Don’t give me the “developers and designers will go without food because a millionaire CEO greenlighted a bucket of fail” crap.  Between the pseudo-maturity and ad campaign, Dante’s Inferno needs to fail.

I lived through Mortal Kombat.  The outcry wasn’t just “blood and guts”, it was the context it was presented in.  The game was a candy bag.  All you knew is that your opponent needed to be separated from his limbs.  The nature of the arcade and the tech limitations of the time didn’t let you go deeper than that.  And why bother?  People wanted blood.  When the Super Nintendo version failed to deliver on that, the Genesis port outsold it four-to-one.

Fun.

The culture’s moved past Mortal Kombat, a.k.a. “video game violence without rationale”.  This torch was ceded to God of War, and even the protagonist behind that game’s laughable brutality has a motivation for it.  The reason for Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game?  “We have a poem and we need to make a game.  Hell is about death, so let’s have the character create lots of it.”

And we ended up with God of War down to the mannerisms, animations, graphics, camera angles, and gameplay devices.  And it ain’t good enough to justify it.

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