Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard: Difference between revisions

* [[Animated Actors]]: Matt has a contract in-perpetuity with the game company, so the only way for Wally to be rid of him is to kill him off in the plot of a game.

* [[Bond Girl]]: Kitty Abundanza. Her name even means "a lot of... cats", like a certain other famous Bond girl.

* [[Boring but Practical]]: The Hazard Pistol is your most basic weapon. That said, the enormous ammo count & plentiful chances at refills means that you can level armies with this thing (especially if you're good at headshots).

* [[Bloodless Carnage]]: The bad guys and Matt all give up little bits of code when shot.

** Well, it's from Matt's perspective where, while humans see blood coming out, the game shows what that blood really is in the game world.

* [[Captain Ersatz]]: Matt is basically one for [[Duke Nukem]].

* [[Catch Phrase]]: "It's Hazard Time!" QA thinks it's pretty lame.

** Same thing happens for the "multiplayer" achievement.

* [[Credits Gag]]: {{spoiler|At the end of the penultimate level, which is the "final" level of the new game, QA says "There's one thing I would like you to do for me... roll the end credits!" Cue laughter, freeze frame, credits... which are then halted by Wellesley who then sucks you into a game representation of the Marathon-Megasoft offices}}.

* [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]]: Wellesley is the CEO of the company and wants revenge because he always sucked at the Matt Hazard games.

* [[Crate Expectations]]: A wide variety, as cover items are often hacked in with their villains. Everything from futuristic rounded metal crates, to Russian military crates, to a western outhouse. You even visit a warehouse which turns out to be where they ''make'' the crates.

* [[Dirty Communists]]: General Neutronov.

* [[Defictionalization]]: ''Blood Bath & Beyond''.

* [[Easter Egg]]: Relatively easy to locate, but in the mission where Matt must protect a Wizard, one company logo reads "[[Memetic Mutation|Failboat:]] Shipping and Storage".

* [[Enemy Chatter]]: Three types. You'll sometimes get enemies trying to taunt you. Sometimes, they'll give each other directions (such as providing suppression fire or flanking). And if you sneak up on a new area without making yourself obvious, some enemies will discuss other things (like how one hired gun [[Insistent Terminology|does not want to be called a mercenary]], and another mook is hoping to become a [[A Space Marine Is You|space marine]] one day).

* [[Evil Twin]]: An evil red version of QA appears early on. When confronted by both the real and the evil version, Matt quickly tells that the red one is evil since she's done nothing but lead him into ambushes and [[The Vamp|come onto him]], which the real QA would never do.

** Which is still not quite [[Genre Savvy]], since the average player will have figured that out in less than a second [[Color Coded for Your Convenience|just from the color]].

* [[Genre Savvy]]: ''Eat Lead'' is supposedly only the latest in a long series of games, and Matt knows the score by now.

* {{spoiler|1=[[GIRL]]/[[Dropped a Bridget On Him]]/[[Cross Player]]: QA}}

* [[Government Agency of Fiction]]: You don't actually see them, but there is an organization called "SVGA" that seems to act as a police force. A character is arrested by them at the end.

* [[Grandfather Paradox]]: In a weird way, because actual [[Time Travel]] isn't used. The plot of ''Blood Bath & Beyond'' involves General Nutronov breaking into the archive computer and kidnapping Matt's 8-bit self in order to kill him and therefore preventing the current Matt Hazard from ever existing. The 8-bit Matt is technically from the present, but is still Matt's past self. Confused yet?

** At least, in ''Eat Lead''. ''Blood, Bath & Beyond'' lampshades the loss of the "big-name voice actors" when Matt realizes they're talking in text boxes and his voice actor is just a [[The Other Darrin|soundalike]].

* [[Hollywood Healing]]: If Matt goes long enough without being hit, he's back to full health. He obviously learns to love cover.

* [[Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels]]: "Wussy", "Damn This Is Hard", and "Fuck That Shit" in ''Blood Bath and Beyond''.

* [[Indecisive Parody]]: While it remains a parody throughout, in the later stages the game can't seem to decide if it's a parody of [[Video Games]] or a parody of generic action movies. ...Can't it be both?

* [[Interface Screw]]: At one point you're forced to do the same segment of a boss fight twice in a row, because the bad guys temporarily hack your checkpoint system.

* [[The Jimmy Hart Version]]: The music for the [[Space Marine]]-themed level bears striking similarity to [[Halo]]'s theme song

* [[Jive Turkey]]: Sunny Tang, the first boss of Eat Lead is one of these, which is lampshaded by Matt. He encompasses about every other blaxploitation stereotype as well.

* [[Lampshade Hanging]]: In abundance.

* [[Medium Awareness]]: He complains about long-winded text, complicated mission objectives, being unable to jump, tutorials, and text boxes with ellipses. But he does like the cover-to-cover system.

* [[Motive Rant]]: When asked why he can't just archive Matt, Wally screams it's because he could beat every game as a kid except the Matt Hazard games.

* [[Neil Patrick Harris]]: He plays Wallace Wellsley, against Will Arnett as Matt Hazard

* [[Nerf Arm]]: The water guns from ''Soak 'Em''. Subverted, in that they're the only weapons that can take out enemies from ''Soak 'Em'' in one headshot. Also, they're [[Shout Out|surprisingly effective]] [[Zombies Ate My Neighbors|against zombies]].

* [[Nintendo Hard]]: ''Blood Bath and Beyond'' is a homage to ''Contra'' and ''[[Metal Slug]]''.

* [[Loads and Loads of Loading]]: The game has two separate loading screens before getting to the ''title screen''. At some points the game exclaims that if the loading is so long the level must be good.

* [[Loading Screen]]: The "additional information" type is parodied. Although they occasionally give actual gameplay advice, most of the time they include lines like "If you are having trouble interrogating enemies, it's because there's no interrogation feature." and "Tip: A small amount of money given, usually in response to high quality service."

* [[Old Shame]]: Matt's ill-advised water-gun and kart racing games.

* [[Painting the Fourth Wall]]: So very much. The stereotypical RPG prettyboy boss speaks in ''text boxes'' and is turn based, and the player can {{spoiler|disrupt his Cure animation by ''shooting the health out of the air''}}.

* [[Punny Name]]: "Altos Tratus" sounds like a type of [[Final Fantasy VII|cloud]]. And "Altostratus" ''is'' a type of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altostratus_cloud cloud]. And "Alto" is a good approximation of the range of a castrati. ...So they're implying that "[[Final Fantasy VII|Altos Stratus]]" is a castrati?

* [[Press X to Not Die]]: Some boss fights are presented as Quick Time Events, including one in the first level that [[Curb Stomp Battle|ends]] after ''one'' button, and another is simply ''repeatedly bashing {{spoiler|Dexter}}'s head into the side of a car''.

* [[Rage Against the Author]]: The entire plot is basically this, as well as Rage Against The Authored.

* [[Retroactive Legacy]]: An entire backstory of games that ''never actually existed''.

* [[Reality Warper]]: As the program into which QA and the villains are hacking is the ''game you're currently playing'', reality is warped quite often. At one point, sandbags and other military regalia are "hacked" into the middle of a casino as cover for a group of Russian soldiers; at another, an entire room is replaced with the main street out of a western.

* [[Shout Out]]: The name of the [[Government Agency of Fiction]], SVGA, stands for "Super Video Graphics Array" (a common graphics technology of the late 1980s and early 1990s). The downloadable side-scrolling sequel has extended (most of level) homages to {{spoiler|''[[Team Fortress 2 (Video Game)|Team Fortress 2]]'', ''[[Mirrors Edge]]'', ''[[Portal (Video Game)|Portal]]'', ''[[Bio Shock]]'', and ''[[Super Mario Bros]]''}}.

* [[A Space Marine Is You]]: Several of his enemies are Space Marines. Matt Hazard himself is a pastiche of the character type, right down to being bald.

** When Matt finds an advertisement for "Duke Winter", done in the style of the cover art of ''[[Duke Nukem 3D (Video Game)|Duke Nukem 3D]]'' and saying "Coming soonish". QA even gets a dig in when Matt asks about said ad.

* [[Take Cover]]: Pretty standard cover mechanic, although it has a neat cover-to-cover mechanic which Matt explicitly comments on.

* [[Those Wacky Nazis]]: The Secret Soldiers of the Wafferthin, sprite-based enemies from an [[Wolfenstein 3D (Video Game)|old FPS]] who are immune to melee attacks (they didn't exist in 1993) and take cover by turning edge on and becoming a vertical line.

* [[Title Drop]]: {{spoiler|Wally is shown holding an in-universe copy of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard during [[The Stinger]].}}

* [[Videogame Objectives]]: Parodied early on when Matt complains in response to a [[Long List]] of mission objectives, so QA changes it to "Kill everything that moves". Later mission objectives include "Follow Sting Sniperscope into the obvious trap" and "Hey, weren't you the star of the [[Jak and Daxter|Matt and Dexter]] games? Your place sucks compared to this!"

* [[Voice With an Internet Connection]]: QA, a [[Playful Hacker]] who is trying to save Matt from certain plot twist doom.

 

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