Image by Gord McLeod via FlickrI’m impressed with Final Fantasy XIII.

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had the chance to pick up Sega’s  Bayonetta and give it a run on the PS3. From the little I’ve played so far though, it seems like a fantastically polished, fast, furious and fun game. It’s exactly the kind of quick combat oriented game I can throw in the machine and have some fun with for a short time, without worrying too much about how much progress I make.

From a design perspective, one feature in particular caught my eye. During load times you retain control of your character in a way that reminds me a little bit of Assassin’s Creed‘s Matrix-like loading feature. Bayonetta takes that concept and makes it even more useful. You can practice your combos while waiting for things to load. This is very handy for a gamer like myself; I gravitate more towards role-playing games and shooters than combo-fests. When I picked the game up, I assumed I’d have to get through it with a little luck and a lot of button mashing, but this practice feature gives me some hope that I might be capable of actually learning a few of the cooler moves at some point. It also makes the load times much easier to bear, though the update that allowed the game to be partially installed to the system’s hard drive results in load times that are pretty easy to handle anyway.

This post is my first experiment at shifting my game impressions from my blog to Google Buzz. Let’s see how this works out!