Dante’s Inferno

Got Medieval is the go-to source for commentary on this game.

Damn, I would actually pay for a copy of a Myst-based Inferno. Keep your FPS crapola.

I thought I was smart, and tried to find a poem about halos. It turns out that 95% of all halo-related poems on the internetz are already about the video game.

Amish sentry.

1)
Four squares, contiguous, from the sky,
Fall slow but certain to the ground,
Where others like them scattered lie –
Four squares, contiguous. From the sky
More squares appear, and though you try,
You cannot halt the rising mound.
Four squares, contiguous, from the sky,
Fall slow but certain to the ground.

2)
As I understand it, Prudentius’ Psychomachia, in which personified Virtues and Vices fight each other, is the forerunner of a genre of arcade game, though the wikipedia entry for fighting game doesn’t seem to mention it.

How about “Call of Duty 5: Homer’s Iliad” or “Canterbury Tales: The MMORPG”? I think, really, the possibilities here are endless.

http://logiosdolioseriounios.blogspot.com/2010/02/la-vita-nuova-indeed.html

In case anyone is wondering: yes, there actually is an edition of Inferno with the same cover as the game. It’s the Longfellow translation.

SEK r00lz.

A video game of Paradise Lost would be great. War in Heaven! Satan with siege engines v. Michael chucking mountains around!

I’m going to de-lurk to note that two of my favorite Asimov novels, I Robot and Bicentennial Man, were adapted with roughly the same subtelty as this game. May those snobs in English departments across America know the horror I felt watching Robin Williams butcher a true classic. That said, the game’s plot sounds cheesy and fun. It would be much cooler if you ascended up through purgatory and into heaven, killing angels and saints along the way. And at the end, Dante kills God!

@ Wesley Osam 11
I see nothing wrong with that. It gets kids to read, which is always good.

Games are bigger than Hollywood.

Anyone want to write an Ode to the Oregon Trail, for example?

I’ll bite, if no one else will:

Oregon! Thy name’s a fertile bar,
A four-by-four-bit patch of open soil
For pixellated wand’rers from afar
Who seek your respite. Much as in this coil:
Their choices early on may seal their fates—
Not just their callings, cash, and cooking oil
But also those selected by their mates.
And Fortune’s not to slight: The trail to wend
Their oxen must not falter at the straits
Nor weather, rocks, or fire ‘gainst pilgrims trend,
Nor break a bone, nor cunning serpent bend,
Nor shit themselves to death before the end.

Nigel @9: Existential Tetris. Cool.

I’ve been a grubbin on a little farm
on the flat and windy plains
I’ve been listening to hungry cattle bowl
I’m gonna pack my wife and kids
I’m gonna hit that western road
I’m gonna hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Chorus:
I’m gonna hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall
hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall
Where the good rain falls a plenty
and the crops and orchards grow
I’m gonna hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Well, my land is dry and cracklin
and my chickens they’re a cacklin’
cause the dirt and dust is gettin in their craw
they been layin flint rock eggs
I had to bust em with a sledge
I’m gonna hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Repeat Chorus

Well, my hogs and pigs are squeelin’
They’re a rockin and a reelin
Cause there ain’t no water to water in the draw
I’m gonna grab one by his tail
I’m gonna take that western trail
And we’ll hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Now, my good old horse is boney
Yes he’s dry and hungry too
You can see his ribs three-quarters of a mile
Throw my kids up on his back
bend the bay horse and the black
And we’ll hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Repeat Chorus

Well my wife gets sort of ailin’
When that mean old dust is sailin’
And she wishes for the days beyond recall
If the work there’s in the future
in that north Pacific land
So we’ll hit that Oregon Trail this coming fall

Repeat Chorus

Apparently this is my day to post links to Onion articles all over CT. Check out this video game adaptation. I’m sure it’d be great, though I’ve yet to compose a verse about it.

I don’t see the problem with that Ginger Yellow. The game needs a motivation for the plot and the setting, so they chose to invoke a famous poem. Being ancient, famous and dead doesn’t render your work inviolable.

It’s sad that the modern computer game industry is so focussed on brawn, simple plots and repetitive killing. There’s a simple reason for this that has very little to do with the tastes of video-gamers or the nerd culture they’re set in (if they even are still set in nerd culture). Seeing academics pouring scorn on something like this – particularly in a post by someone whose interest is that ultimate low-brow nerdish waste-of-space, American comics – is quite unedifying.

My point wasn’t the setting. It’s that it’s a rubbish game. If it had been a great game set loosely in the world of the Inferno, there wouldn’t be an issue. Well, to be honest, if EA had had the same tasteless marketing campaign, maybe there would have been. Like I say, there are a million and one much better games with broadly similar settings – most relevantly God of War (which draws heavily and equally loosely on Greek mythology). The main problem with Dante’s Inferno is that it’s a lame rip-off of God of War with none of the gameplay merits and even more gratuitous nudity and violence. The point is that EA know they’ve got a stinker on their hands (the press has been taking the mickey out of it ever since they got their hands on it), and so they’ve been playing up the Dante angle (and particularly the Dante with tits!) angle as much as possible, because it’s the only way they’ll sell their crappy game.

no John, I was more thinking of some of the comments here than your post (which only has one sentence that seems to imply scorn). I should have said “thread” not “post”, sorry.

I’d like to know what the ‘simple reason’ is, even though I suspect it will be more like ‘an absurd conspiracy theory’.

ajay, sg may have a point, albeit non-obvious. Many of the nerds I grew up around have always wanted something more absorbing than hack-n-slash, but are willing to settle for the simple formulas that are available. There is a potentially huge market for complex games with deep mechanics, signalled by the popularity of “sandbox” games like Fallout 3, Black and White and The Sims.

Of course there is also a huge market of generation-Xboxers who want nothing more than the simple formulas (and who generally aren’t nerds, like my hard-living, hellraising, triathlete friend who will only take a break for gaming if the rules are simple and the return on time investment is instant).

Formula hack-n-slash/shoot-em-ups are technically simple to produce. The same code can be reused over and over for different game, with only significant variations in content. So there’s an optimum point are which production costs intersect with size of market and thats the area that most games inhabit. But it doesn’t follow that its what most gamers think is ideal. Many of the “formulas” of today were innovations not too long ago, until some studio put in the significant amount of extra work required to develop technologies that enabled new game mechanics.

Gaming today is in an analogous place to movies before colour and sound. There are still significant developments pending which will broaden the options available to game designers, in terms of world-building, storytelling, non-linear gameplay and so on. And this potential is obvious to a lot of hardcore nerds.

Its obvious to those of us who’s passion for games stretches back decades (along with AI, they were my motive for getting into software development) that the formulaic shooters of today are not mutually exclusive with broader formats. Eventually, sandbox games with non-player characters driven by believable AI could simply include current shooter/hack-n-slash/driving games as elements of their worlds. This is already a trend in MMORPGs and combination sandbox/driving/shooting games like the Grand Theft Auto series.

New technologies like Lionhead’s potentially revolutionary “Natal” system illustrate what I’m talking about quite nicely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scGvYv-UUsE

This is a system that employs sophisticated animation techniques and AI to not only create believable characters, but have them recognise you, your speech and your emotional signals (via camera) and respond in a very personal way.

sg as an interesting aside have you read any of the buzz about the new Star Wars MMO? By all accounts is going to be entirely story-based, with no “fetch me” quests, only progression of a grand narrative. Like a TV series, they’re going to have a permanent writing staff. One of the formats I’ve been waiting for for years, even if the SW franchise is more than a little sullied for me.

Its being done by Bioware and appears to have many of the signature traits of their single-player epics, so expect standard MMO combat just with a lot of plot and character interaction too.

I’m harsh on grinding because it’s symptomatic of how computer games have declined in quality under the pressures of the industry. I understand other people seem to be able to bear it, and the WoW world is so beautiful that even grinding in it is kind of fun (I played WoW to lvl 12 and then gave up because of the unending similarity of every adventure). I prefer plot, resolution, etc – all the sorts of things that modern game builders are tempted to ditch in exchange for the cash cow of the modern MMO. I’ve read that game companies are starting to give up on RTS games due to a lack of milkable cash flow, and it scares me that commercial pressure may be forcing all games into the same form. I don’t know anything about this inferno game and it would be sad if a linear FPS were to become indicative of variety, but at this stage I suppose we just have to take what we can get…

@35

Funny, I was just about to mention “Heavy Rain” myself. I haven’t played a computer game in years, specifically since I got really bored with “Bioshock”, which was an excellent and beautiful game that got rave reviews – I figured that if I get bored playing that one, my gaming days are probably over. But “Heavy Rain” caught my eye, especially since it’s made by Quantic Dream whose “Omikron” I liked a lot (it also had David Bowie in it!). I wish more companies would try exploring ambitious gameplay concepts like the ones developed in games like “System Shock II”, “Deus Ex” or “GTA”, which I really loved back in the day.

New technologies like Lionhead’s potentially revolutionary “Natal” system illustrate what I’m talking about quite nicely

FWIW, Natal is a Microsoft project, not Lionhead, and consists of the camera/microphone hardware and the software that processes the inputs to recognise body movements, objects and voice (it was going to have a dedicated CPU to do that, but apparently it’s been dropped to reduce the price). Lionhead’s involvement is with the Milo “game” which uses the Natal system as an input device.

@ sg 41
“The same thing has been said of porn – that the consumers don’t actually want what they see, but they have to cut out the crap that they don’t want in order to get the core parts they do. If the whole industry is producing a core of something you want overlaid with a load of dross, and there’s nowhere else to go, you just ignore the dross.”

The repetition, the dross, is important. It is through the repetition that one realizes the value of the object of one’s desire by failing to achieve it. There is a great deal of the obsessional repetition of “dross” in religious observance also. That’s the whole point.

The goal of religion, porn and gaming is the grinding. It is the core that is the real distraction.

I second the suggestion of checking out Got Medieval’s coverage. He’s been all over it. Most recently by describing the copious quantity of oversize breasts in the game.

http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/

Fun blog in general, too.

sg wrote: ““The same thing has been said of porn – that the consumers don’t actually want what they see, but they have to cut out the crap that they don’t want in order to get the core parts they do. If the whole industry is producing a core of something you want overlaid with a load of dross, and there’s nowhere else to go, you just ignore the dross.”

And that’s kind of their big problem now, because people can get the 3 minute clips of the bits they want, for free, on the net, and that’s usually plenty of time, if you get my meaning.

It’s not the size of Beatrice’s breasts, its that the game is one long creepy ode to them.

sorry John, no offense intended. By “shtick” here I suppose I mean the property of your posting which is distinctive and unique to you, such as your philosophy-via-comic posts, etc. It’s clear you like the comics; so do a lot of the people who comment on your threads; it therefore seems a bit strange to mount significant objections to low-grade art in a different medium (e.g. computer games). This is not a strongly held position of mine, hence the ellipses.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that this stuff is all schlock – genre fiction, movies, computer games, porn, comics – and any kind of commentary which implies the privileging of one of these forms of schlock over another strikes me as a bit silly. To me, people complaining about computer-game-related schlock in an environment (being in this case threads associated with your posts) which is generally supportive of another kind of schlock is just a tad hypocritical. Or sad. Or counterintuitive. Or something.

maybe jholbo you’re confusing yourself with jon H? I’m making assumptions about peoples’ degree of interest in your interests, I’ll grant you. But I don’t intend my criticism to be scalpel-like or medicinal. Hence the qualifying phrases, ellipses, etc. Your defensiveness is kind of interesting though…

There are some industrial trends in the gaming industry, especially in the online ones. There is an extremely strong current towards extremely easy single-player design which then fills out a lot of time by being repetitive. It’s hard to get groups of players together in an online game, thus the very strong pull to recasting allegedly multi-player games as solitare games. The social things to do are clustered at the very end of the game and tend to involve running a small number of scripts ad naseum.

There is a big audience demanding that the games be very, very easy – so any puzzles which might have required thought are removed (from older parts) or never added (to the newer ones.) Again, the exception is the small list of current things for end-game designed to keep the frequent players occupied.

Things to do are also designed to be quick. But the online game designers want to keep people playing, so the required simple tasks are made extremely repetitive through various guises. You might need 10 coins from beating some ogre for a flashy sword, or perhaps have one chance in 100 to pry the flashy sword out of the hands of a dead orc.

I think of these computer games, in various guises, as really being puzzles – even video games have an element where you need to work out that you win if you jump twice to the left and throw the big rock when the ape turns orange, or whatever. For those of us who like puzzles, this tendency towards the anti-social, boring, and repetitive is understandable, but depressing.

It’s dirt cheap on Steam. Give it another shot.