So, last night I found myself with a bit of a puzzle. I had finished the first of my term papers, but not the second. With a full week to go (instead of my usual twelve hours of frantic typing and incomprehensible, constant obscenities that ends with a finished paper and a little piece of my soul gone), I decided to reward myself with some videogame time. The question was, what to play?

Borderlands, while utterly delightful, has been finished twice and is about as finished as it can be, unless I want to make 3 new characters and acquire the last 45 points possible there. Yeah, not today.

Deadspace and Batman are both awesome, but not a game for a stray hour.

Dragon Age remains sealed away until the semester ends, at which point I may lose about 80 hours.

Splosion Man…no, I’ll save my rage-induced cursing for the term paper.

What’s this? A demo? I had heard something about Bayonetta. I don’t remember what it was, but what the hell. It’s worth a shot.

So we fired this bad boy up…and I’m a 5′ chick with 3′ legs, horn-rimmed glasses, and hair beyond description. Ok, whatever. If I can play a horrifying Italian stereotype across seven games I can deal with this for a demo.

So now we come to the gameplay demo, where I learn to punch (punch go!), kick, dodge, jump, and shoot dudes…

…with my guns and gun feet. Alright…moving right along.

So we started the game. Completely incomprehensible cutscene. Check. You know what, video game? You’ve got a chick with gunfeet beating dudes up. I really don’t need a story. Borderlands didn’t have a story, just 4 characters, a lot of guns, and dudes who needed to not breathe. That’s all I want. Can we get to that part now?

Yes, yes we can. Awesome. I’m punching and kicking dudes. And now I’m running combos that end in giant fists (or feet) obliterating these crazy…Japanese monster things. And for those to go off I need to be naked. And I’m fighting on a giant broken clock flying through space. Ok. Whatever. Let’s just punch dudes.

Until a two-headed dragon blows me up and the level ends. Was that supposed to happen? Did I just die? Why am I getting a medal? Is this some kind of post-humous award?

No, no it was not. It was all a dream sequence leading up to another incomprehensible cutscene. Dammit, videogame, we had a deal. You make with the army of poorly-skilled hemophiliacs, and I make with the murder. Why do you have to mess with this? Why you gotta make me want to hit you?

So, after about 437 words of nonsense, we’re at the game proper. Which is announced to be paradise after I get off the train. You know, it seems to me that if you could just buy a train ticket to paradise more guys would be around. Like that crazy guy who I see on the metro. He’d totally be hear screaming obscenities at the glasses chick and soiling himself. In some ways I think that would fit with this game.

Glasses chick has two speeds: hooker-strut and murderous nerd-run. During the hooker-strut you can shoot at stuff, which is how I break everything in the level. Also, apparently purple butterflies give you magic. Good to know.

And finally bad guys show up. In glowing pillars of light. With halos. And are called archangels. So I’m murdering angels here? Honestly I see this going poorly. There’s no way glasses-chick is taking Christopher Walken.

Gameplay’s pretty awesome and frenetic. I’m hitting a lot of dudes, and when I remember to hit the dodge button awesome things occur. Like conjuring a guillotine out of thin air and kicking an angel in the spine until he falls in. Nice. Also, apparently I have a sword now. Don’t ask me why I have a sword or how, I hit a bunch of buttons (because this gameplay is mashy as hell) and a sword came out and now I’m stabbing dudes.

Sweet, giant angel with an axe and a baby face. Let’s get my murderous rampage on. Enemies so far have been creepy bird-dudes with halos and baby-heads with wings. Big dude with axe breaks all kinds of shit in the environment while trying to murder me, until I beat him down thoroughly.

At this point a “climax” button lit up on the screen. I don’t really think I need to add anything to this. There was a giant hair-dragon, and murder, and nakedness. So it was pretty much everything I’d expect from a woman’s climax.

After this the game continues through a few more bad guys to slaughter (honestly after the giant hair-dragon it lost some of its luster by comparison, but hey, murderous rampages are always good), and then we find another, even bigger crazy angel-monster who’s combat technique involves picking up the ground and flinging it around ineffectually while I stab the crap out of him.

Then the demo ends. No resolution for this fight, no explanation of a goddamn thing, and I’m not entirely sure I didn’t just pass out in front of the TV, land nose-first into a bottle of white-out and dream the entire thing over the course of losing a couple million brain cells. I mean, it was fun, but what did I get out of this besides the assurance that I clearly am at no risk of seizure after seeing bright flashing lights for about twenty minutes?

In other words, we have another perfectly suitable entry into the DMC-like genre. Or, for us normals, we have a beat ‘em up that would be great fun if it made one goddamn bit of sense, and is entertaining nonetheless. Thanks Japan!

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Tags: bayonetta, platinum games

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Games, Videogames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.