Comments on: Dante’s Inferno: The Reckoning Part 2: Blood Oath - Generations

By: wrshamilton

wrshamilton — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:44:29 +0000

To be fair, the source material has some pretty idiotic one-liners of it’s own. Doesn’t one canto (italian poetry terminology?) end with a demon turning around and playing a trumpet with his butt?

By: Chris Remo

Chris Remo — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:01:12 +0000

Iriquois:

Well said; that is a concise and accurate way of putting it.

By: iroquois pliskin

iroquois pliskin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:49:57 +0000

I think your debate with Leigh here is very similar to a recent debate between Gus Mastrapaand John Teti over on Crispy Gamer, regarding the Godfather II.

I’m of two minds on this subject, but I think your basic point is well-taken: these adaptations can’t harm the recognized on which they are based, but the total incongruity between the maturity and artistic seriousness of the source material and the utter stupidity of the adaptation really degrades the medium.

By: sergey samokhov

sergey samokhov — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:04:29 +0000

I think that title doesn’t just discredits the hypothetical guys that’d like to do an honest adaptation. It discredits the whole industry. There are people who’d like video games to be a mature media, like cinema or books or whatever. What if the casual gamer decides to check out a game called ‘Dante’s Inferno’? It sounds like serious matter, not like ‘Ghosbusters’, or ‘Assassin’s Creed’ or ‘God of War’ or whatever. Granted, she should probably know better than to judge the game by the box, but never mind. Suppose she even reads some review and gets disappointed by them. She’s still comes away disappointed. And the next ting we know, nobody publishes serious games cause hey! Only dumb kids play them anyway.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:35:24 +0000

Attaching themselves to a recognizable name—who hasn’t heard of “Dante’s Inferno”?—may be a way of adding some security to what is, technically, new IP. There’s safety in an adaptation as there is in a movie tie-in or sequel: it doesn’t have to work so hard to convince people to risk their money on it.

There’s publicity too, even if it is about how the game isn’t really like Dante’s poem (and is instead a fast-paced hack n’ slash—exactly what EA’s PR hopes to get across).

By: — Craig Ostrin

— Craig Ostrin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:18:13 +0000

[...] is a comment I wrote (with slight edits) on Chris Remo’s response to the question of Dante’s Inferno: essentially, whether it’s a “good [...]

By: Craig Ostrin

Craig Ostrin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:37:12 +0000

“Most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought … You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.”

I’ve been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Podcast lately, in which the host interviews a different writer on each episode. You’d be surprised at how much thought goes into even the most explosion-riddled action flick.

Have you seen The Island? It’s standard Michael Bay fare, with a dystopian clone world as the backdrop for shakycam and over-the-top special effects. The movie was written by the same guys who did the new Star Trek’s screenplay, and during the Trek interview, they mentioned that they had much loftier ideas for The Island, which were never realized once Bay and the studio got a hold of the script.

Even The Dark Knight—on the surface, a fairly standard adaptation of a classic superhero series, albeit with exceptional acting on the part of some of the players—had a ton of thought and care put into the themes and characters.

I think the biggest problem with storytelling in games right now is that most developers don’t know how to craft a protagonist. Either they’re non-existent, as in most first-person games, or they’re absolutely flawless, with no room to grow and develop.

At their core, stories are about characters. If we can’t create compelling* characters, we can’t tell compelling** stories.
*Sorry.
**Sorry, again.

By: Chris Remo

Chris Remo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:49:45 +0000

Drew,

I don’t really think so. Luhrman’s adaptation is, undeniably, an adaption, regardless of whether one thinks it’s a good or bad one. This game seems more from the Japanese RPG school of religious allusion, which is to take a bunch of names, vague plot conceits, and settings, and mash them together haphazardly into a standard video game formula. It’s fine to do that if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not an adaptation, regardless of what genre modifier you disclaim it with.

By: Drew Marlowe

Drew Marlowe — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:24:09 +0000

I understand where the hate for this game is coming from, but to me it seems that this kind of complaint falls into the same category as someone complaining about Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet.

Right now we’re looking at this as “Dante’s Inferno adapted as a video game” which is the wrong approach. What we should actually look at it as is “Dante’s Inferno adapted as an action video game” which makes the whole affair much less offensive.

By: Steve Amodio

Steve Amodio — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:59:07 +0000

I’m hoping at some point we get the full story of how this game got greenlit. Someone at EA must have a pretty strong opinion of Dante’s brand and its ability to move copies. Or perhaps the devs even more cynical than I am and knew they couldn’t get this project greenlit without a franchise behind it, and Little Nicky was just too expensive.

On the bright side, this has given me the impetus to start work on my own third person open world shooter, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Streets of LA. Look for it next fall on Gizmondo.