The Perfectly Sane Show – Episode 10: The Infernocast
In this episode I have no special guests from anywhere, instead I talk for roughly 20 minutes about one game and one game only, Dante’s Inferno.
Music in this episode:
W***es of Babylon – from the Dante’s Inferno soundtrack
Redemption – from the Dante’s Inferno soundtrack
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Burning It Up: Impressions From the Inferno
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.
Some will argue that there was no need to adapt Dante’s work into a video game and they would be correct. However there are a lot of things that do not need to be made, yet still are and some of those things actually don’t suck. Dante’s Inferno is one of those things. The game works on a variety of levels but specifically the most important one, its fun.
4×07: Trending Topics and Guitar Heroes
Chris, Brady, and Jay get together for over 30 minutes of complete and utter randomness! Or so it appears from the beginning. Also, Nicholas pops in requiring you to buy something.
Topics covered this week:
- Bob Barker and Trending Topics
- Extract
- Gamer
- Jennifer’s Body in Jennifer’s Body
- Guitar Hero 5 andBeatles Rock Band
Awesome Xbox Game – I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
I am so excited because I got this game called I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. It’s an indie game, obviously. And it’s like 80 points to buy, which makes it ten times cooler. The song is the best. And my favorite weapon is the flamethrower.
For all of you who don’t have Xbox LIVE, or an Xbox 360, and have no plans to ever get either, then I have conveniently included a video.
It’s about eight minutes long, and is a recording of someone playing the actual game. Enjoy.
Milo isn’t as real as you think
Did you watch E3 last weekend? Did yo usee Microsoft’s presentation? Did you see this?
I caught this a couple days after Chris wrote his piece. @jontilton mentioned Milo and I just thought he named his XBOX 360. Turns out that Milo was really the video above. I half believed it, and I 100% wanted to believe it, but I just didn’t buy it’s authenticity.
Well, thanks to PR.net, I found out that Milo isn’t really everything we saw in that video.
Read the article for more information. That British guy bothers me more now that I’ve read the article.
Second Game Beaten of ‘09: Too Human
Almost nine years ago Blizzard dropped “Diablo II” on the gaming community and it quickly became one of the most successful games ever. The game was very well polished, told a great story and for people who love to collect stuff dropped tons of loot much like its predecessor. To this day I still play “Diablo II” and like a junkie chasing the dragon I love to try out new loot drop RPGs in the off chance that it will be as addictive as “Diablo II”. “Too Human” could have been this game but unfortunately for me and for developer Silicon Knights, who spent roughly ten years developing it, it is not.
If you were to tell me that you were going to take “Diablo II”, “Devil May Cry”, Norse mythology, cyber punk and mix them together I would have told you I was on board because damn the idea that forms in my head look awesome. While “Too Human” does have all these ingredients, it sadly doesn’t come together very well. The strongest point of the game is its story and there are some twists and turns that will do much to keep gamers interested in the game because outside of that, the game is a mess. “Too Human” takes place in a futuristic world where you are cast as Baldur, a son of Odin, with the purpose of protecting the humans from the ever growing machine presence. Baldur can enter cyberspace, which is much nicer looking than the real world, and by doing certain things there he can alter the real world. Can anyone say “The Matrix”?
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Chris’s Personal Best of 2008: Games
A couple of days ago I wrote a post that was somewhat critical of the way GiantBomb selected their game of the year. I want to make it quite clear that I wasn’t criticizing game of the year awards (I love ordered lists) nor their selection in general (its their opinion), so please don’t take this post as me being a hypocrite because that certainly was not the intention. With that said I believe I should note that my gaming disappointment of 2008 goes to Grand Theft Auto IV. I just didn’t have anywhere near the amount of fun I had with previous games in the series and while I didn’t hate it like some people, I didn’t like it much either.
But this post isn’t called Chris’s Personal Disappointments of 2008 but rather Personal Best so let’s get to that.
(Oh and this is going to be long)
The XBOX Experience is New
When attempting to review the poorly named New XBOX Experience the easy thing would be to call it a blatant rip-off of the Wii. On first glance those accusations would be accurate, from the avatars to the “channel” system it certainly looks like a Wii rip-off. However after having played around with it for the past few days I can gladly say that there is far more substance to the NXE than one would think.
