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Jack crosses chainsaws with a bullheaded enemy in the gory game “MadWorld.”

“MadWorld” is as intense an M-rated video game as one is likely to come across, especially for the Wii.

With just four colors – black, white, red and the occasional yellowish orange – the striking graphics manage to get a lot done. The Wii can’t produce the hyper-detailed visuals of, say, a “Gears of War” or a “Killzone 2,” but hyper-stylized gets much better mileage.

The look calls to mind Frank Miller’s “Sin City” graphic novels, and so does the violence. This one is not remotely for younger players, a relative rarity on the family-friendly Wii.

Don’t be fooled by the comic-book look of the cover art – this game is intensely violent and gory, and the color contrast of all that red splashed against the otherwise stark look makes it stand out all the more.

There’s nothing really special here from a game-play standpoint; this is a brawler with occasional motion-control inputs, not unlike “No More Heroes.” The game plays well, though the control relies a bit much on arm-tiring swings of the Wii Remote. The camera can be a bit finicky, too.

But the look is striking – it’s easily the most visually interesting game for the Wii lately – and the ultra-violence will certainly attract some players while turning others off.

Players control Jack – “Just Jack,” he says, but the game manual gives his last name away – a hulking dude who has a mechanical forearm with a retractable chainsaw built in, and he doesn’t use it to trim hedges.

Jack arrives on the quarantined Jefferson Island (standing in for Manhattan), which has been cut off from the rest of the world and made into the staging point for the sadistic BloodWatch Games, a deadly contest with shadowy sponsors and an enormous cash prize that may not be the only reason Jack is involved.

Blood sport is pretty common subject matter for games: “Manhunt,” “No More Heroes” and the “Mortal Kombat” series are all variations on the theme. And like those titles, “MadWorld” is over-the-top extreme.

The game rewards Jack for killing the endless waves of thugs who attack him, but it grants him a higher score if he does so creatively.

With the running commentary of two smart-aleck announcers detailing every action, “MadWorld” starts to feel almost like a parody of the violence it presents, but not quite.

Cutting a foe in half with a chainsaw or throwing him into a spiked wall earns points; pinning his arms with a tire, impaling him on a street sign and then throwing the whole mess into a trash bin earns more. And those are just a few of the environmental hazards Jack can employ against his enemies.

Earning enough points in a stage unlocks successive bonuses, such as supplementary weapons, extra lives and eventually a chance to take on the level’s boss.

Each level also contains at least one death trap, an elaborate device that Jack can play something of a minigame with – as in trying to score as many kills using it as possible under a time limit. The first level presents a giant turbine; later levels offer up a speeding train; and a huge, spiked dartboard awards points for every enemy Jack can stick to it.

Picks and Pans

Resistance: Retribution

3 stars

“Resistance: Retribution” looks fantastic, plays pretty well and features both familiar and new weapons and enemies.

Players control disgraced Briton James Grayson. He automatically snaps to points of cover when he nears them, and his weapons have a generous lock-on feature, which helps offset the PSP’s lack of a second analog stick. The Chimera in this one aren’t too smart, but they’re numerous.

There are some neat features that can be activated if the PSP is hooked up to a PS3 running “Resistance 2.” The first lets a player use a PS3 controller to play the game, allowing for that all-important second analog stick to come into play. The second activates a whole new mode, Infection, which gives Grayson the regenerative powers of the Chimera, a new weapon and underwater breathing, among other changes.

Sony PlayStation Portable; $39.99

Age rating: Mature

Boing! Docomodake DS

3 1/2 stars

Papa Docomodake’s family has gone missing, and what’s a little mushroom man to do? Well, find them, of course. Each of his family members lies at the end of a series of puzzle stages that Papa has to navigate through.

He’s a pretty big ‘shroom, but luckily he can break into several minimushrooms to get through small passages. He can also stack up the smaller parts to reach high ledges, drop them into gaps to serve as steppingstones and fling them at enemies and switches, but he can only split into a few pieces.

The stylus-based controls are simple and pretty intuitive, the puzzles are clever, and the visuals are bright and cute.

Nintendo DS; $19.99

Age rating: Everyone

Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

3 stars

The first of several downloadable add-ons for the sprawling post-apocalyptic RPG “Fallout 3,” “Operation Anchorage” provides some new areas to explore, characters to meet, loot to collect and quests to complete.

The bulk of the new content takes place in a deadly simulation program recounting the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska, from Chinese communist troops in the game world’s past. As in “The Matrix,” if the player dies in the program, he or she dies in real life.

The simulation is more action-heavy than the “real” world, and players have only a limited set of tools – a neat change of pace, especially for advanced characters.

Microsoft Xbox 360 (also for Sony PlayStation 3, PC); $10 (800 Microsoft Points)

Age rating: Mature

– Justin Hoeger

“Killzone” was an ambitious shooter hobbled a bit by the technical limitations of the PlayStation 2 – and even then, it was among the best shooters on that system.

“Killzone 2″ is every bit the game the original wanted to be.

Having thrown back the blitzkrieg of the goggled-and-gas-masked Helghast race in the first game, the warriors of the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance have turned the tables and invaded the enemy’s home world of Helghan.

The game looks incredible, better even than last year’s “Resistance 2,” which looked fantastic itself. But where the “Resistance” games pit humans against toothy mutant aliens armed with exotic weaponry, the “Killzone” titles are closer to World War II in space, with a gritty feel to the combat.

The Helghast aren’t quite aliens; they’re an offshoot of humanity that colonized a hostile world and evolved to live in its harsh environment, and are now trying to expand into more easily habitable systems under the leadership of their fanatical dictator.

The Helghast home world is a gray, dusty and stormy place with a heavily industrialized landscape, bad air and a worse welcome. It’s no wonder they’re looking for greener pastures.

The ISA has arrived in force with a massive battle fleet encircling the planet, but the Helghast are dug in, their weapons are in place, and they’re not about to give up their home.

Players control Sgt. Tomas “Sev” Sevchenko as he makes his way through a series of linear levels, sometimes with squad members, sometimes alone. But solo or with comrades, Sev will be shooting a ton of Helghast. The game’s combat is frequent and intense, with grenades going off and bullets flying all over.

The weapons are mostly futuristic extrapolations of present-day rifles, machine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers and such, though there are a handful of exotic weapons to be found, mostly based on the Helghast’s mastery of artificial lightning.

Multiplayer allows for up to 32 players to duke it out in several modes, including team-based kill count, VIP assassination, objective destruction and defense, and object retrieval. A multiplayer match typically cycles through some or all of these game types in a single round, so players have a new objective every few minutes. The team that wins the most points in a round claims victory.

There are several multiplayer classes, but they’re locked away at the beginning. Players have to earn the right to use them, which is time-consuming and a little aggravating, and puts rookie players at a material disadvantage.

Picks and Pans

Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection

4 stars

“Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection” is similar to the “Sega Genesis Collection” from a few years back, but it includes many more games and replaces a couple of the older set’s duds with, well, new duds. But this collection of nearly 50 games from Sega’s glory days is mostly good stuff.

It offers all the classic “Streets of Rage” brawlers, the original Sega Master System’s “Phantasy Star” as an unlockable bonus to go along with the three Genesis entries, and many more. Some of the titles, like the arcade versions of “Space Harrier” and “Shinobi” and “Fantasy Zone,” have to be earned by completing tasks in other games first.

Microsoft Xbox 360, also for Sony PlayStation 3; $29.99

Age rating: 10-plus

Pikmin

3 stars

It’s more than eight years old, but “Pikmin” holds up pretty well, as this reissue proves. Updated to take advantage of the Wii’s unique controller and given a new widescreen view mode, “Pikmin” remains otherwise unchanged from the GameCube original. The game plays as if it was always meant for the Wii, with the Wii Remote used to point to where the Pikmin need to be, and the buttons used to send them there.

As the tiny, crash-landed alien Captain Olimar, players command an army of this strange planet’s tiny life forms, called Pikmin. They grow in the ground and blossom like plants, but they can walk and fight, and willingly follow orders.

Olimar needs the Pikmin to help him find the lost pieces of his ship, and fast – his life support will give out in 30 of the game’s days. Each day is on a timer, too, so players must act quickly to find enough parts to blast off in time.

Nintendo Wii; $29.99

Age rating: Everyone

Flower

3 1/2 stars

As relaxing a game as has ever been made, “Flower” is a serene experience.

Each level represents the dream of a flower on a windowsill in a gray, dingy city. Starting out with a single petal, the player uses the tilt-sensitive PS3 controller to catch that petal in the wind, guiding it into other flowers to make them bloom and picking up more and more petals along the way, eventually amassing a long train of color.

There’s no score, no death, just a mellow mission to make the landscape bloom, whether it’s a green field dotted with buds or a dry hillside that needs rejuvenation. Blooming enough flowers in one part of a stage opens the path to the next, and hitting clumps of certain colors of flowers will create new clusters of buds.

Sony PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Store download); $9.99

Age rating: Everyone

– Justin Hoeger

Developer Relic has taken the innovations of its World War II-era strategy game “Company of Heroes” and applied them to the “Warhammer” universe. But this isn’t “Company of Heroes” with a “Warhammer” skin.

“Dawn of War II” drops all the races added in “Dawn of War’s” expansions, paring the selection down to the original Space Marines, Eldar and Orks, and swapping out the Chaos Space Marines for the hive-minded Tyranids.

The solo campaign does away entirely with the concept of bases. Players won’t spend any time expanding a headquarters that produces their units or harvesting resources with which to produce more. Instead, the player chooses up to four squads of Space Marines (they’re the only playable race in the solo game) before each mission, and they’re sent in, en masse, in a drop pod.

If the mission’s plot dictates it, a new squad will sometimes join in mid-mission, and fallen squad members can be replaced at special beacons and structures if they’ve been activated or captured first.

Four squads may not seem like much, but these squads are tough, and each is led by an accomplished hero. Actually, the Force Commander, whom the player names, is strong enough to go it alone – he has no squad mates, but as the game starts, he can heal all his fellows with stimulant packs and charge into clumps of enemies to knock them all over like bowling pins.

His backup squads include Tarkus, who leads a group of Tactical Marines; Avitus, in charge of the heavy-weapons Devastator Marines; and Cyrus, leader of some stealthy scouts. Eventually more Space Marines, such as a team of jetpack-using Assault Marines, will join, and players choose which combination of these specialized teams is best for each mission.

The minute-to-minute action is very similar to “Company of Heroes” and “Dawn of War” – this is still a real-time strategy game, just one with tweaked mechanics. The combat is built around using cover, suppressive fire and special abilities to manage the numerous enemies and keep squads at full strength; leaders can be revived, but they’re a lot more vulnerable without their squad mates.

Each squad gains experience in battle and levels up from time to time. Between missions, the points earned from leveling up can be assigned to four attributes, eventually unlocking new special abilities and perks.

The multiplayer and skirmish modes are almost a separate game. There are two modes, one calling for the annihilation of other players, the other requiring each side to capture and hold control points on the map – not unlike the original “Dawn of War,” in fact.

Picks and Pans

Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?

3 stars

The peg-legged, explosive penguins who cry “Dood” from the “Disgaea” strategy series now have their own game with “Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?” Unlike other games that feature the weird little demons, “Prinny” is a side-scrolling action game. Given 1,000 lives and a limited time to find all the ingredients for the Ultra Dessert, the player hacks and slashes through a variety of stages. Each can be tackled in any order, but each has several configurations, depending on how many in-game hours remain to complete the adventure. The game will sap those 1,000 lives, and there are no continues.

Prinnies have a limited move set: They jump twice in a row, slash, do a ranged attack from the air or a downward stomp, spin, dash, duck, slide, and pick up and throw objects. No special weapons or power-ups here – everything’s useful; nothing’s very fancy.

Sony PlayStation Portable; $39.99

Age rating: Teen

Skate 2

3 1/2 stars

“Skate” caught a lot of attention because it differed so much from the perennial “Tony Hawk” series.

As before, the left stick controls the skater’s body; the right stick is used to do tricks with the board; the shoulder buttons cause the skater to grab the board.

The game arrived at a perfect time, just as the yearly doses of “Hawk” were starting to wear really thin. “Skate 2″ has more of everything, including bunches of new tricks and areas to use them in. Players can now hop off the board and get around on foot, allowing them to rearrange objects in the sprawling levels – to move ramps around, for example.

The game’s campaign has the player in the role of an ex-con skater doing tricks for magazine photographers – pulling off specific trick sequences earns money for clothes, boards and so on. There are also free skate, party game and online modes.

Sony PlayStation 3, also for Microsoft Xbox 360; $59.99

Age rating: Teen

Watchmen: The End Is Nigh

2 1/2 stars

“Watchmen” is a tough enough graphic novel to put on film. Making a game would be even tougher, as the book doesn’t really have a ton of action – at least, not in the present tense.

That’s why “Watchmen: The End Is Nigh,” the first of two parts, goes back in time to when the sociopathic Rorschach and the better-adjusted Nite Owl were crime-fighting partners.

Rorschach is quick and vicious, and good at improvising weaponry. Nite Owl brings his own weapons, and his strikes are slower and more focused.

The game’s very pretty, especially compared with most downloadable titles. It’s also pretty shallow – there’s not much air between “The End Is Nigh” and old arcade brawlers like “Final Fight.”

Microsoft Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade download), also for Sony PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Store download) and PC; $20 (1,600 Microsoft Points)

Age rating: Mature

– Justin Hoeger

Lock’s Quest

“Street Fighter IV” is not a revolution. But it is a great fighting game.

It has been 12 years since “Street Fighter III” altered the series’ formula, ditching most of the familiar characters and adding an emphasis on parrying incoming strikes. “Street Fighter IV” plays a lot more like classic “Street Fighter II” and its upgrades than like the third installment.

The graphics are fantastic, using stylized 3-D models and environments but restricting them to a 2-D plane, which serves to update the visuals and preserve the classic “Street Fighter” game play.

The game’s initial cast of 16 includes the original dozen fighters of “Street Fighter II” and four newcomers. Series fans will find old favorites such as Ryu, Chun-Li, M. Bison, Sagat and Guile play much the same as they always have, though they’ve naturally been given some tweaks.

The new characters include the amnesiac Abel, a grappler; Crimson Viper, a speedy special agent; Rufus, a rotund kung-fu fighter; and the quick luchador El Fuerte.

The game offers an arcade mode (with nonsensical snippets of plot) and some other single-player pursuits, such as survival and time attack, all of which unlock goodies when certain conditions are fulfilled. But player-vs.-player fighting is where the real action is, and players can duel online or off.

Beating the game with certain characters unlocks several familiar faces from other games in the “Street Fighter” series, such as the Bruce Lee knockoff Fei Long and the sinister Akuma. The cast brings together 25 fighters in all.

All have unique special attacks, such as Ryu’s Hadoken fireball and Guile’s Flash Kick.

These moves, and the controller motions that activate them, have been thoroughly burned into the minds of fighting fans over the last decade and more.

Throws are handled by pressing the light punch and kick buttons at once. The medium buttons can be held down for a focused attack that will knock an opponent down and that fends off a single hit while charging.

“Street Fighter IV” rewards players both for attacking frequently and for taking their lumps by way of two power meters.

The Super Combo Gauge fills up as a fighter delivers attacks. When the segments are all full, players can execute the Super Combo itself, draining the meter and causing lots of damage if it hits.

The Revenge Gauge fills up as a fighter takes hits. Once it’s half-full or higher, a player can execute a damaging and visually impressive Ultra Combo using all three punch or kick buttons, depending on the move.

Picks and Pans

Lock’s Quest – 3 1/2 stars

“Lock’s Quest” puts its own spin on the tower defense genre. The game looks good, sounds good and plays well – it’s a solid game with only occasional glitches in the touch-based controls to cause frustration.

Players fight off waves of enemy Clockwork soldiers commanded by the evil Lord Agony. Players can use the power of Source to build walls, turrets, traps and helpers in hopes of fending off the Clockwork attacks as the story progresses.

Defenses can be built and strengthened between waves. Once an attack starts, Lock can repair but not build fortifications, and he can fight enemies directly – unlike most tower defense games, these scenarios aren’t purely defensive.

Defeating invaders earns Source points to buy more structures during the next lull, and Scrap that unlocks more advanced construction options.

Nintendo DS; $29.99

Age rating: Everyone

Rygar: The Battle of Argus – 3 stars

“Rygar: The Battle of Argus” holds up pretty well for a game that’s more than six years old.

First released for the PlayStation 2 in late 2002, this remake of a semi-obscure 1980s arcade game borrows many of the game-play elements that made “Devil May Cry” a hit.

The game is little changed here, aside from tweaks to the controls to take advantage of the Wii Remote’s motion-sensing capabilities, and an odd redesign of the main character into a tattooed, feather-haired warrior.

The goal is still to take on the Titans with Rygar’s Diskarmor, a bladed shield on a chain that acts like a deadly yo-yo when swung at enemies. As he progresses, Rygar learns new and better ways to attack, as well as more utilitarian skills such as using the Diskarmor as a grapple.

Nintendo Wii; $39.99

Age rating: Teen

Death Tank – 2 1/2 stars

“Death Tank” resembles nothing so much as a real-time take on the “Worms” strategy games. It’s a solid action title with nice graphics, but the $15 asking price is steep for this package.

Up to four players can battle at once in the game’s stages, each controlling a single tank that can lob shells at fine trajectories – hitting an enemy with a shell that’s had a steep arc will do more damage than a more straightforward shot.

The tanks are slow to start with, but between matches, players can use money earned from kills to buy speed upgrades, jump jets, shields and limited amounts of more powerful weapons to give them an advantage in the next round.

Microsoft Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade download); $15 (1200 Microsoft points)

Age rating: 10-plus

– Justin Hoeger

Newcomer Crimson Viper puts the hurt on classic fighter Guile in “Street Fighter IV.”