My Friend Pedro's bullet-time ballet is a work of art

Maybe you remember a little Flash game published by Adult Swim website back in the day, something about slow-motion shootouts and a talking banana called My Friend Pedro? That version of the game was an amusing time-waster you could play in your browser, and it ended with you eating Pedro, growing wings, and then flying up into the sky for a final showdown with a guy in glasses who I assume was the game's creator. He tried to kill me with a flyswatter.

My Friend Pedro is back, and it looks even weirder this time. The new version—subtitled "Blood Bullets Bananas"—had a trailer during Devolver Digital's E3 showcase, but I've been following its development on Twitter and creator Dead Toast's blog for a while now, and its slow-motion guns akimbo skateboard/motorbike/barrel-riding bullet ballet has made for some excellent gifs. Like this, for instance.

That kick's new to this version of My Friend Pedro, and so are the ricochets. Stationary signs and mobile frying pans seem to be the main option for getting bullets around corners and behind cover, as shown here.

Barrel-rolling's also a new addition—not to 2D games more generally of course, though I've never seen Donkey Kong pull off a move as gory as this. Note the LOVELY x4 bonus at the end, suggesting combos and perhaps a score attack mode.

And while much of what we've seen so far takes place in a grimy, urban setting (with a few high-tech touches) the full game will also include visits to a more whimsical location called Pedro's World. Is this a plane of existence known only to talking bananas?

Pedro's World will apparently involve a break for reality, making even more physics-bending possibilities. I haven't ridden a skateboard since I was 17 but I'm pretty sure they don't work like this.

My Friend Pedro won't be out until 2019 but it already looks impressive, like someone took the opening fight from Deadpool and made an entire game of it. Dead Toast note that not every feature on the dev blog is guaranteed to make it to the full game, but if you want to see more of Pedro in action you can check that out here.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.