Very-High-Velocity Rounds

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You've activated your Bullet Time ability, and it's an amazing thrill. Enemy rounds move like an amateur swimmer through a pool of molasses, and it's more than merely "simple" to duck and weave between the shots, without a single one even touching you. And with the enemies slowed down too, it's quite easy to line up your shots to return fire... hang on.

Any shots that enemies fire at you may move like a swimmer through molasses, but your bullets move like, well, bullets. Clearly, your gun is loaded with Very-High-Velocity Rounds.

A staple trope of shooter games that make use of Bullet Time. Not only is the player character free from the slow-down effects, but so are their weapons, even after leaving their hands. Could be considered an Acceptable Break From Reality; while it's exhilirating to dodge bullets coming toward you, it could easily become tedious waiting for your own snail-pace shots to finish crossing the room. Occasinally, attempts are made to justify it.

If enemy bullets and attacks are always slower than your attacks, Bullet Time or not, that's Painfully Slow Projectiles. See also Hit Scan, a type of weapon that instantly hits under all circumstances.

Examples of Very-High-Velocity Rounds include:

Video game examples

Action Game

• Averted in Enter the Matrix and the Matrix movies. Everything slows down equally in Bullet Time. But in the game, your gun fires every time you pull the trigger... which means, since you're moving a few times faster than anything around you, that you can take a jump, shoot a bunch of relatively slow bullets, and when you deactivate bullet time the enemies will be turned into bullet pincushions about the same time they realize you aren't touching the ground anymore. For extra style, you can turn around in midair and land in the same place you jumped from, so that as the enemies fall to the ground they wonder what happened and what that blur was. This means that you are working with Very High Velocity Firing Pins/Primer/Gunpowder.
• Using the healing touch in Trauma Center causes everything to slow down: ongoing damage to your patient, expanding aneurysms, and so forth... but if you start injecting medicine, it still works at the same rate, and suturing your patient at blazing fast speeds somehow doesn't give them friction burns. Taken to ludicrous levels at the end of Under the Knife 1, where in a burst of Heroic Willpower Derek proceeds to stop time entirely to defeat the final strain of GUILT. You can still operate to your hearts content, without hurting your patient. Reversed on you once you finally kill it, as it proceeds to writhe around in its death throes, despite time being stopped.
• Averted in the PlayStation 2 version of Viewtiful Joe. When playing as Dante and using the 'slow' VFX, the bullets from his handguns are slowed down normally, just like enemy bullets.
• Bayonetta's bullets and other projectile attacks still move at normal speed while in Witch Time. Except that one time where you shoot a lipstick at a boss and manually guide it to its target.

First-Person Shooter

• TimeShift gives us a couple of rather, ahem, extreme examples. Not only to bullets move freely, but the timed detonator on explosives still goes off, even with a full TimeStop.
• Averted and justified in some cases in the Half-Life mod The Specialists. There are two types of time-altering powerups, slow-motion and slow-pause. Slow-motion slows EVERYTHING down for three seconds, giving the initiator time to get the drop on his opponents, who will likely have been unprepared for the slowdown and scrambling to find a target. Slow-pause slows down everything BUT the user for two seconds. If the user simply fired while standing still, the rounds would move just as slow as the others. This trope is justified if the shooter is firing in the general direction he is moving, since his speed gives his rounds a boost in velocity, just like they teach you in physics.
  • Speaking of Half-Life mods, some versions of SMOD let you set whether bullet time slows just enemy bullets, all bullets, or even just your own bullets.
• Averted in Wolfenstein. When you're in bullet time, as soon as your bullets leave your gun they slow down to the same speed as everyone else's.
• If you freeze or slow down time in Unreal Tournament, with the playersonly and slomo 0,X command respectively, you can kill the bots with your hitscan weapons normally, but your projectile weapons will shoot projectiles which stop or slow down according to the current state of time.
• F.E.A.R.s bullet time speeds up you reaction, movement speed and, for non-automatic weapons, firing speed, everything else in the game world in slowed down. However your bullets appear to slowed slightly as well.
• Averted waaayyyy back in the original Turok. When you used the slow-time powerup (or a cheat) your projectiles would slow down, and so would the firing rate of your weapons. Things like pistols and shotguns, whose bullets are invisible and normally seem to "instant hit" actually take a noticeable amount of time to reach the target... But are still invisible.
• Singularity sort of averts this. When in a slowed time bubble, bullets hang still in the air for a while, then the E99 in them activates, and they move without interference. E99 is specifically made to screw with time, so it's justified.

Hack and Slash

• Not the full Bullet Time, but the Amazon of Diablo 2 had this trope as a Skill. She could slow the speed of all projectiles within a radius around her, except her own.

Light Gun Game

• In Virtua Cop 3, the Bullet Time pedal goes so far as to let you intercept the enemy's bullets by shooting them out of the air. In fact, doing so enough times can let you hit the score Cap.

Platform Game

• Jak 3 uses this with the "Light Jak Flash Freeze" power.
• Also averted in the Matrix parodying level of Conkers Bad Fur Day.
• In Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time Clank gains the ability to throw 'time bombs' but he isn't affected by the slowing of time due to the fact that he has a component installed that prevents this. Later, once Ratchet and Clank are reunited, Clank can throw the bombs from Ratchet's back. Ratchet and his weaponry are entirely unaffected by the slowing of time, though everything else that moves is (including the currency, the scenery, and NPCs).

Role-Playing Game

• • Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines with the Celerity discipline. Off the topic, but very noticeable is that slow-moving shots continue moving slowly even after the power is toggled off, thanks to a programming quirk.
• In one case averted, in another used straight in Fable II. If you cast the Time Control spell and fire a gun multiple times, you can actually count the shells as they move toward your target. On the other hand, the player's pet dog still moves just as quickly.
  • Sparrow might just be extending the spell to include the dog, though.
• Played straight and averted in Mass Effect 2.
  • The Soldier's Adrenaline Rush ability slows down time for a few seconds. Your bullets move more slowly, but your movement speed is unaffected. (It's justified with the fact that Adrenaline Rush doesn't actually slow down time; it just makes you move faster than everyone else.)
  • Completely averted with the Infiltrator's slowdown time whilst aiming with a sniper rifle. This is especially obvious while using the Incisor rifle, which fires bursts of three rounds: in real time, the bullets seem to hit at about the same time, while there's a second between hits during slowdown. Aiming itself is also slower; the slowdown time pretty much only exists to make it easier to get headshots.
• The Slow Time Shout in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim slows down you, your spells and your arrows at to a minor degree, and everything else to a significant degree. Possibly justified by the fact that the mechanism is that you shout at time to slow down, and it does.
  • Subverted by the continuous-attack spells like flames, which keep doing the same damage as before, effectively multiplying their damage.

Shoot'Em Up

• Touhou: Sakuya usually averts this; her knives hang in the air while time is frozen.

Third-Person Shooter

• Max Payne 2 The Fall of Max Payne. It becomes especially noticeable with modifications that bring the Bullet Time up to higher levels.
  • Max Payne, however, averts the trope: your bullets are just as slow as everyone else's.
• The Wanted game makes it painfully obvious by requiring you to shoot their slow moving bullets out of the air with your fast moving bullets.
• Averted in BloodRayne 2. When you're in slow-mo, or stop-mo, your bullets are slowed just like everything else. This actually makes it pretty fun to set up a barrage of time-stopped missiles around an opponent, then watch them all hit him at once, za warudo-style.
• Postal 2's A Week in Paradise mod plays this completely straight with the added bullet time feature-everyone else and their weapons move slower BUT you. And since there's no time limit with hotkey-based bullet time, it could fall straight into Game Breaker territory.
• Played straigh in Total Overdose with any weapon. The bullet time simply doesn't work on you.

Non-video game examples

Anime and Manga

• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Akemi Homura's barrage of bullets, as Kyubey tasted firsthand in episode 8.
  • Partial aversion? The bullets hit simultaneously because, as seen two episodes later, bullets freeze in the air shortly after firing.

Film

• Russ's "knucklepuck." in The Mighty Ducks.

Literature

• Somewhat inverted in German author Wolfgang Hohlbein's book Videokill. The main character uses a video recorder's Fast-Forward function to speed up a mook's bullet still inside his gun, causing the gun to explode.

Tabletop Games

• Averted in Dungeons & Dragons. Timestop would cause attacks to only take effect when the spell ended. In 4th edition, it is now impossible to attack with timestop.
  • Averted in fan gameline Genius: The Transgression, where attacking or being attacked while temporally distorted returns the distorted person to normal speed.

Western Animation

• Not exactly rounds, but when Dexter is late for class and slows down time, the water that comes out of his shower is also very, very slow. Writing in normal speed for him with a pencil results in the paper catching fire.