Posts Tagged ‘Dante’s Inferno Game’

Take the Dante's Inferno game out behind the barn and shoot it!

Would that the title of the article were actually possible. Sadly, it is not. But if Electronic Arts can engage in fake marketing, we thought we could do a bit of it ourselves, if only for a moment.

Most of the time we here on the No Prisoners, No Mercy staff will not denigrate a game sight unseen. Most of the time we are willing to cut the developers and publishers  some slack until the “horse is well out of the gate.”

But this is not one of those times.

Let us start with a review of the game Dante’s Inferno developed by Visceral Games, published by Electronic Arts and released on February 9, 2010 in North America.  Let us lay some review on you from people who have spent time with the game, all the way through the single player game in fact, whose opinion we trust – Joystiq:

“It won’t call you names, but Dante’s Inferno will offend. Whether intentional on Visceral Games’ part or not – and in truth it’ll be a combination of the two – you’ll not enjoy every minute in Lucifer’s lair. The abhorrence begins with Limbo, the lair of unbaptized babies. When the first infant emerged crying from the hollowed-out womb of a female effigy (which is lying underneath the gaze of a fiery devil) we questioned whether we wanted to keep playing. As it waddled forward on wobbly legs our only option was to take a scythe to it. It’s easily the most disturbing moment we’ve ever witnessed on a console and one that’ll understandably upset a lot of people.” – Matthew Pellett for Joystiq.com, God of War tumbles from Mount Olympus into the depths of Hell

If this weren’t enough to turn your stomach, how about a few more excerpts from the same review that will make you turn off your console and return the game.  You can read the entire review here - further excerpts from the review below:

Dante’s also offends with its numbing repetition. Nothing epitomises Hell quite like the invisible barrier. The laziest of all gaming mechanics, it’s capable of marring almost any experience when used without limitations.

Dante is fighting through Hell to save his murdered lover Beatrice and return her to Heaven. He’s so foul, though, that his overarching tale of redemption is ineffectual blubber.

The journey through the underworld is a whistlestop tour of all the epic poem’s major sights with plenty of dull filler in between. You’re whisked through the nine circles at such a pace that the major areas of Hell act as little more than footnotes punctuating lengthy nothingness. For every boss fight there are a dozen identical rope-swings and cliffs to rappel down. The sensation that you’re not exploring Hell so much as its maintenance tunnels is inescapable.

Maddeningly there are often glimpses of interesting goings-on in the distance or at the corner of the screen, but because the camera’s locked to rails the best sights seem hidden from you.

First let us say that if you are going to make a game that purposefully attempts to offend more people, in more cultural categories than we thought was humanly possible, and do it with a single game…

Well let’s just say that you might want to at least make your product a bit less akin to the mount sized pile of dingo dung that has begun to pollute retailer’s shelves all over North America.  Thankfully we were not able to find a picture of the opening moments of the game when you are given the task of killing unbaptized babies.  Most people are aware that there is even an “achievement”  (if you can call it that) for killing babies called “Bad Nanny”.

At this juncture we are still trying to make up our minds about this game. What puzzles us the most is trying to fathom what is worse – a game that is as offensive as this one is, a game that basically defecates all over a classic piece of literature, or the fact that it does both and is, apparently, mind numbing and fraught with tedium.  Our biggest question upon which we find ourselves pondering, however, is when the Dante character reaches the last plane of Hell, is there a special place for the people who developed and marketed this game?  You will pardon us now while we take a copy of the game out behind the barn and shoot it. Hopefully it won’t come back as a zombie – things like this are just tough to kill.

See you online,

The Webmaster

Side Notes

Allods… Street Thug Online

A recent post by Keen, from Keen and Graev’s gaming blog caught our eye, in reference to the cash shop for Allods Online which is a “free to play” game, and apparently not even out of open beta yet. You can read the post here.  Here is an excerpt:

“Everything in the cash shop has had a zero added to the end.  Mistake?  I do not know.  It seems like an awfully big mistake to make, especially when you’re open for business.  A medium bag that was $2 is now $20 (that’s $20 for 6 extra slots folks), and a level 10 rune that was $689 is now $6,890. ”- Keen

I had to look at that about three times before I was sure I had read it.  Even if $6,890.00 (presumably U.S. Dollars) is a mistake, there isn’t anything, anywhere, in any game for which we would pay $689 dollars, let alone six thousand eight hundred eighty nine dollars.  And people have complained about a $10.00 panderan monk in World of Warcraft?

Until we saw the video clip by Keen steering their astral ship, even though we played the game in closed beta, while the graphics where fantastic the game was a bit of a yawner for us. In the end, no matter how inovative a game is, no matter how fantastic the artwork if those are representative of the prices its not a cash shop…its a thug on a darkened street corner asking you to hand over your money.