I got an old busted 360 and I'm gonna play old weird 360 games

hey this sucks bring back ＴＨＥ ＢＬＡＤＥＳ

man remember how Miis were cute for like ten minutes so microsoft bought Rare for twelve billion dollars and locked them in a basement until they created these maudlin nose-having bitstrip-ass knockoffs

thinkin about that SIXTY PERCENT FAILURE RATE on the first run of hardware (including mine lol)

what an incredible legacy

it had so many weird ambitious busted games that nobody played and are therefore Good

All right nerds buckle up

this game has like... *severe* framerate issues while performing tasks such as... drawing the main menu

Yeah input response time's gonna take some getting used to lol

Everytime it brings up a tutorial prompt the whole game stalls for 1-2 seconds and then the screen flashes black for a few frames and then the prompt comes up

I'm actually kinda wondering if this xbox has hardware problems lol

anyway I'm not actually bashing it or anything; I'm going into this expecting weird sorta busted games

this does legit feel like the console's about to catch on fire though

wish I had a way to save screenshots/videos besides a phone camera

want to talk about cool tech-art stuff but hard to show it

there's a ton of screenspace flares and overlays just blasted across everything, and all the lightsources are moving around constantly so there're like shadows and speculars wandering around across all the surfaces

it's a super neat look

fixed-camera platforming oh nooooooo

Okay this is ridiculously cool

it's a credits sequence, which is also a cutscene composed of a bunch of animated illustrations + dialogue, while you're ALSO controlling a little silhouette combat diorama spanning the bottom portion of the screen

everything I've seen in the first few minutes of this game has felt INCREDIBLY focused on controlling 2D compositions in artistic ways

Satan just looked directly at the camera and said "You could clear this in 7 hours... if you're good enough"

well done, videogame

rapidly coming to the conclusion that anyone interested in non-photorealistic rendering needs to play this

This hatching effect is super cool. Diffuse shading term appears to be driving a threshold value on a hatched texture?

easier to see in motion bc all the lights are constantly moving, but surfaces smoothly shift from lit, to thin hatching, to thick hatching, to solid black, depending on how the light hits them

this game has at least four different failure/death states and I can't figure out how any of them work

it's rad

Rather than being generically cinematic fantasy choral music, a bunch of the soundtrack appears to be closely derived from actual hymns, which is super strange/cool

This game doesn't actually distinguish between "normal jump" and "double jump"; you just get two jumps regardless of whether you started on the ground or not

if you walk off a ledge and start falling you've still got two jumps

this is... good and cool? Super nice for platforming; kinda wish more games did it. Like why even bother with coyote time really; just let me jump

I'm enjoying this game a lot but it kinda has no idea how to use its own combat system

it's got this cool weapon-stealing mechanic where each weapon type has a rock-paper-scissors power relationship, so you're supposed to steal a weapon off one dude to beat up the other dude

which is neat and fun when you're fighting popcorn enemies, but then it keeps throwing in super tanky 1-on-1 fights against bosses or just weirdly resilient mooks of a single type, and the whole thing suddenly sucks bc they just invalidated their own core combat mechanism

best I can tell so far:

If you die in *specific* boss fights, they leave and the game continues

If you die in normal combat, you get a QTE. If you pass the QTE you resurrect, and if you fail you load from checkpoint

If you die while platforming, you load from checkpoint

If you die in a challenge room, you watch a several-minute cutscene, and then the credits run while you can still control your character, and then it plays what I can only describe as A TRAILER FOR THE GAME, then you get kicked out to the *main menu* and have to load last save

these devs genuinely put an ENORMOUS amount of effort into making things as confusing as possible

Also worth noting "load last save from main menu" is not the same thing as "load from checkpoint" and appears to usually be a pretty significant setback

...lol

Check out what happens when I grab this pickup and the game needs to display some text

you should probably play this

those aren't phone-camera colors those are the actual videogame colors

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this genuinely features some of the worst-designed platforming I've ever played

colors tho

Okay finished it

El Shaddai is a really really good bad videogame

Combat's dull and repetetive, levels are mostly excruciatingly bad platforming, pacing is tedious, art direction and overall mood are OFF THE CHARTS

Also deliberately sexualized male protagonist in an expensive-ass Big Videogame is... kind of incredibly cool?

Like it's never really a focus, there's just kind of this ambient sense of "LOOK HOW HOT THIS HOT DUDE IS" that runs through the whole thing

which is how.... basically every game with a female protagonist treats its characters, while male protags all gotta have some kind of physics-enabled half-cape at the waist so you don't see too much butt