Today started off on a bit of a wrong foot. First the Vagary.tv crew (of which I am a part of) boarded a shuttle that dropped us off at the wrong convention center. We then decided to walk the three miles from the wrong convention center to the correct one, arriving roughly 45 minutes prior [...]

The number 13 holds great significance for me. It is the number of my favorite football player of all time. It is the number I wore when I played soccer, hockey and baseball. It is the day when Jason comes out to kill all the promiscuous pot heads who are hanging out in his campground. [...]

I’m trying to get the show on a more regular schedule and I view this Episode as the new beginning towards that. In this episode we (myself, Reid and special guest Tommy_Arashikage) talk about the latest “big” Sony release, Heavy Rain. We discuss what we like and dislike about the game remaining relatively spoiler free [...]

For the last three days I have spend a solid amount of time tooling around in the depths of Hell, specifically Dante Alighieri’s version of Hell. Visceral Games (Dead Space) has adapted the first part of Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy, into the Christian mythology equivalent of God of War. Adaptations are a tricky monster. On one hand you have the hardcore fans of the source material who will cry foul at the slightest change and on the other you have to consider that adapting something needs to work in the other medium. Stray to far from either and you risk ending up with a mess off a product and a large contingent of angry fans. Not surprisingly, Visceral decided that the hardcore fans of the epic poem were most likely not going buy the game anyway and changed core pieces of the original source to fit their medium.

In the game, Dante is no longer being a poet but rather a Christian Solider (I believe him to be a Templar but I never specifically heard them say as much) who defeats Death. And on his return home finds his wife, Beatrice, dead and follows her soul into the depths of Hell to rescue her from Satan. The core of the story though remains intact. Dante still is on a journey through the circles of Hell, Virgil is still his guide, and Dante still encounters all sorts of horrific imagery. While I can see why some literary types would be upset at the changes to the source material, lets face it the original material does not lend itself well to a game, yet this does.