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Humorous hazard

In the mostly humorless and self-indulgent world of violent video games, “Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard,” is like hunting for blind hogs with an M4 — there’s an endless supply of big targets just waiting to be blown away.

“Eat Lead” is a delightful first-person shooter for gamers with a sense of humor. It’s not a title you’re likely to revisit to explore different ways to beat the levels, and there’s no multiplayer, but I’m still happy to recommend it.

There have been books, movies and television shows like this, but never a video game: an action-shooter game that parodies action-shooter video games.

Still, for all the knowing fun that “Eat Lead” has at the expense of the past decade’s video games, it has problems of its own. This is a game you’ll want to play all the way through to see what the next joke will be, but at the same time, you’ll gain new respect for the better-made titles “Eat Lead” mocks.

Our star is Matt Hazard, an old-school death-dealer from the original 8-bit generation of platform violence games (think “Contra”) who was so successful, he barreled his way through the next several iterations of game technologies. We see him in a groundbreaking “3-D” shooter, “Matt Hazard 3D” (think “Duke Nukem”); and then in other titles including the adventure “You Only Live 1,317 Times” (think PlayStation2-era “Final Fantasy”).

Hazard is voiced by actor Will Arnett, and he’s hilarious. When you begin a level and the standard, endless list of objectives appears on the screen — “Locate the casino office,” “check the refrigerator”— Hazard says, “uh, yeah, lot of text in this game. Can we just summarize this?” Then the list of objectives is replaced by “Shoot everything that moves.”

“Eat Lead” is supposed to be Hazard’s comeback, after squandering his talent on kids’ titles such as “Haz-Matt Carts” and “Choking Hazard: Candy-Gram.” But as you advance in “Eat Lead,” you discover that someone in Hazard’s software company wants him dead and is changing the game code as you go, bringing in his old nemeses to eliminate him.

This concept keeps the single-player mode fresh and creates some amazing, surreal environments as the unseen villain changes the code to try to kill Hazard. At one point, you fight Russians and cowboys in a nightclub, and if your rounds hit stationary objects, they warp and sizzle because the designers didn’t code them to interact with player characters. At another point, you fight bad guys with a Super Soaker-style squirt gun, brought back from one of Hazard’s kids’ titles.

(After Hazard shoots bad guys in the water fights, he cracks wise: “Damp if you do, damp if you don’t.”)

“Eat Lead” is so inventive, it’s worth listing more hilarious details you’ll encounter: Loading screens include tips such as, “You can read gameplay tips on the loading screens”; and the bad guys have perfect stock lines, as when the Russians shout, “Die, capitalist pig!” When you shoot bad guys, glowing blue lines of computer code spurt from their bodies instead of blood.

The problem is that “Eat Lead” spent the energy on being funny that normal games spend on working well. So although Hazard gets cool guns and he is reasonably easy to control, there are some baffling omissions: Hazard can’t jump, run or punch — except when the game prompts you with key commands.

The low-stakes, it’s-all-just-a-gag feel of the game will test the motivation of players not enamored of Hazard or the humor. There were times when I didn’t want to keep shooting bad guys because I wanted to see what would happen in the next movie to advance the story.

These meta-medium problems are probably why no video game has taken on video games like this before. In fact, you could make a case that “Eat Lead” should be a movie, not a first-person shooter. Players care mostly about action, after all, which is why most of them don’t care about the ham-fisted drama and indecipherable plots in regular games.

You could make that case, but I’d disagree. I had too much fun with Hazard and “Eat Lead.”

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (www.eatleadvideogame.com)

• For Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

• Rating: T for “Teen.”

• Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: Rent.

• Price: $59.99.