It’s hard not to be cynical about EA’s Dante’s Inferno. A game that scrambles its source material so hard conventional terms like reboot and retcon fail to do it justice. A game with a marketing campaign which hit most of the Deadly Sins.

But when Tor released the Longfellow translation of Dante’s Inferno as a tie-in, complete with cover art based on the game, did anyone expect this?

From Aramis, a local librarian:

Something amazing happened last Friday. I’m still not sure what to make of it.

I was at the library Reference Desk ready to answer questions and help people find stuff when a teenage boy came up to me looking for Catcher in the Rye. I checked the catalog for Salinger and didn’t see any hard cover copies available so I walked the kid over to the uncataloged Classic Paperbacks. His mom followed behind us and while I was browsing the S’s I overheard this incredible bit of dialog.

‘Hey, Mom! See this book?’ He grabbed a copy of Inferno, the first book in Dante Alighieri’s trilogy The Divine Comedy. ‘Remember that game you bought me? This is the book it was based on, but this book is even sicker the game! It was awesome!’

This blew my mind completely. It’s like something out of a marketer’s wet dream. A ridiculous video game induced a teenage boy of average coolness (he had a skateboard and was sporting a Bieber) to read not just a book, but a classic allegorical, epic poem written in the 14th century in which an Italian poet and a dead philosopher traverse the afterlife to find the poet’s deceased girlfriend and possibly meet God in terza rima (three part rhyme).

What do you guys think? Is this a thing™ or more of a fluke? Also will “literary” games become the latest trend replacing sandbox and/or post-apocalyptic casual zombie tower defense MMORPGs? What classic book would you like to see made into a game?

The Supreme Court decided yesterday to review Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) v. Schwarzenegger putting video gaming on the highest court’s docket. This case stretches back to 2006, when Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law criminalizing the sale of “ultra-violent” video games to minors and requiring retailers to separate Mature-rated games from games intended for children and the posting of signage explaining the ratings system used by the industry.

Finding fault with the state’s definition of violence and opinion-based labeling, the 9th Circuit Court upheld a lower court’s decision to overturn the law before it was enacted. This prompted Schwarzenegger to head to the court of last resort.

“By prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children under the age of 18 and requiring these games to be clearly labeled, this law would allow parents to make better informed decisions for their kids,” said Schwarzenegger, adding “I will continue to vigorously defend this law and protect the well-being of California’s kids.”
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The Needles’ Lighthouse from Keyhaven, Hampshire
Charles Tennyson Turner (1868)

The downs and tender-tinted cliffs are lost,
And nothing but the guardian fire remains –
That crimson-headed tower on the rough coast,
Whose steady lustre ceases not, nor wanes
Till sunrise from the east reveals to us
The mightly Vectian wold, and tawny tract
Of shingle, seen through bowers of arbutus,
Like some fair corn-field, mellow and compact.
How that deep glow the deepening gloom attests!
How much is by that noble lighthouse taught!
Mine eye rests on it, as the spirit rests
In sorrow, on some holy, ardent thought,
The sole beam in our darkness! Those who dwell
Near these great beacons are instructed well.

_____________________________
According to Roger Ebert, one of these isn’t art.

If you were disappointed by 2008’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, blame the guy who decided back in 1995 that a lightsaber mod for Dark Forces would be really cool.

Dark Forces was a first-person shooter set in the Star Wars Universe. History lesson: back in 1995, the term “first-person shooter” didn’t exist. Games like this were called “Doom clones.” But Dark Forces fought the clone wars, presenting innovative features like looking up and down, ducking and jumping. Yes, in 1995 simulating movement of your character’s neck, legs and spine were breakthrough accomplishments.

In Dark Forces you played as pixilated mercenary Kyle Katarn who went on secret missions for Mon Mothma – black ops stuff the main characters couldn’t handle. Need the Death Star plans? Done. Crix Madine needs rescuing? Done. The Empire rolling out a line of Dark Troopers? Done.

And Katarn accomplished all of this with a combination of blasters, detonators and – when necessary – his fists. Obviously, his fists were a fallback weapon; something only to be used when you’ve exhausted your ammo supply. But Katarn is still able to punch a Kell Dragon to death, if that’s what needs to be done. The point being that Katarn is just fine without a lightsaber and a Star Wars game is fine without a Jedi – up until some guy decides to mod the game swapping out a lightsaber for Katarn’s fists.

Suddenly, everyone on AOL was like, oh Dark Forces is so much better now that we have a laser sword! Nevermind that it was purely cosmetic, doing the same amount of damage as a punch making it the most underpowered lightsaber since Jedi Arena on the 2600. The budding franchise experienced a shift and people like me who always thought Han Solo was cooler than Luke died a little inside.

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II came out in 1997 (trading pixels for polygons) and Kyle Katarn learns that not only does he have secret force powers, he also has unconvincing facial hair. Sure Katarn can still blast stormtroopers, but using his newly found lightsaber is more fun because you can run around cutting arms off and deflecting blaster bolts.

By the time 2002’s Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast came out, it’s a full-on lightsaber fest complete with mopey force-powered ennui. Oh no, I’m tempted by the Dark Side :( *cries* And – hey! – Dark Forces has been dropped from the title? What kind of naming system is this?

Then a year later, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy comes out – shouldn’t that be Jedi Knight III? – and Katarn is now some serene Jedi Master basically opting to make a cameo appearance in the series he launched.

Which brings me back to The Force Unleashed, which people should realize is actually Dark Forces V: Jedi Knight IV: People who don’t want to play as stupid Jedi III. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with Jedi, but at this point every game has overpowered laser swords and magic powers. What the gaming world needs is a return to space opera themed first-person shooters – something we haven’t seen in 15 years.

This post was part of Blog Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part, please email him for details.

For other takes on this topic, check out:

Next Jen: X-COM
Silvercube: Looking For Ingenuity
Game Couch: Dark Forces

A teenager’s brutal murder brings the FBI to the small town of Greenvale. FBI Agent Francis York Morgan believes the murder is connected to a series of killings he’s worked across the country, but locals fear it’s the work of the Raincoat Killer – an urban legend who’s keeps citizens indoors on rainy days. To solve the crime, Agent York must convince the local police force to follow his unorthodox methods and he’ll need to survive terrifying encounters with Greenvale’s paranormal underbelly.

One of the joys of PC gaming was that I could buy a game I’d never heard of for $20 and have a fun gaming experience. However, development costs for consoles make budget titles a rarity. When I heard a survival horror game was coming out for the Xbox 360 and it would only cost $19.99, I was sold. Deadly Premonition is a quirky, compelling and scary horror game, held back by PS2-era presentation and a few odd design choices.

Among the many things established by the opening cutscene is that Deadly Premonition isn’t Alan Wake. The graphics are substandard; the draw distance is short and there’s a glaring lack of detail. Combine this with low resolution textures and a limited palette and everything looks muddy. I put this upfront because graphics can be a deal-breaker, but I encourage you to get past this.

33% of Deadly Premonition is an adventure game – its strongest element. Greenvale is an open world, letting you explore the town, visiting suspects at work and home – and peaking in the occasional window. Citizens keep to a schedule, so you’ll learn when they go for a morning hike or head home from work. But there’re some nuances: Emily goes to the bar after work, except on rainy nights when she stays in to make dinner. While not Oblivion’s Radiant AI, this system creates a living world.

The core of the adventure element, and Deadly Premonition’s most compelling feature, is its wide cast of characters. There are at least 30 voiced characters and Agent York will have meaningful interactions with all of them – either in scripted events or during one of the optional side quests (which are essential to appreciating the game’s narrative). It’s a small town so everyone knows (or is related) to each other, but what really comes across is how these people are connected to each other – and how, what becomes a series of deaths, truly shocks them.

33% of the game is survival horror. Mirroring Silent Hill, Greenvale takes on a nightmarish façade with red vines suddenly overgrowing parts of the town. Monsters – somewhere between ghosts and zombies – rise up from inky pools, and Agent York can either gun them down (with a growing arsenal) or sneak past them while holding his breath. Greenvale’s undead are disturbing humans who grotesquely contort their body seeking to ram their arms down York’s throat while moaning, “I don’t want to die.” The survival horror sections are eerie, but their effectiveness is undercut by having the best scares take place during cutscenes instead of in-game.

34% of the game is spent driving between the adventure and survival horror sections. Greenvale is a small town on a large map. It takes serious time to drive from one location to another and the locations are so spread out you’ll often spend five minutes just driving along a twisty forest road. In-game conversations make this more palatable, but while Access Games probably strived for realism, it just feels like padding.

To its credit, Deadly Premonition plays like you’re living in this town. With day/night cycles, weather effects and an in-game clock which often feels like it’s real-time, Greenvale has a living, breathing vibe. Speaking of living and breathing, the game throws food and sleep meters at you, so picking up food at the Milk Barn, eating at the A & G Diner, and calling it a night at the Great Deer Yard Hotel becomes part of your daily routine.

Deadly Premonition draws comparisons to Twin Peaks, but I found it Lynchean in a greater sense. The game nails quirk with Agent York, who reads his fortune in mugs of coffee, spouts movie trivia and carries on one-sided conversations with his imaginary friend Zach. But the quirkiness is offset by increasingly brutal crimes and nods to small town S&M. The game plays with dreamlike imagery and recurring symbolism, hinting at multiple meanings from something as simple as a red seed.

I found this video over at Hawty McBloggy and it’s worth watching even though I disagree with Brian Schmoyer’s assertion that video games, as entertainment, have no lasting value. The short version is that after 30 years of gaming, the Schmoyer found himself “alone, overweight and divorced,” and he blames this on the time he spent playing video games.

Coming off of two Dragon Age playthroughs and one run through Mass Effect 2, I’m probably more sympathetic towards Schmoyer’s POV than a gaming blogger should be. I’ve basically minored in BioWare RPGs. However, I don’t think I could have made better use of that time so much as I would have made other use of that time — at the very least, I should have done more laundry.

Still, in between my tours of Ferelden and Masseffectium, I’ve managed to keep my approval rating high among my friends and family. Likewise, I continue to have a strong romance with my wife, which I attribute to the diversity of conversation options we have available. Finally, though my quest log is never empty, I remain a kickass Collection Development Librarian (it’s all about the graphic novels).

A $50 million initial public offering (IPO) has been filed by Gamefly with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Gamefly is a  rental-by-mail service; akin to Netflix for video games.

Customers choose plans based on the number of games they can have checked out; with plans ranging from one ($15.95/month) to four ($36.95/month) games.

The IPO registration reveals that as of September 2009, Gamefly had 334,000 subscribers and revenues of $84.7 million for the fiscal year ending March 2009.

Time to cancel those plans for a game of Halo 2 on Tax Day.  Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue Xbox Live service for the original Xbox starting April 15th, 2010.  The video game console that birthed some of the most successful multiplayer franchises will soon be permanently offline, roughly eight years after its launch.

It has long been thought that the service on the Xbox 360 was limited due to Microsoft’s continued support of the original Xbox; most notably the 100 friend restriction on Xbox Live.  The disconnection also includes Xbox Originals and Xbox games played through the 360.

Xbox Live’s general manager, Marc Whitten, released the following statement concerning the shutdown:

“To reach our aspiration, we need to make changes to the service that are incompatible with our original Xbox v1 games. We will contact the Xbox LIVE members directly impacted by this change and if this includes you, I encourage you to check your LIVE messages and associated e-mail account over the coming weeks for more details and opportunities. We view you as a partner in this process.”

It is relatively common to see servers shut down for games on the PC, but console-wide stoppages are rare.  The Xbox had a good run, but it’s time to remorsefully pull the plug.

With the January NPD numbers coming next week, I thought it was time to catch up with how the holidays treated the video game industry.  Or, in other words, how many good little boys and girls received Nintendo products.  Read below for the answer:

Wii: 3,810,000
DS: 3,310,000
PS3: 1,360,000
Xbox 360: 1,310,000
PSP: 655,000
PS2: 333,000

Over three years after the launch of the Nintendo Wii, it still managed to sell nearly four million units in one month; single-handedly outselling all systems without Nintendo branding.  The Nintendo DS  brought its number of units sold-to-date in the US to a staggering 44 million.  The PS3 and 360 both clocked in around 1.3 million.

On the software side,  Nintendo sold a lot of games (surprise!).

01. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 2,820,000
02. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) – 2,410,000
03. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) – 1,790,000
04. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360) – 1,630,000
05. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3) – 1,120,000
06. Wii Play (Wii) – 1,010,000
07. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 936,1000
08. Assassin’s Creed II (Xbox 360) – 783,100
09. Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360) – 728,500
10. Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (DS) – 656,700

Nintendo dominated software sales with five Wii games and a DS game in the top ten, including three with Mario in the title.  Maybe Microsoft and Sony should try that out?

In its second month on shelves, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 continued to perform well on the 360 and PS3.

We always see fantasy worlds at their worst. Ferelden, the setting for Dragon Age: Origins, is no different. The darkspawn have again arisen from the underworld to spread their Blight. Once more the Grey Wardens assembled an army to crush them, but this time the confrontation ends disastrously — to the extent that the rightful leadership of Ferelden is now in question.

As one of the remaining Grey Wardens, it falls on you to end the Blight. Doing so will require unifying a country on the brink of civil war and convincing the dwarves, elves and mages to honor ancient treaties. How did you get to be so lucky?

Answering that question is one of Dragon Age’s strengths. After character creation — matching an elf, human or dwarf with fighting, thieving or magic using abilities — you begin your adventure along one of six paths. Whether starting as an apprentice in the Circle of Magi or running errands for Orzammar’s shadier citizens as a casteless dwarf, you get to explore your background before moving on to the esteemed ranks of the Grey Wardens.

Showcasing your origin story sets the tone for your character, and the choices you make here have ramifications throughout the entire game. This also makes replaying the game more palatable by bypassing the early level repetition of most RPGs. Even if you tend not to replay games, it’s worth exploring some of the other origins — side characters in one storyline are major characters in another and something as simple as a skeleton in a prison can take on poignant meaning.

After go from rookie to last, best hope, the game loses its rails and opens the world map to you. Here you travel by clicking on a location and watching the meandering path your party takes – punctuated by random encounters and scripted events (combat!).

Dragon Age: Origins uses a real time battle system. While you can switch between the four party members to micromanage them in combat, it isn’t required. Each character has several default profiles (which balance aggression against self preservation), but you can tweak the profiles to get the responses you want.

It’s an amazing level of control ranging from simply telling characters to heal themselves to ordering one of your fighters to drop everything and stun the enemy attacking you. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s also the game’s best feature.

While your party is doing what you’ve programmed to do, your own actions depend on your character type. On my first playthrough, I was a rogue who lured enemies into traps before picking them off one by one. The second time around I was a mage who launched fireballs into crowds and summoned blizzards to freeze my enemies. Customization extends beyond the three main classes with specializations you can learn. Fighters, for instance, can range from noble Templars to demonic Reavers.

Overall, I was impressed with Origins’ controls. Most of your character’s abilities can be mapped to the face buttons and lesser used abilities and inventory are easily accessed from a radial menu which — thankfully — pauses the action. Although the combat is real time, I found it often required a level of strategy reserved for turn-based games. And it helps to maintain that tactical level of thinking, even when an ogre lifts your character off the ground and starts pummeling him.

Unlike Bethesda’s RPGs which are exploration-driven, BioWare’s are quest-driven. I prefer the immersive feeling of Cyrodiil, with its day/night cycles and Radiant AI-powered NPCs, but none of Dragon Age’s 60-hour play time is consumed by simply walking from one town to another or stopping to enjoy a sunset over a lake. Every area in Dragon Age is packed with content and filled with dialogue.

I was amazed at how quickly events could turn, based on my conversations. While recruiting the Circle of Magi, I reloaded an earlier save after a poor choice of words led my party to go Order 66 on them. Yes, Alistair, even the younglings.

Gathering elves, dwarves and men to face the forces of darkness may sound a bit Lord of the Rings to you, but Dragon Age earns points for its focus on Fellowship. As you progress through the game, you gain followers. Each character has a different motivation for joining with you and not all of them are there willingly.

Instead of opting for the traditional good/evil meter, Dragon Age tracks how much your party members like you. On the surface, good actions make them like you more, evil actions less – but Dragon Age throws significant moral quandaries your way and you’ll find that you can’t keep everyone happy. I’ve had party members abandon me, challenge me in combat and betray me.

Of course there’s also love. Taking an interest in someone’s life, giving them gifts and fulfilling their wishes (side-quests) may lead to romantic opportunities. I’m talking about sex – or what passes for sex. It’s really a short montage of partially clothed erotic (or homoerotic) poses. A minute later and you’re ready to hit the road again.

Dragon Age: Origins has amazing music (composed by legendary Inon Zur) and ambient audio brings life to environments which are visually stagnant. If you find yourself emotionally affected by the game’s events, it’s due to the superb voice acting. The cast is literally a who’s who of notable voice actors and almost feels like a Star Trek: Voyager reunion. The amount of dialogue in the game is stunning, both in terms of writing and delivery.

Graphically, the game is a disappointment. Textures are muddy. Environments are lifeless. Faces are unexpressive. And there is no convincing facial hair anywhere in the game. Now I’m not usually a graphics whore, but since BioWare elevated digital acting with Mass Effect, I came to Dragon Age with high expectations. Main characters have their beards sink into their chests. Armor digs into characters’ heads during conversations. Characters will be spattered in blood for no reason and will appear in several different outfits during a single cutscene. Most egregious is a major cinematic at game’s end which is so poorly compressed it’s like watching something on YouTube. It comes down to a lack of polish.

This lack of polish carries over to an overly complicated menu system which keeps poor track of quests and an ever expanding codex. You shouldn’t have to hit three different tabs to find all the information you need on a quest. With the level of content in the game, bugged quests are expected but I was happy with the overall stability in the game and the fact that game breaking bugs were rarely encountered.

Swap Grey Wardens for Spectres, darkspawn for the geth, and the Dalish longbow for the HMWA VII Assault Rifle and you might wonder what BioWare is doing here that they didn’t do in Mass Effect.

What they’ve done is reworked the party dynamic so your fellow adventurers are more than mindless followers. They’ve given gamers a compelling reason to visit and revisit the game by offering multiple starting points and a wealth of paths to explore in-game. And they’ve taken what could be a generic fantasy setting and infused it with hundreds of years of its own history. Dragon Age: Origins is another impressive example of BioWare’s world-building even if the world feels unfinished. Let’s call it a Large Flawed Ice Crystal.

Xbox 360 version reviewed. Also available for the PS3, PC, and Mac.