Anyone remember Bayonetta? It's now a 91/93 on Metacritic

[Eternal Entity]

What the hell is this? The game is, as hazyshadows put it, going to be a hit or miss game. You either like it or you don't, end of story. As for the PS3 having 'issues', let's point out the fact that the PS3 YLOD's FAR less than the 360 RROD's. And, at least Sony is improving their system via the Slim rather than constantly releasing the same thing over and over with a different amount of memory inside and a few other goodies to sweeten the deal. *cough*Elite*cough* I own a PS3, so I am speaking from experience. The only game I own that lags, at all, is Fallout 3: Game Of The Year Edition, and since Bethesda doesn't seem to care enough to release a patch for it, I suck it up and deal.

Onto Bayonetta itself. OHNOES IT'S NOT A SHOOTER WHYYYYYYYY MY BRAIN HURTS! /360 owner. Regardless, the game plays quite a bit like DMC with some things that are a bit more...over the top than others. Yes, there is the gratuitous amounts of sex appeal and the girl gamers out there will probably scream about how the only demographic appealed to is the guys, but, honestly, if you care that much, why are you playing it? You bought the game/played the demo knowing what you were in for. And, for the two or three of you who live under a rock and had no idea about this game, my apologies.

Speaking of girl gamers complaining about how women are portrayed in videogames, can I kindly point you in the direction of Samus Aran? Or perhaps Ada Wong? Jill Valentine? As for those of you complaining about how you'd feel bad to have your mother walk in and see you playing it, I doubt she'll feel any worse about you playing Bayonetta as she does about you playing Gears or Modern Warfare.

On the subject of Gears and Modern Warfare, it wouldn't surprise me if those of you who are complaining about the game are complaining purely because the guns are as close to useless as they can get while still having some use. A game where you can't pull the trigger and blow the head off the enemy just hurts your brain, since you actually have to think about how to fight, doesn't it? Oh well. I'll be over here, playing my innovative games that the rest of you dislike and you can return to telling the rest of the 14-year olds on Live about how you're going to rape them.

 

[Halo Fanboy]

This was in Best Buy today. If only in the Best Buy near me. Its also so much harder than you would expect from playing the demo, the two clawed enemies are absolute powerhouses and I'm only on normal mode.

 

[TraumaHound]

I played the 360 demo and wasn't impressed at all. Maybe I was expecting it to be something else, I don't know. It moved pretty fast and there was a lot of shit going on on-screen but it just didn't grab me. I had more fun with the Wet demo, which also featured a hottie shooting the shit out of everything.

Was there something to the Bayonetta demo that I missed? Something that I should've appreciated and clearly didn't?

 

[NickCaligo42]

I'll be honest: I REALLY hate the character design.

I can tolerate Team Ninja's bullcrap; for all the really downright sexist physical portreyal of women in their games the characters at least try to take themselves, their storylines, and their fighting styles seriously (well, sometimes anyway--mostly going off DOA2U here); but Bayonetta's just obnoxious. I don't agree with anybody who talks about it being porn-y; I've seen far less tasteful and more risque stuff, and honestly, I don't think it holds a candle to the annoying sexism factor set by something like Bikini Zombie Slayers on the Wii. I'll say, though, that the character is so dreadfully unsubtle about herself that it becomes really annoying and tacky, to the point that she couldn't possibly get worse unless she borrowed some of the louder pieces of Elton John's old wardrobe. "Tacky" is the word for it, not "sexual." It's like Los Vegas. It really doesn't titillate so much as... "dazzle."

That's kind of its charm, though. It's the same kind of stupid, loud, hyper-exaggerated stuff you see from games like Viewtiful Joe, kind of applied to a Los Vegas-y theme, and it's got that SEGA arcade game feel going for it too, which is something I've missed a lot since the days of the Dreamcast. It's the kind of thing that lets you sit back and not take things too seriously and just laugh at it, which I think is honestly more the intention and which is more what I like from my games. It's... you know, FUN, if you're open-minded enough about it, though I can certainly understand why a lot of people would have a difficult time liking it at a first glance. I was damn skeptical about it too.

That said, I'm not ashamed to say that I played the demo and enjoyed the hell out of it. It's definitely better than Devil May Cry 4, and in general a lot more accessible than the Devil May Cry games in spite of its comparatively bigger array of options and abilities. It's kind of a guilty pleasure since it's so atrociously tacky, but it's a showcase of cool and original action game mechanics if nothing else and a game that I'm definitely going to buy rather than rent.

Was there something to the Bayonetta demo that I missed? Something that I should've appreciated and clearly didn't?

Probably. The problem is that it's not very upfront about how you should go about doing things, and that's the big issue with Devil May Cry as well. It takes a little while to figure out what's safe and what isn't; what you can get away with trying to do to the enemies and what'll just get you torn to pieces. I had to do two playthroughs of the demo before I started to get a hold of it, at which point I went from having my ass handed to me and being royally confused to destroying things with some really impressive and methodical combos.