Day 10: Bayonetta

This week I've been playing a game called Bayonetta. Quick synopsis: It's bonkers. It's also frightfully well made, deeply challenging, and shamefully childish. But before all these things, it's a just a bit bloody mental. I'm aware that not everyone who reads this is an avid gamer, so i'll do my best to keep it grounded. Apologies in advance if I spiral off like a catherine wheel of perplexing jargon.

Basically you play this woman called Bayonetta who's a witch who's got fully automatic pistols in the heels of her shoes and she's wearing this sexy black cat suit but the cat suit is actually made of her hair and when you do moves it uses up your hair so that she's a bit naked but then when you do the big special move the hair turns into a big dog that chomps up the enemies into meaty chunks then she blows a kiss at the camera and decapitates an angel and there's explosions and blood everywhere and it's Mental.

Insanity aside however, I initially found myself a bit on the fence concerning how I feel about the game overall. It's a sentiment that's been echoed throughout the internet a lot over the past few days - some relish the shameless sexual nature of it all, but at the same time many begrudge it; an unwanted throwback to the 'Jugz n' Gunz' trend of the early 1990's, when your typical female protagonist was often unable to engage in conversation without playfully suggesting she might have a semi-automatic weapon concealed in her vagina.

Bayonetta is a bloody excellent game, but I admit I did feel a little torn about how I felt about the overall content. I had a similar experience over Christmas playing Gears of War 2 with my brother on the family telly; It was great fun, but I couldn't help but feel ashamed every time my Dad walked into the room. As it turned out there was no need for this - he surprisingly seemed to enjoy watching us mince up aliens in a hail of gore. Considering this is the same man that wouldn't let me play Mortal Kombat when I was 10, I wasn't happy about this. As impartial spectators of my hobby, I didn't want my parents to accept Gears of War 2 as being a reasonable form of entertainment; from an outside perspective, in my mind Gears of War 2 shouldn't be seen as anything other than a brash and unpleasant collection of monochrome macho slosh. I wanted to make it clear that this was an exception to the rule - because of this, I felt the need to nonchalantly justify to my parents why we were playing the game, and that we were aware of just how stupid and adolescent the overall package was.

It was an unprovoked reaction, and one that most gamers have been guilty of succumbing to at some point. Whilst there are only a few who constantly soldier on trying to convince the world that GAMES ARE FUCKING ART MAN, most of us are happy enough just trying to assure those around us that we're not a sexually deprived idiotic child. Some gamers deal with the second part of this by hamming up the first, often rubbishing games that are clearly brilliant fun simply because they then don't meet a selection of pseudo-socio-prickademic criteria, which is a shame.

Conversely, the other of the spectrum tend to just play games for a laugh, and don't give a shit about any of the deeper stuff in the slightest; an attitude which regularly infuriates intelligamers, fueled further no doubt by the reality that it's the former group which has most control over what faces commercial success/doom. Irritatingly again, it's usually the doing of these brash gamers that leave many of the rest of us defensively justifying why we're playing these dubious looking games: The main reason I'll make it clear to you that I don't masturbate over chainsaws and headshots is because I'm fully aware that there are a big chunk of people out there who genuinely do.

But anyway, Bayonetta. It's a brash and bloody romp with tits in it. Spin yourself a yarn about the hidden feminist nuances if you fancy, or brand it as a violent wank-bank for spotty teenagers. OR, maybe you've decided it's an ironic statement about videogame culture. Personally, I think it's just deeply silly.

Of all the systems and rules videogames have borrowed from other media, the most damaging is the underlying tendency to believe that for a videogame to be truly worthy of critical acclaim, it must be either meaningful, intelligent, or beautiful. Bayonetta is none of these things, and as such the reaction has been to either scoff at the praise it's received, or to weave a web of pretension trying to transcend it into something it's clearly not. 7/10 games however tend to get by a little easier... I personally can't recall a huge debate surrounding the nature of the portrayal of women in Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a critically series of games designed to be specially compatible with man-sized tissues.

Bayonetta is uncomfortably cringeworthy at times; a spaghetti junction of absolute nonsense tied together with overblown sexual references and nudity. But fundamentally, beneath all this it's a fucking brilliant game about fighting things. And the wonderful thing is, it's so good at being a a fucking brilliant game about fighting things that it doesn't actually need to be anything else. As fans of the medium, we're able to see what onlookers cannot: The core of the experience that hides away beneath the shiny - sometimes embarrassing - veneer.

If you're able to look through to the core of Bayonetta, I think you'll find it's solid gold.