gonna play that new nier game everyone keeps talking about

(joke explanation: This was made by Cavia, the Drakengard/Nier studio. It bombed and nobody bought it, and then they made NieR and nobody bought that, and then they shut down)

going through the credits, obv shares tons of staff with their other games, but none of the leads worked on nier

(not sure what Taro was up to between drakengard and nier, but it wasn't this. Saito was/is with Square so he wasn't involved)

watching the attract mode video and immediately googling "wait when did bayonetta come out"

like two years later, apparently

absolutely incredible tutorial work

note how the first bit of text on the loading screen just disappears. I didn't push a button; it just goes away before you can read it all

not visible in video: me pushing every button on the controller trying to figure out how to shoot lmao

oh lol okay you have to HOLD right trigger for like half a second before it starts shooting

so like, no immediate feedback that the button even does anything at all lmao

okay I know the 360 generation was a really painful leap for a lot of studios in terms of tech requirements

this is.... definitely not how shadowmaps are supposed to work though

it never actually told me how to attack but here's a popup to explain what walls are

honestly huge respect for 2007's unflinching commitment to the belief that Destruction Physics was the Future of Gaming

WelCome Glad Mall

maaaan the sense of scale in this game is absolutely Fucked in like the most unintentionally evocative way possible

everything is just... way too huge and empty and wrong, like it was never designed for this. Like a normal human walking through a Sonic Adventure 2 city on foot

HE'S GOT TO HAVE A WEAK SPOT SOMEWHERE

with the game being named Bullet Witch and all, you would think it would be about some cool combination of guns+magic combat

Turns out nope; it's a rote run-and-gun shooter with a handful of highly situational special moves that you primarily just use to destroy barriers lol

lmaoo one mission ends with the gang riding a plane and then all the engines explode

the next level just opens with the plane lying intact on a highway and this guy just being like "WOW GREAT JOB CAN'T BELIEVE WE MADE IT"

genuinely one of my favorite 360-era videogame things is "there was supposed to be a cutscene here but we ran out of budget, because nobody has built good engine tools for cutscenes yet, so we just skipped it"

this move is known as The Reverse Xenogears

this has got to be FaceGen right

great to hear that the future of the human race rests in the hands of the Unity Surface Shader Examples Guy

the first few hours of this game were the good kind of bad videogame but unfortunately the later levels tend towards the bad kind of bad videogame

the only thing you ever do is point your gun at a dude and hold down the shoot button for about 30 seconds until the dude dies. The enemies keep getting spongier but your attacks don't get stronger lol

initially I thought my aim was just bad or bullet spread was really strong but after playing a while it turns out the hit registration is just... broken

like you can just point your gun straight at a dude and hold down the gun button and for some reason the bullets just Don't

one would imagine if you were making a videogame about shooting dudes you would make sure that the dude-shooting code actually results in the shooting of dudes but 2007 was a very difficult time for making videogames

lol you eventually go back to that weirdly-huge city level from earlier, and now the demons have become so powerful that the ocean is made of screamy faces

The final boss is, without exaggeration, about 30 straight minutes aiming at the weak point and holding down the shoot button while the boss walks in circles

I guess that's it for Bullet Witch (2007)

regrettably, I cannot recommend that you play Bullet Witch (2007)

All the good parts (bizarre environment design, bad voice acting, getting killed by errant physics objects, etc) are apparent in like the first two hours, and then everything after that just kind of gets more and more tedious

Was a decent way to expend a weekend at least

It's a remarkably unimaginative game. The good bits are the result of low-budget technical jank. In terms of gameplay, art, music, writing... it never even *tries* to set itself apart really

shoutouts to the UI designer though; the menus have more character than the whole game

I dunno what the rest of Cavia's games were like, but I was kinda surprised this felt so bland, because like... if nothing else nier and drakengard are WEIRD

I knew this game wasn't particularly "good" by most metrics but I at least expected it to have a sense of style...

One thing that's very funny: I def remember the marketing/press talking this up like some kind of Hot Sexy Gun Girl game, but the actual game is like absolutely zero percent horny lol

like her outfit is sort of revealing I guess but there's no sexy poses or pervy camera angles. Her personality is like the cold taciturn anime-badass style; she barely ever speaks to people if she can avoid it and refuses to ever betray emotion. Lone wandering swordsman aesthetic

what if i just played bayonetta again