Dante’s Inferno // PS3

If ‘Hell is other people’, then nobody told Visceral Games. To them, Hell is rivers of boiling blood. It’s enormous beasts with mouths for hands. It’s a clutch of babies with scythes for arms that have been birthed by a mouth-shaped nipple on an extremely large blue tit. To the players of their videogame adaption of Dante Aligheri’s 14th-century epic poem, Hell is illogical puzzles, cheap deaths, laughable voice acting and unlikeable characters.

First Impressions: Dante’s Inferno

The first few hours of Dante’s descent into the nine circles of Hell are certainly a visceral experience (geddit?), with the wailing of lost souls and the impaled corpses setting a dark, twisted tone for what is to follow; but the game’s fixed camera (another slavish tribute to God Of War) doesn’t allow you to soak it in as much as you would wish. It would be nice to write about a game on this blog that doesn’t involve references to Sony Santa Monica’s mythological slash-em-up, but it is impossible to ignore just how much Dante’s Inferno lifts directly from the famous series. Two circles out of nine in, I’m hoping that the game starts to throw at least some original elements of its own into the hellish mix.

Eurogamer Expo: Some thoughts

Yesterday, I spent a few hours at the Eurogamer Expo at Old Billingsgate. Comprising of most of the triple AAA games due to be released over the busy Christmas period, and those that have recently hit the shelves, the Expo was a good chance to play some of the eagerly anticipated titles. At least it would have been if it wasn’t absolutely awash with people. It was rare to see a machine free, and the big-hitters that everyone wanted to play were usually surrounded by thick crowds of people. Add in the fact that the temperature was through the roof and that the noise was close to deafening, and you didn’t really have a conducive atmosphere to relax into the various demos on show. Having said that, I did manage to get some playtime with the three games that I had come to check out. My thoughts on them appear after the break.