Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Inferno comments off the port bow!

“The lustful being blown around on the wind is supposed to be a reference to how they are blown about through their lives by temptation and desire.“
–Symplify

See, I get the impression that Dante was flying by the seat of his pants somewhat when he was writing the Inferno, especially with regards to all that ironic punishment business. Some of it works alright: people who commit violence go to the river of boiling blood, fair enough. But with things like the big windstorm on the Lust circle, it just seems like he was coming up with the punishments first and the sins later, tying them together with the first piece of bullshit off the top of his head. You could tie the wind thing to virtually any other sin with the right far-fetched explanation: Maybe it’s the hell for suicides because it symbolizes the wind to which they cast their own lives. Or maybe it’s the hell for gluttons because it symbolizes the wind they used to emanate after visiting the all-you-can-eat Tex Mex restaurant. It would only be completely appropriate as the hell for stormchasers or inaccurate weather forecasters.

And it might be hard to come up with ironic punishments for things like simony and usury, but lust’s easy. Here’s one I just came up with: You have to spend eternity getting sucked off by your gran. And she only stops to take her teeth out half-way through.

“From day one, people were shouting “god of war rip off” and I was expecting Yatzee to be a bit more original.“
–SimGrave

Do you know why people were shouting “God of War rip off” from day one? Because that’s what it fucking is. What do you want from me? Darksiders and Bayonetta differ from God of War in many various ways, but any reviewer or critic who claims not to notice that Dante’s Inferno is a wholesale copy was either paid off or has something wrong with their brain. Look: the combat controls are the same. The camera is the same. The art style is the same. The graphics even look to be on a similar level of technology, which is weird, because God of War was on the PS2 and Dante’s Inferno is allegedly current-generation. You’re a bare-chested berserker fighting off mythology with ridiculously big weapons and various upgradeable spells, pausing every fifty yards to crack open prize boxes and chow down on the souls within. And there’re Quick Time Events and wall climbing. It’s shameless.

The only real difference is that Kratos wasn’t looking for his missus, because she was already dead at the start of God of War 1. Although Kratos himself has died and clawed his way out of Hades about fifty times by my count, so I’m surprised he hasn’t just pulled an Orpheus on that shit.

“I’m a little tired of the term God of War Clone. God of War took its style of hack and slash gameplay directly from Devil May Cry, which evolved it from previous games.“
–The Youth Counselor

I’ve heard this argument before, and it doesn’t hold weight for me. Being the first doesn’t necessarily mean you get to be the benchmark: Doom was the game that put FPSes on the map, after all, despite Wolfenstein 3D being the first (and there were others that were even earlier, like Catacomb 3-D). Devil May Cry might have created a model for frantic hack-and-slash gameplay, but God of War gave it style.

Besides, despite similarities in the core gameplay, God of War and Devil May Cry aren’t cut from the same cloth. It seems more like they’re heading vaguely towards the same place from vastly different directions. DMC has more of the Japanese-style hack and slash about it – extremely over-the-top, with more emphasis on combat variety and less on level design, and with end-of-mission scoring screens that give a more arcade-y feel. Whereas God of War‘s model has greater emphasis on environments and storytelling but with gameplay that’s more function-over-style, treating monsters more as obstacles to get past than opportunities to show off your skills. And that’s what Dante’s Inferno rips off. So there.

Meanwhile, on Fun Space Game: The Game

It’s amazing how much re-education is required for the simplest operations when you’re learning a new dev tool. This week’s major stumbling block was making rocks not phase harmlessly through the player. One would think you could at least trust a rock to behave.

I’m starting to regret not using more of the included controller scripts Unity provides. I’m generally iffy about using scripts when I don’t understand how they work – except the Mouselook one, ‘cos I’ll be buggered if I can get my head around all this quaternion angle shit. Besides, I wanted to use an original movement system (forward and backward speed remains constant when you release the key, while strafing and vertical speeds go down over time). All of which worked perfectly fine except that a giant asteroid I’d plonked directly in my path had the consistency of helium. Eventually I figured out that the two colliders were iffy about the Translate function, and wanted me to use Move instead. Snobby little bastards. So that was a weekend down the drain.

I wasted another one trying to make the game instantiate stars and space debris that fly past as you move, trying all sorts of exotic code before realizing I could just glue a particle cloud to the player’s face. Anyway, It’s taken me a few weeks, but I’ve finally got the basic skeleton in place. You can move around, smash into rocks, lose health based on how fast you smashed into them, and get a big fat Game Over if you make a habit of it. Everything’s ready for me to start building the actual game part of the game. I just need to figure out what that is.

Next: Plot!

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