are hooting and hollering “Woo!” and “Yeah!” with thrill and excitement. The only reason I can imagine that these sequences were included was that, during testing, the designers recognized how much fun it was to simply shoot large targets with the spread gun, and decided to devote huge chunks of the game to it. There are other bonus sequences in which players must level a fleet of parked fighter jets by calling in airstrikes, and all while dancing about a sea of moving land mines. The second boss of the game isn’t a boss at all, but an endurance mini-game where the player must rapidly hit the start button to help his soldier break free from a torturous electric chair. Carnage’s body is twitching and burning, his eyes are tearing up and bulging from their sockets, sparks are flying, the gigawatts are mounting, and the strength meter is dropping. Mash that button and be free! You get a huge bonus if you pull it off.
The final stage is a real corker, one that will make “Your puny head swell,” as the game says. It’s not especially long, but it’s strange. The battle with Akhboob is extremely long, extremely difficult, and extremely goofy. I know the game is pretty damn old now, but I don’t want to spoil its craziness for anyone who hasn’t yet played it. Get this game and play it yourself, or, if I can’t convince you to play it, go to YouTube and watch some gameplay videos. Akhboob is not who you think he is, and if his identity doesn’t surprise you, then the final challenge, not to mention the game’s true goal, certainly will.
Anyone who’s beaten Total Carnage will likely agree with me when I say that it is the meanest video game ever made. It’s really quite rude. For one thing, it’s a quarter-vacuum. It’s very hard. Though the stages always play out in the same way, the timing and movement of the enemy hordes are unpredictable, and the only solid strategy is to keep moving and grab any powerups you can. Practice will reduce a player’s death count, but complete mastery is next to impossible. What’s more, the game is more than happy to taunt players, and berate their performance. General Akhboob will occasionally interrupt the chaos with messages that are hilariously similar to any given terrorist video, and which often end with him blurting “You suck at this game!” Candid text will flash onscreen warning Smash T.V. fans to flee from the arcade machine. The game calls players dufuses if they fail at certain tasks, tasks that they probably weren’t even aware of until they failed them. Even its best ending closes with a venomous lie, one engineered to encourage more quarter-feeding, and to generate gamer gossip about just how in HELL the game is to be beaten properly. So even if you earn Total Carnage’s best ending, the game won’t tell you that you’ve earned it. It won’t admit defeat. It wants you to come back, angry and determined to root out that last little secret, but you’ll never be able to.
I know I’ve made Total Carnage sound like a game made by assholes and for assholes, but the whole daring nature of it is what impressed me as an arcade-dwelling youth, and what keeps me so deeply enthralled by it as an adult. Many folks avoided it in the arcades because its brutal difficulty emptied pockets quickly, but nowadays it can be had on the cheap thanks to its inclusion in Midway Arcade Treasures 2. It’s worth every cent. It is a sensation, one whose feast of explosive outrageousness should be enjoyed over and over for years uncounted. This is what video games should be.
Final Rating: 3/3. Must-play. Find it. Get it. Play it until you beat it, and then play it again. They just don’t make games like this anymore.
Lisvender
