Whacked!

Whacked! is played as a series of arena style mini-games. The player competes with three other players, human or artificial intelligence, to complete a specific objective, and players can use a variety of weapons and power-ups to affect the game. Possible objectives include collecting stars for points, deathmatch, king of the hill, holding a trophy to earn points, and elimination style dodgeball. Single player has the addition gamemode of chicken, in which many flesh-eating chickens pursue the player, and the player has to destroy them first.

Arenas include the site of a car crash, the ceiling of a bathroom, a plaza, the space underneath a Christmas Tree, an oil pipeline, a heavily fortified front yard, a space station, a toy pirate ship in an electrified bathtub, an arena with spiked walls, the tops of skyscrapers, the back of a pickup truck during a police chase, and a kitchen sink. Hell is unlocked after completing the game.

Whacked! takes place on the set of a game show in which seven contestants compete for The Prize, which will be anything in the world that the contestant desires. To win The Prize, the contestants compete across four stages of violent battles and competitions. While the contestants compete, Van Tastic speaks to his boss over the phone, reassuring him that it's impossible to win and that there is no prize.

After the player's character wins the game, Van Tastic's boss calls him again and cancels the show. Van Tastic challenges the winner to a final competition for an even better grand prize. After the contestant agrees, Van Tastic destroys the set, revealing it to be Hell. He burns the other contestants to death, and reveals himself to be a demon.

The concept for Whacked! was first conceived in the mid-1990s as a casual multiplayer game to compete against Mario Kart 64, with a similar low barrier to entry and mechanisms to rubber band players between first and last place. During development, testers would regularly test different variations of each in-game element individually before allowing the art team to give it a design. It was also tested without artificial intelligence to prioritize the multiplayer experience and players to adjust to changes in real time without updates to AI.

Development was held to a strict schedule, allowing the game to ship three weeks early. Whacked! was originally designed as a PC game, but the game was eventually ported to the Xbox. Development was complicated by two of the three creative designers leaving half way through the project.

The game received "mixed or average" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Critic Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot praised the game's style and voice acting, but criticized the gameplay and soundtrack, saying that "The single-player mode is plain and simple, and the multiplayer mode, once you get over the novelty of shooting people over the Internet, really lacks depth." Hilary Goldstein of IGN criticized the drawn-out gameplay and the inconsistency of the gameshow dynamic. In Japan, where the game was ported for release under the name Whacked!

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