'Dante's Inferno' First Impressions - A Demo

Seion loves deadlines. She especially loves the whooshing sound deadlines make when they go by. Which would explain the obscene lack of updates to this blog. I know you expect a movie review from me, and I have kept myself active, but allow me to pull you aside for a moment and rant about something. Yeah, you and me in the corner, all excitedly, as if we were going treasure-hunting.

As a working person, I never have any money. All my funds, which I work very hard for, usually go into maintaining my house and person in good order, and crow knows I fail at even that at times. Since I don't have any wealthy relatives, despite having a PS3, I don't have a lot of games. This can be a problem, once I get tired of leaping out of hay to slit people's throats. Assassin's Creed is fun, but everything gets old. My brother and I seemingly also make a sport out of torturing ourselves with games we cannot purchase, we decided to go to the PS3 store and download a couple of demos, amongst which was once of the most discussed games that came to the platform - Dante's Inferno. We did this in an attempt to figure out, in our current financial status, which games we should spend gold with, and which can wait... I'm sorry to say we reached a conclusion with this one. Step away O ye of impressionable nature, for ravaging SPOILERS lurk below.

Having seen a review by Yahtzee at The Escapist Magazine, some four thousand webcomic parodies and enough YouTube clips to choke a horse on the game, I am led to believe my first impression of the game is accurate. Yahtzee labels some games as "like God of War but", and this one is simply "like God of War". Let's put it like this: I didn't even have to look at controls. The same battle rhythms. The same sort of finishers. And we further proved it by downloading the God of War 3 demo after we were done. Let's get one thing straight: slap a helmet on Kratos and give him something bulkier and more ridiculous for a weapon, change the warpaint into your Mum's doily sewn to the chest, bang, we have Dante.

On that weapon and how he acquires it, I also have something to say, mind you. I was raised with Castlevania, and if you played the right ones, seeing the Reaper as a boss is nothing new. In fact, at some point, the Reaper became the boss before final by excellence. This happens because, of course, if Death is the boss before the final one... who the Hell is worse than Death?! That's something to sweat about. Furthermore, notice you never killed Death. You defeated Death. That's mandatory in Castlevania because well... a vampire is a living corpse. You sorta need to beat Death to achieve that. Killing Death gives way to a lot of questions, namely, if Death dies, how will anyone else ever die now? And yes, I know there's this Family Guy episode where that sort of happens.

So your game begins, if the demo is to be trusted, with Dante in the Crusades, spreading whoopass to whatever moves in pretty much the same way his ancestor Kratos did a few centuries in the past... he hops onto a ledge and after kicking every available ass in his field of vision, in comes an assassin (and not an overly skilled one, mind you) who goes stabitty in his back and runs away giggling like a little girl. (You know, this sort of scene always makes me facepalm: there is a guy who is virtually untouchable, kills everything that even faintly breathes within four miles of him, and then some douchebag with a dagger runs in, stabs him, and gets out of scene. Just like that, you're dead. It's just stupid.) The Reaper promptly shows up to tell Dante that the bishop gave him a load of crow: his sins in the Crusades are not excused, and so he's going to Hell. But Dante doesn't agree. In fact, Dante doesn't play that: he pulls the dagger from between his shoulder blades and decides to kick the Reaper's ass.

Right here, we have a problem. Seriously, game developers. Death is the FIRST boss?! What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you telling me, as a gamer? That every single boss from here on will be worse than Death? I've been playing for ten minutes for crow's sake, set your standards a little lower... oh wait. You would be telling me that... if Death in Dante's Inferno wasn't the puniest thing that ever went into a game since fat guys in leotards stopped being called as enemies, circa early 90's!

Let's go back to Castlevania's incarnations of the Reaper. One thing the series taught us was, as Ash used to say in Army of Darkness: Death is a bitch. A stupid bitch. Death is a creature that stays away from you for the sole reason that it has no motive to stay close by... it can attack you from a distance. It's a pain in the butt just to get close enough, and if you do get close enough, it's another pain to score a hit, and when you eventually do score a hit, you feel like you just nicked at the side of the robe it wears! When Death hits you, however, and it will, repeatedly and with great intensity, your HP bar behaves as if it just had an intimate encounter with a rabid wolverine. This is a fight with Death. Fuck around, the Reaper don't. In Dante's Inferno, Death gets its bony ass turned into an ashtray for a Florentine crusader! You defeat the Reaper in the same way you defeat anything else: bash it into a pulp. It stays conveniently close to you, as if it wasn't carrying a five foot scythe. No barriers, no armors, no mystical unwordly powers shield it from your mortal weapons. And then you disarm it, get the scythe (and let me just slip this in: touching the scythe should mean instant death. That's what it's there for), and the bullshit really begins. Death begs for help from your ass-kicking. Let me remind you that this happens within 20 minutes of you turning on the console and popping the game in. What happened?!

Not only did you discredit the moolah-mogul of next-to-final bosses, you have also set a tone for the rest of the goddamn game. If we managed to kick some Zeus ass within the first level of the first God of War, what could the producers possibly throw at you that you find awesome? Congratulations, you're the badass to end all badasses. Now go get a sandwich, step outside and find yourself a life.

Try to see this from my perspective. I'm not even gonna go with the "if you killed Death, how do people die now?" Within 20 minutes, I defeated Death. Now these producers will have to run really hard and really far to impress me. Death is the most powerful force in the Universe, in that even Gods can die - try to make me feel awesome now. You just killed my perspective of this whole game. It's like if I'm playing any Silent Hill and God is my first boss. I just killed the biggest mother in this game. What else can possibly pose a threat?

Alas, Dante survives his encounter with Death (pretty much in the same way any four year old with a baseball bat would) and goes home. To find someone killed his lass and she's on her way to Hell. See, Beatrice decided to do the nasty with Dante, figuring he'd remain faithful. Since Dante was given a free for doing whatever the fuck he wanted in the Crusades, well... he did. Which by some obscure law of Christianity I wasn't aware of makes her a whore and so she's going to Hell. Dante doesn't even give half a fuck about who did this: well, she's dead anyway, might as well try to fix my part of the screwing up. So he starts chasing after her soul.

So... why did she go to Hell again? For the sin of lust, that makes sense. She was doomed from the moment, however, if I know my religion... supposedly, if she did the hokey pokey and she wasn't married, that's a trip downstairs regardless if the other part of the couple's faithful or not. Why is Dante to blame for this? If you guys needed a reason for him to go to Hell, why not the original one? She died, he simply wants to see her! Where does the obligation come from?

Although let me sneak this in: I did like the animation parts of the demo. That was cool. Mute out the music on that and take a look. Yum.

These were my first impressions of Dante's Inferno, and this is why I find that playing demos without the actual game is tricky. A demo is good when you need to pick between two buys, for instance. And I'm sorry to say I have some five or six games I would definately buy before this one. You killed Death in a demo, man!! Show's over! Now I've heard art design is quite good, and one of the reasons to play the game is the look of everything. After seeing concept art and YouTube vids, I truly believe it. But graphs don't make the game, son - they make a game that generates awesome wallpapers for your computer, but they don't make the game. Unless there is something really very good up this game's sleeve, I doubt it will be able to impress me after I, and once again, killed Death in the first 20 minutes of gameplay!! That is all. And if you mean to flame me, find me a copy of the whole thing, and I'll review it, let's see who was right.

Silent Hill is dead. Someone shoot the refresh.

Well folks, it's hard to admit it when a good franchise dies. Or a fairly decent franchise with a top dog game, but you know where I'm getting. It's time to pull out the gun and shoot Silent Hill out of its misery, and having been a fan for so long and over so many years, it might as well be me. It had been pretty obvious since the fourth title that this was going nowhere. But Silent Hill's fifth instance (not 0rigins, mind you, that wasn't exactly great, but it wasn't god-awful either) and its newest bastard child, Shattered Memories, can be truly interpreted as the signs the final Seal is opened, and it's all downhill from here. Now let me make something perfectly clear: I have not played Shattered Memories. I know how the plot goes, I've seen others play and I've seen a few walkthroughs. But I know Silent Hill, and I know what isn't, and well, do the maths.

A tendency has manifested itself lately, in movies such as the new Star Trek, to "reset" franchises long gone in a vague attempt at resurrecting them from the dead. Instead of having everyone downloading the original works or remaking them, people seem to now opt for re-doing things. "This is how it would look like if I had thought of it today". Well, I didn't have much to say about the new Star Trek, although if you were at the theater with me, you probably heard me bitch and moan by the movie's end. The same goes for Silent Hill, sadly. Shattered Memories has been called a "refresh" on the series instead of a "remake". I call it a "reset". We all know any other game coming out will go by this one's standards, since Shattered Memories is now... "the modern first"... how did we get to this? Sit down for a while and keep an eye on the SPOILERS, child, I'll tell you.

Konami had a good thing going, back in the day where you could suggest things to people in video games without them trying it in real life, and without seven hundred and nineteen members of Mommies Against Video Games coming to TV to whine and spoil the ride for those of us who are actually sane. There were plenty of titles that made you play against all types of monster, shooting all that moved like bullets were being given away with gum, but very few had the gruesome, passive-aggressive hatred lying in Silent Hill. Back then, they introduced a simple story, not unlike those you have seen in plenty of horror movies throughout the years: death cult, missing child, hero daddy, yadda yadda yadda. On the surface, the game was plain like your breakfast porridge. It was only when you began to sit down and actually think a little about what you saw that the complexity behind the game began to unveil.

Its sequel is arguably the peak of the series. Once again, and perhaps more so than on the first title, not a single aspect of the game was left to chance: the monsters had meaning, the people had meaning, pretty much everything and anything you saw during the game was tied in with the idea they wanted to reveal, and the twist came as a true shock for many of us. The more you play it, if you did, the more you can tie in those messages. It was a work of crow-damned-video-game art. We aren't sure if Konami planned all of Silent Hill 2's tie-ins, but even if it didn't, there was enough material to establish a consistent, logical interpretation. And, of course, the prime aspect of the first game was maintained: ambiance. The town of Silent Hill. The fog, the dark, the noises, the unnerving soundtrack. As I see it, this is something other games of the same period never managed to pull.

On came Silent Hill 3, because something worth doing is worth doing three times. And because so many of the fans didn't truly grasp the meaning of the first game, thus needing a sequel that would provide an answer to all of those questions. It's still a Silent Hill, and still adored by many. Unfortunately, it would pretty much be the last instance you'd see of it. Because Konami thought something worth doing is also worth screwing. On came The Room.

I repeat this every time the game is mentioned, and this is how my friends know I have a problem. As a standalone game, The Room could've pulled it. As a part of Silent Hill, it looks like something made at the last minute to resemble the rest of his brothers and sisters from afar. That's probably because, this is exactly the case. The Room was made as a standalone, and only crammed into Silent Hill when Konami started fearing the game wouldn't stand on its own two feet. My questions: a) when in Silent Hill did we ever have ghosts attacking?, b) how is this Silent Hill if we never even go to Silent hill, and c) a limit to items that can be carried? No flashlight? No radio? I'm not saying that it's bad on its own, on the contrary, the game is fairly entertaining and has that delicious gruesomeness we usually go to Silent Hill to find, but it would've been a perfectly decent game on its own. In order to cram it into the series, they picked one of the most farfetched missing links the history of Silent Hill ever had: a guy who killed himself with a spoon in prison, whom we only know from Silent Hill 2.

0rigins... was odd. With Silent Hill 5 already in the making, and the clear notion that this was not only a prequel but borrowed greatly from the asinine movie adapted from the series, we the fanpeople expected the worst. It was actually much more decent than either The Room or the fifth title, as I see it. Because... this is Silent Hill! We're in the town, puzzles must be solved, enemies must be avoided, and we can walk around with fourteen portable TVs and nine toasters in the same menu. It's actually an improvement from its predecessor. Hell, I can even live with the fact Travis can sucker-punch his foes and we have control over the swap between the normal town and Dark Silent Hill. While the game looks rather incomplete - you can easily see a lot was scrapped from the original plans - it was still good to play. And crow knows it had critics: the presence of the Butcher as an attempt to duplicate the success made with Pyramid Head actually makes sense from the story's perspective: James had Pyramid Head because he needed a punisher, and Travis has the Butcher because that is what haunts him! It surely made a lot more sense that Pyramid-chan's appearance in the fifth.

And oh crow, the fifth! Again, Konami missed the hole by about a mile and a half with this one. Pyramid Head's appearance was pure catering to fans, ultimately destroying any sense the entity might've made in the past. Again, most of the game isn't spent in the town of Silent Hill. Like with The Room, the connections to the series are so tiny you only very briefly heard about them. And while I do accept Travis' emotional luggage in 0rigins as rather well-made, Alex Shepherd's is so in the face it ends up not being fun at all. It's a half-assed game, with half-assed motivations and a half-assed plot, on a series of games well-known for its character depths, its amazing ambience and its near-flawless plots. I hated it.

And so we reach Shattered Memories on a long line of major titles released in the franchise. Where do I begin...?

Up first, and with just E3 information to base my claims on, I thought I would criticize a lot of things. No combat, the fact that it's a "refresh", no monster variety, loss of a lot of depth, the works. But it's way worse than I figured. This is not a refresh, it's the ultimate death of the mystery.

All this history of the town of Silent Hill as a holy place, the cult, Alessa, it's all gone. The ambiance is gone, there is no longer a lingering, passive-aggressive hatred, no uneasiness anymore. The fog is gone, and has been replaced by icebergs that spawn out of nowhere - a very aggressive change if I may say so myself. All that underlying bit that made a name for Silent Hill has been tossed aside like yesterday's diapers. But wait. We haven't gotten to the worst part. Sure, the game has a lot of problems... the puzzles are rather nice at times, with a few (very simple) heads-up to the original title (replacing the piano puzzle, which was the cross of many Silent Hill players up to then, with a toy piano puzzle. Ingenious or proof that the more mankind evolves, the dumber they get?)... the lack of combat seems to be a standard in horror games these days, more and more. Seems "get out of dodge" is a more likely reaction to something horrifying than "I beat it with my lead pipe!". Still, most original characters are there, even if simply to take a nod at the original game. This seems like a game made out of inside jokes between Silent Hill fans... maybe that's exactly what it's supposed to be, I figured, and that's not as bad as just another shitty title.

After a while watching, though, I just assumed they were just poking fun at the original game.

Dahlia, chief of the Silent Hill cult and mother to Alessa? A punkish high-schooler. Kaufmann, another high-profile member of the cult and responsible for the traffic of the drug White Claudia? Your psychiatrist, actually trying to help you. Nurse Lisa has one of the worse cameos ever thought of for a "refreshed" character. There is no Alessa. What the fuck am I looking at here?!

And then the epic twist Konami seems to have decided to include in every single Silent Hill since fans went batshit bonkers with the second title: it's all in Cheryl's head. The ice, Harry Mason's quest, all things happening in town, everything is in Cheryl's head. Yeah, it seems they accepted the worst ending of the original title as canon and Harry died in that car crash, and then his daughter hallucinated the rest on the course of several years of denial and making up. What...? So... Silent Hill is a completely normal town? It's not even a ghost town, since real people live there? What...?

And you know what actually grinds my gears? You know what actually pisses me off in Shattered Memories from what I've seen of it? The fact Konami decided to claim the game psychologically analyses you. Meaning, different aspects of the game change according to your answers to a series of psychological tests. To this, I do have something to say.

A few years ago, when the PS entered the market, I bought a puzzle game for my Mum called Puzzle Bubble 4. I bought it because my Mum actually liked to play that sort of game. One of the features of the game was the fact that when you finished one of the campaign modes, you had a tarot reading done by the system. It only covers the amorous life, but my Mum enjoyed shooting bubbles to solve puzzles and found that feature funny. She had her tarot read several times. Even today, if she happens to fire it up, she will go for the tarot reading. Why am I telling you this story? Because the tarot reading my Mum so enjoyed is about as accurate as the psychological profiling done by Shattered Memories. Namely, it's a cute feature, but not to be taken seriously.

Psychologically profiling a person based on her answers to a couple of tests and questions? Damn, why are there even psychiatrists?

Why do it like this? Is the game supposed to be made to fit me? And you know what bothers and scares me based on the answer to a few simple questions? Why so obvious, Konami? Why not move the game according to choices made in game? Oh right... because then you'd have to sacrifice the whole psychiatrist bit and lose your ending twist that invalidated Silent Hill as we all knew it. So you gave us a painfully obvious game mode to aid in your ugly-as-sin ending twist! How am I not supposed to be. Pissed. Off. My. Brains?!

... alright. So. My final diagnosis. Shattered Memories can be fun, and it does contain a series of inside jokes to Silent Hill fans, provided you decide to approach it as a game made in honor of a better one. This is the only way a true blue fan of Silent Hill can enjoy it. If you never heard of Silent Hill, find the first title and play that, and then the two first sequels, before you drive head first into this sorry piece of crow. I promise any of those three games are well worth your time, and will make you feel like you're playing a game. Shattered Memories wins plenty from being on the Wii, since this is likely the best way to play it - you may enjoy a lot of what the Wii has to offer for this one, and it will improve your gaming experience. Not by much, but with this one, all help is needed.

To all of you who know and love the original series, don't come here looking for Silent Hill. It's not the same. Hell, more of the usual would be welcome here! Using the same basis, several more stories like James Sunderland's could be told, with different approaches. I can point you several decent horror movies which have gone by with one basis and several different plots! 0rigins did it, so can others! Now open a beer, and pour a couple of drops for this franchise, toast to it, and chug it down. Sometimes we just have to admit it - it's not coming back.