I first caught a glimpse of Bayonetta at the 2008 Tokyo Game Show so when I found out that Sega would be debuting a playable demo of this game, I made sure I held my place in line. The demo offered two different stages: A tutorial (easy mode) and actual levels (normal mode).

Bayonetta is a third-person action adventure game amidst a fully 3D environment with game play that closely resembles Capcom’s Devil May Cry. It includes an intact combo system as well as a scoring meter that tallies everything at the end of the level and awards the player with different trophies representative of skill level displayed. Bayonetta was being demoed on the Xbox 360 and is scheduled for a multi-platform release in late 2009 (Xbox 360, Playstation 3). From the early looks of this game and the demo, it looks like the latter part of 2009 is heating up to be be one extremely sexy adrenaline rush.

The daily deluge of industry woes unfortunately continues as Edge confirmed rumors that Sega of America has laid off around 30 people. A rep for the company blamed the biggest villain in the game industry right now, the flagging economy.

The House of Hedgehog hasn’t said exactly how this will affect…

According to a post at GameDaily, Sega is happy being the sixth largest publisher in North America – and has no interest in mergers or acquisitions that seem to be all the rage among big publishers these days. Still warm from the glow of selling over five million copies of Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, Sega of America president Simon Jeffery reportedly told Reuters that despite the increased consolidation among publishers in the industry (EA’s purchase of BioWare/Pandemic, Activision Blizzard, and EA looking to buy Take-Two were all cited), Sega has no interest in being acquired.