61 Frames Per Second : platinum games

Trailer Review: Bayonetta

John Constantine — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

You’d think that with time and experience and the accumulation of knowledge, a man would move past certain things. He’d start to develop more refined tastes that reflect a growing passion for life’s finer stuff. You’d think he’d exhibit a predilection for more metered explorations of the human experience, subtle meditations on adult relationships and history. You’d think that witches who have guns built into their shoes, who get naked while attacking monsters with their hair wouldn’t be the sort of thing that would interest him.

Nope. Bayonetta is about as cultured as I’m likely to get.

There’s a lot more of the game to chew on in this latest trailer. It’s the first decent look at the sort of play I got to see demoed back in January. I’ll say, though, it still doesn’t give a full impression of just how varied and fast combat in Bayonetta really is. There’s also a heaping spoonful of story, with two new characters spouting dialog that strongly recalls director Hideki Kamiya’s old cheese from Devil May Cry and Resident Evil 2. Also, Bayonetta can turn into a cougar. I guess that explains why she’s chasing after that young, good looking fella driving the car in front of her! You know. Because… she’s a cougar… um…

That is the worst joke I have ever made.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Fez
Katamari Damacy Tribute
Behemoth’s Game #3
Muramasa – The Demon Blade
InFamous
Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
Dante’s Inferno is Looking Even More… Something
Machinarium
Mightier
Demon’s Souls
Final Fantasy XIII Looks Disturbingly Interesting
Priston Tale II: The 2nd Enigma
King of the Fighters XII
Edge
Dante's Inferno
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Resident Evil 5

The 61FPS Review - MadWorld

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

First and foremost, let me say this: I loved just about every second of Platinum Games' debut title MadWorld. If you have a Wii and are even slightly interested in over-the-top violence, I say get the game as soon as you possibly can. If you enjoyed the Wii's reigning champ of hardcore tongue-in-cheek violence No More Heroes, you'll find a lot to love in MadWorld. If you're a fan of Clover Studio's past work, in particular Viewtiful Joe and God Hand, you will probably love MadWorld. If you are a fan of Frank Miller's Sin City and/or black comedy, you will absolutely have a blast with MadWorld.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get into the nitty-gritty. We'll start with the good stuff. MadWorld is visually stunning, and like Super Mario Galaxy and World of Goo, another prime example of brilliant art direction in a Wii game that makes you forget the system is so much less powerful than the competition. Videos online do not do it justice, you really have to take the game home and play it in your living room to see how crisp and perfectly stylized the entire world and all of its inhabitants are. The story, believe it or not, is compelling and brilliantly paced, slowly but steadily revealing details about the Death Watch games, its organizers, protagonist Jack, and more through a mix of in-engine animation and static comic strip art cut scenes at the beginnings and ends of most stages. I'm very intentionally leaving out details in this write-up because the story (written by Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII's Yasumi Matsuno) was one of my favorite elements of the game and I would hate to spoil it for those who should really experience it themselves.

Gameplay, surprisngly, doesn't get old thanks to a healthy variety in environments, challenges, and kills and a steady increase in enemy AI. Most of the stages play out as arena-style battles where you keep killing waves of baddies, accumulating points to unlock a big boss fight, so in this regard MadWorld is very much like the aforementioned No More Heroes, and just like in that game, the boss fights are really worth fighting for, with zany characters and big quicktime-waggle-event-based payoffs. Especially in the boss fights (and the later arenas) the dodge maneuver of shaking the nunchuck will be your best friend for making it out alive. The Bloodbath Challenge mini-games keep the slaughter fresh and enaging with fun new ways to mass murder.

This brings me to, by far, my favorite part of MadWorld: the audio. From the whirr of Jack's chainsaw eminating from your wiimote to the sticky squish of blood splatter, sound effects go a long way to bringing you into this not-too-distant future decent into madness (supporting character Leo, a dead ringer for Platinum board member Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil 4 protagonist Leon Kennedy, is a hospital resident born in 1993, so unless he's Doogie Howzer this has to be at least a decade from now). The original hip-hop soundtrack sets the mood for murder perfectly with an air of style and self-worth. Jack is voiced by Steven Blum, whom you may recall is a general voice acting badass for his roles as Wolverine in the X-Men Legends and Ultimate Alliance games, as well as the new Wolverine and the X-Men animated series, hero Spike on the anime Cowboy Bebop, and various other tough-as-nails bastards in God of War, Killer 7, Dead Rising, No More Heroes, the upcoming Bionic Commando and tons of other games and animes involving massive death and destruction. The dude's got a pedigree in stone-cold badassery. Last, but absolutely not least are the Death Watch announcers, voiced by Greg Proops and John DiMaggio (Futurama's Bender). Their back-and-forth banter throughout the slaughter was always welcome and often hilarious. The occassional repeats ("I like to wash down my scotch with another glass of scotch!") are noticable only because of how memorable every line of their dialogue really is. Their spot-on slander of the game's production team has made MadWorld's end credits my favorite of the year so far (and I really thought Flower's were excellent). The one-two punch of the dialogue and the outrageously over-the-top violence made the game utterly hilarious. Even my visiting sister was entertained by the brutality and profanity. Be warned, though, I'm fairly certain you will hear the word "motherfucker" more than the word "the" in MadWorld.

Okay, so all of that is great, right? Now on to the not-so-great. The biggest qualm people will have is that the game is short. My save file read exactly four hours when I completed the normal difficulty (this does not include deaths, cinemas or quicktime events, as my Wii system memory counted nine hours by that point). Completing the game unlocks two new weapons and Hard Mode, plus the game is just fun, so there's plenty of enjoyment to be had in replaying it all, but still, the whole thing goes by very fast. All of the Bloodbath Challenge mini-games are available in multiplayer mode, but I would have loved to see these available as score attacks in single player too, as well as a cinema gallery so I could reexperience the whole story without having to fight my way through thugs, zombies, and goons for hours.

The multiplayer, while a fun and easy addition, also proved problematic. Players do not receive points for kills they achieve as in the single player Bloodbaths, but rather kills of specific characters. Player one gets points for thugs wearing bull masks, player two for thugs in geisha masks. It's very hard to tell one from another when they're all in black and white and half-size for split-screen, so you'll often rack up points for your opponent without realizing it, and there is no option to turn those masks off. Multiplayer for a stylized beat-em up should not involve paying that close attention to your targets.

Control-wise, the camera can be a bit frustrating at times, and locking onto enemies takes practice, but neither is game-breaking and the controls are otherwise solid. Quicktime events with bosses have the potential to wear you out from rapid waggling. I found I needed to take a break after every other stage for my muscles to relax again. Still, thirteen big crazy ranked boss battles is three more than No More Heroes had (including Henry), and the fact that they're all shorter fights is probably a good thing in most gamers' books.

All in all, I strongly recommend MadWorld to the mature Wii audience. The story is deep and rich, the gameplay is varied and visceral, the style and production are top-notch. Many worried the game would be too easy because enemies don't really attack much in the first few stages. Let me tell you, by the end of Normal mode, regular thugs are evading and blocking attacks, teaming up on you, and attacking you while you try to combo other baddies. Hard mode starts off there and keeps going up, crippling you with only one life, so challenge is there when you're ready for it. I'd love a few more options in play, but I will definitely replay again and again for bigger and badder kills, scores, and wicked laughs. The first game to come from Platinum, the quality really lives up to the studio's name and is at the very least worth a weekend rental. I very much look forward to the announcement of a MadWorld 2.

Final grade: B+

Previous Reviews:
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Chiptune Friday: Spring Is In the Air With Okami

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Two truths. Today is March 13th. It will not be spring for another eight days. Also, the original soundtrack to Okami is not chiptune. At all. In fact, it is fully orchestrated and entrenched in traditional Japanese composition, a far cry from the heavy metal and pop roots of the blissed-out blip songs composed on the NES or similar consoles.

Have you gone outside though? It is freaking gorgeous out there. It may rain, it may be cloudy, but the bitter miasma of late winter has lifted, washed away as if by… a celestial brush! Given, it’s likely that the fine weather is a result of the Earth’s natural solar orbit and axial spin, but I like to think that there’s a sun goddess wolf out there making it nice outside. I’m going to find her. We’ll go to the park and play fetch. Beautiful women will be all, “Oh your dog is beautiful!” And I’ll be all, “Check dis.” Then Amaterasu will make a bushel of fragrant botanicals grow at our feet.

Here are three selections from the Okami soundtrack. Listen, be in bloom, and grab your DS or PSP. Go play outside today!

The Great Goddess Amaterasu’s Revival

We’ll Always Be Together!

Two People Gazing At Each Other

Related links:

Chiptune Friday: Ethernet’s “Theme For the Water Shrine” Makes Me Want to Adventure and Possibly Defeat an Ancient Evil
Chiptune Friday: Trip to the Beat
Best NES End Credits Music in the History of NES End Credits Music
Chiptune Friday: Shut Up and Jam!
Chiptune Friday: Blaze a Blaze in the Mushroom Kingdom

MadWorld: Actually a Pretty Even-Keeled World

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Unlike Bayonetta, Sega were all too happy to let me try out MadWorld yesterday. After a quick tutorial in the controls, I was thrown, for lack of a better phrase, into the deep end of Varrigan City. I walked away from the game thinking three distinct things:

One: Ultra-detailed black and white games are as cool in practice as they are in theory, but I can see why there aren’t too many of them.

Two: Platinum Games took Suda 51’s No More Heroes combat model and improved its accuracy and versatility in significant ways.

Three: MadWorld’s kind of… boring.

For clarity’s sake, I’m saying that my fifteen minutes with MadWorld were boring. I walked away without an inkling of what it will be like as a complete game. I got a good feel for its combat in one portion of one stage only. That combat is solid and the controls responsive, like a slowed-down, more deliberate variation on No More Heroes’ manic swordplay. A button makes protagonist Jack punch in combos and swing weapons picked up from the environment, shaking the Wii remote does an uppercut, holding the B-trigger brings out Jack’s chainsaw and you swing about the controller to make a mess of thugs wandering about town. There’s also grappling, throws with flicks of the remote, and all sorts of context-sensitive environmental violence. Looking at it all written out, MadWorld’s controls might seem a little overwhelming, even more complicated than those on a more traditional, dual-analog stick controller. They are when you actually play the game, but it’s not difficult to settle into the game’s rhythm. I say that as someone who’s played a ton of No More Heroes, so MadWorld may have something of a learning curve for players new to 3D combat on Wii that’s more than just wagglin’ the remote.

Unfortunately, the game’s mechanical competence is besides the point since the combat doesn’t feel very substantial. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen what MadWorld has to offer. You bludgeon all sorts of Sin-City-meets-Manhunt badguys with your fists and whatever else is around, throwing them into bizarre death traps wherever you can find them. MadWorld’s carnival freak aggressors don’t put up much of a fight though, and therein lies the problem. I’m a glutton for exaggerated cartoon violence in videogames. MadWorld’s is very satisfying, a perfect mix of funny and grotesque, as a visual spectacle, but it never demands anything of you as a game. If there’s no threat to your own well-being in a game like MadWorld, the violence loses the thrill of tension and release. It’s that exact balance that made the Platinum Games team’s other action games God Hand and Viewtiful Joe the so memorable.

MadWorld’s presentation — intricate black and white environments and characters accented by washes of red blood and yellow sound-effect words — looks great, bellying the Wii’s meager horsepower. The characters are huge too, much bigger than you usually see in the genre, and the camera stays close to the action. The characters are so big though that I found myself losing track of what was even happening. If the enemies were even remotely aggressive, I think I would have died more than a few times. The black and white compounds the confusion because it’s hard to discern what’s what on screen – if the game didn’t have a GTA-style radar as part of its HUD, I wouldn’t have even realized there was a path leading to the level’s objective. Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba admitted to the inherent problems of MadWorld’s visual style, and it was troubling to find that all the kinks hadn’t been worked out yet.

Platinum Games’ track record is enough to convince me that there’s a lot more to MadWorld than you can experience in fifteen minutes. Still, I was a little disappointed that its play was nowhere near as instantly gripping as its looks.

Related links:

The Contrarion: Madworld - Color Me Unimpressed
Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think
Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think

John Constantine — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Nah, I’m playing. Bayonetta is totally as gratuitous as you think. Sega came to NYC today and they brought Platinum Games’ Xbox 360/PS3 debut with them. I wasn’t allowed to get my hands on the controller, only a guided playthrough of the game’s first stage, but that was enough to say that Bayonetta’s every bit as over the top as its initial trailer made it out to be. It also looks like a hell of a good time.

Games are more than their graphics, I know, but it’s impossible to discuss Bayonetta without mentioning its presentation first. Without question, it is one of the most visually impressive games of the last five years. The game periodically goes into brief, playable flashbacks showcasing a war that left the titular character comatose for decades. One of these sequences is frames around a boss fight against a towering, obese dragon with two heads and a human face protruding from its swollen belly. The scene is a riot of color. Every inch of the crumbling environment is a meticulously detailed and animated. Even though the game’s months away from its fall 2009 release, Platinum Games’ new engine runs all the action without a hitch and the camera, a notorious trouble-maker in 3D action games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, follows the action without obscuring it.

The best part of the demo was that it was all play, no cutscenes, and the best way to describe the action is Devil May Cry-on-speed. It looks like Kamiya’s spent all his time since the original DMC trying to come up with new ways to make combo-driven melee-and-gun combat even more of a spectacle. In addition to the kicks, punches, and four-limbed-rapid-fire shooting, Bayonetta can pick up any weapon dropped by an enemy, and use unique attacks. It sounds pedestrian when you put it that way. It’s a different story when you pick up a trumpet and start blowing up angels with music or picking up staffs and pole dancing bad guys to death. Like I said, Bayonetta is as gratuitous as it seems. As reported, the titular character's chief weapon is her hair, and since her attire is also happens to be her hair, progressive attacks reveal more and more skin. The fighting and special one-hit kills — fill a combo meter, press a button, kick an enemy into a spectral iron maiden — are so fast, though, that you barely notice that she’s de-robed. (Let me stress: the combat is fast, faster than any other 3D action game I've seen.) The same can’t be said for the finishing moves in boss fights, since Bayonetta turns her entire outfit into an enormous hair-dragon while the camera busies itself with her body.

So it looks great and the play seems tight, but the jury’s still out on whether or not Bayonetta is a good game. Without actually playing the game, it’s impossible to say whether or not the combat is as satisfying and nuanced as Devil May Cry 3’s. (It’s even harder to make any judgments since the demo had infinite life and combo meter turned on.) I also glimpsed a stray non-action part of the level that had Bayonetta running around a city populated with ghostly NPCs. Apparently the game takes place on a dimension overlaying reality and these ghosts are how regular old people appear from there. Unfortunately I wasn’t clued in on whether or not these adventure portions had any significant presence in the game. Looks like I’m just going to have to wait ten months to find out if Bayonetta’s a great game or merely a pretty one.

Related links:

Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

Infamous: Unsung Contender of 2009

John Constantine — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:30:00 GMT

I don’t like lying. Lying tends to make me feel dirty on the inside, like I’ve broken my own New Year’s resolution and started eating topsoil again because it’s both moist and visually similar to cake. So I won’t lie and tell you that the games I am most excited about in the first half of 2009 are published by someone besides Capcom. It simply isn’t true. There’s new Bionic Commando. It is my topsoil. Everything else is dirt.

But that’s not to say there isn’t a whole ton of excellent and appealing dirt on the way! Sega and Platinum Games’ goodies are going to start rolling out in the next few months. Killzone 2 is looking like it may actually deliver on its half-decade of ridiculous hyping. Muramasa: The Demon Blade? Fragile? These games will, hopefully, be sweet.

Speaking of all things promising, Bob’s love for Sly Cooper reminded me that Suckerpunch is gearing up for their big Playstation 3 debut in just the next few months. But where is all the hype for open world superhero extravaganza, Infamous? Why have we seen so very little of this game since it was announced in 2007 and why haven’t more people gotten to play it? You look so fun Infamous. I love shooting people with lightning after I’ve climbed some buildings and blown up some cars. It’s how I unwind.

Check out the interview and tons of in-game footage from TGS ’08 that Gametrailers just got around to posting. It really does look like a blast.

Related links:

Underappreciated: Sly Cooper
Fan Art: Sly Cooper
Emergency Rescue!! Super Joe!!
Where is Prototype?
John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

You’re Doing Great, Sega: Space Harrier Returns

John Constantine — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Space Harrier, unlike a lot of Sega’s other arcade games in the mid-80s, was a little light on challenging play. Your little blonde dude and his huge gun flew across the seemingly endless surface of The Fantasy Zone, shooting all kinds of dragons and cycloptic wooly mammoths, but it never quite felt like anything you did had a physical impact on the world. Things exploded when you shot near them but it didn’t ever feel like you were actually causing it to happen. But Yu Suzuki’s debut game stands out in history because it was, and is, staggeringly beautiful. Its scaling sprite graphics were an important landmark on the road to making lush three-dimensional – not true 3D mind you, but close – game worlds. Harrier’s Fantasy Zone is as bizarre and unique a visual space as anything else that came out of Sega (arguably even stranger and more fully realized than Opa Opa’s Fantasy Zone.) It also had some of the most hilarious voiceovers in a game. One of my earliest gaming memories is of a Space Harrier machine repeatedly yelling, “You’re doing great!” in the corner of a Pizza-Hut. It made me laugh so hard, Pepsi came out my nose, and everyone knows that the true test of comedy is whether or not it can make you leak fluid.

It’s strange then, considering Sega’s recent penchant for resurrecting their iconic franchises, that Space Harrier has remained untouched for twenty years. The only sign of the series since 1988 was Sega’s arcade shooter Planet Harrier in 2001, an obvious spiritual successor but still not a proper Space Harrier 3. If Tez Okana has his way, Space Harrier won’t stay unloved for long. Okana recently released Thunder Force VI on PS2, another long dead Sega series given new life, and he told Edge Magazine that his ambition is to bring Space Harrier back to the masses. Discussing his thoughts on the shooter genre broadly and his plans, Okana said, "I need to demonstrate our approach is viable. But for my next step, I’d really like to work on Space Harrier. This is a unique game in Sega’s history that projected us into some incredible worlds and experiences. But the success of Thunder Force VI is the key to any future projects." This is particularly exciting considering Okana’s previous games, like the phenomenal Astroy Boy: Omega Factor on Game Boy Advance, has precisely the sort of tangible, weighty, and skillful play that Harrier was lacking so many years ago.

Sega, I’m loving you these days. Signing Platinum Games, making Sonic good again, making a grindhouse themed House of the Dead for Wii. Please let Ozaka make this game. That would, as the kids say, rock hard.

(Link: Edge Online)

Related links:

Sega "Gets" the Wii
Where is Yu Suzuki?
Sex/Violence: Oneechanbara and the New Localization
Sonic Bound: After Three Botched Reboots, Sonic the Hedgehog May Finally Get His 3D Due
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Sonic the Hedgehog: I'm Just Not that Into You

Game Designers: Rockstars, Auteurs, Dweebs?

John Constantine — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One crummy thing about living here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. is that we don’t get issues of Britain’s Edge Magazine for a full month after they hit stands in Britain. Yes, I know, it’s a hard life. We’ve been at war with two separate nations for close to a decade, the economy is disintegrating, and our health care system is an atrocity but all that pales in comparison to not getting pretty videogame rags in a timely manner. But I digress. Yesterday, while flipping through their July issue, something stuck out about their Platinum Games cover story: the photo spread of Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, Shigenori Nishikawa, Hifumi Kouno, and Tatsuya Minami made them look like a god damn boy band.

I’m conflicted about the emerging designer-as-rockstar image. Once upon a time, it wasn’t unusual for a game to be made by a single person, but in 2008, it’s the rarest exception to the rule. Big games, the vast majority of games the public plays, are made by studios whose collective creative vision makes the game what it is, not one woman or man’s vision. Instead of celebrating and promoting the individual, the rockstar of David Jaffe, Cliffy B, or Shigeru Miyamoto, maybe it should be about the rock band image like in the Platinum Games spread. I’d wear a Valve t-shirt over a Gabe Newell one any day, wouldn’t you?

Related links:

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

John Constantine — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Image courtesy of IGN.com

Last week’s reveal that Platinum Games, formerly of Clover fame, was making four entirely new videogames was one of the most exciting moments of the year in gaming. The return of powerful creative voices is always reason to sit up and pay attention. Brendan Sinclair of Gamespot sat down with Sega America VP of marketing Sean Ratcliffe and president Simon Jeffery to discuss Sega and Platinum’s new publishing relationship. Interviews like this tend to not be very revealing about the content or creation of the games being discussed; these aren’t designers talking, they’re marketers, so they market. Buried beneath the glad-handing here, though, is some scary insight into what independent developers without the resources to publish and promote their own work face when getting their games onto the world stage. Take a look at this excerpt:

Gamespot: Is this (publishing) deal exclusive, or can Platinum work here and there for other publishers?

Simon Jeffrey: It's completely exclusive.

Gamespot: Do the intellectual property rights for these brands stay with Sega or Platinum Games?

Simon Jeffrey: Sega.

No matter what Platinum Games creates under this agreement, they don’t get to own it. As both Jeffrey and Ratcliffe emphasize throughout the interview, they’re looking to turn Hideki Kamiya’s Bayonetta, Inaba’s Madworld, and Shinji Mikami’s untitled project into franchises. But these worlds, these characters, and most likely any assets built specifically for these games will become the property of Sega. While it’s laudable that Sega brass is offering as much opportunity, promotion, and “independence” to Platinum Games as they can, it’s upsetting to hear that they’re continuing the trend of retaining intellectual property. If ever there was an argument for an industry wide move to digital distribution, it’s that said move would keep a creator’s creation in their hands.

And, oh yeah, here’s some more ultra-violence for you. Just look at this trailer for Madworld. That is AWESOME. Apparently, it’s so gory, they may not even release it in Japan. Beautiful.

Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum

John Constantine — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

While the final months of 2006 were exciting times – the Wii and Playstation 3 were released mere days apart while the Xbox 360, DS, and PSP really started to heat up content wise – it was also a time of mourning. Just after the release God Hand and Okami, Clover Studios disbanded. Parent company Capcom absorbed much of the staff while the designer trinity of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry), and Atsushi Inaba (Viewtiful Joe) went off to form a new independent studio. Clover’s games were true rarities in the industry, each one an artistic ziggurat built on a foundation of violently colorful worlds and idiosyncratic mechanics. Viewtiful Joe’s comicbook world of an empowered movie buff that found the player manipulating the action with VCR commands, Okami’s sumi-e fantasia that allowed the player to literally exert their will on the world through painting; truly special stuff. That’s why it’s so exciting that yesterday’s rumors about their new games turned out to be absolutely true.

Their new studio, Platinum Games, has signed a three game publishing deal with Sega and their new titles sound like classic gold. Bayonetta for PS3/360 looks to evolve the stylish violence Kamiya created in the original Devil May Cry seven years ago, MadWorld is set to join No More Heroes in the world of surrealist Wii action, and Infinite Line’s take on science fiction sounds markedly deeper than the usual DS fare. Check out the leaked trailer for Bayonetta below.

Our thanks go out to NeoGAF and all its members’ tireless effort to dig up any and all info that leaks before press embargoes break.