Tequila!
A big part of what makes Chili Con Carnage so much fun is the humour that is liberally sprinkled throughout the game. There’s loads of one-liners that make references to a whole range of classic movies, such as Tim Roth’s famous “Everybody be cool, this is a robbery!” through to “Watch your ass, everyone else is!” when you take down a machine gun toting bikini babe.
But there’s more humour in here than just the dialogue. You’ve got some of the weirdest bosses and bad guys you’re likely to encounter in any game outside of dropping some acid and playing Katamari Damacy. Take the first boss, Mama Virgillo; a huge, cigar smoking old bint who fires exploding chickens at you before lobbing sticks of dynamite and a bloody great machete... You don’t get THAT in GTA.
Seriously, some of the stuff in here will have to laughing out loud. Not just with the whole ridiculous premise of exploding chickens, ramming tractors into grain silos or doing slow motion wall flips whilst firing of an AK47 at a guy dressed in a chicken suit and wearing a Stetson... It’s just the whole game is one fantastic romp of fun. Even the power-ups are ridiculously funny. Whilst all are certainly useful, with the Golden Gun giving you guaranteed headshots or the Tornado seeing your dual Uzis take out everyone within range of your spinning arc of leaden death, there’s some brilliant fun to be had with the El Mariachi, an homage to the dual guitar case mini guns in the film Desperado or perhaps the Lucha Libre style gigantic masked wrestler is more your bag as he runs around pummelling bad guys for you.
So far I haven’t even mentioned the vehicles with which you can even more creative with the carnage. Pretty much every vehicle you see is drivable and you can still shoot the bad guys you happen to miss with your car. You can, in a true John Woo style, do a slow motion leap from a moving vehicle, letting that plough into a group of baddies whilst you spray bullets from your Uzi, taking down two bad guys and then turning the guns on the car for an impressive explosion that destroys a grain hopper and kills three more bad guys... so all that and get a cracking combo score and style bonus... loads of fun.
