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.

To compensate for this above-average title, Electronic Arts has rewarded us with a morally-bankrupt ad campaign.  This from the company whose bad graces culminated in Spore becoming the biggest validation of copy-paste since the printing press.

Remember when Acclaim offered to pay for the funerals of the deceased in exchange for a Shadowman 2 shout-out on the headstone?  Remember when they offered to pay off the speeding fines of anyone ticketed by cameras as part of a potential promotion for Burnout 2?  You don’t?  Who’s Acclaim?  What’s Electronic Arts doing that Acclaim didn’t drive themselves to bankruptcy with?

E.A. phonied a Christian protest against their own game.  Then they concocted a contest encouraging people to “commit acts of lust” against Comic Con booth babes.  Then they sent review mills 200-dollar checks, knowing free publicity would be found.  Most recently, the company embedded ASCII art in web page advertisements.   Were some of these acts illegal?  Debatable.  Unethical?  Absolutely.  Results?  Grand.  All enough to bring you to a point where you wouldn’t even trust word-of-mouth from other “gamers”.

I’m not denying people the right to indulge in Electronic Arts’ latest take on the beat ‘em up genre, I’m just suggesting they haven’t done anything to deserve it.  So it’s fitting this month, the two most important February game releases are Bioshock 2 and Heavy Rain, both titles aimed at mature adults.  Those may be worth your time instead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Dante's Inferno, Ethics, Marketing, Mortal Kombat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.