Purkake

Empire: Total War demo coming out tomorrow on Steam. Mind = blown or bust. Edit: It will feature one land and one sea battle.

That's surprising. And kind of cool. I thought he was out of the business. Yeah, after Grimm you'd think that. Anyway Alice was awesome, so if he can do the first one justice then count me in.

Check out the NeoGAF thread while your at it, it has some real gems.

I'm no big fan of the Divine Comedy, I respect it as a classic. I am in no way personally offended by what they are doing with it. What bothers me is that the games industry feels the need to take it down to that level to make it sell/be viable. Gaming is still a new industry that needs to prove itself and this is not exactly helping. If someone wrote a book based on the Divine Comedy where Dante fights his way through hell slashing devils left and right, it would be a satirical work on today's society/entertainment or it would just be dismissed.

He doesn't strike me as the Graphic Novel type.

Shh! We don't about that stuff here. It's the public secret

They should totally base it on the game. Then they can make a movie based on that - Dante's Inferno the game the graphic novel the move: Dante's re-revenge.

Yeah, I though that something was wrong/missing in this episode as well. I didn't like the fact that they just pulled these new questions out of nowhere to add potential flashbacks/forwards/sideways to the story later. Why not spend an episode showing how Kate lost Aron, Sayid got arrested and Hurley got out of prison. They are making big mysteries out of them when they are probably just Ben pulling some strings. Also the plane crashing/not crashing and people teleporting out was kind of a cop-out. Why not have them crash and then get caught in the time-jump stuff? Otherwise it was a good episode, with a nice LOST moment at the end. I would really like to know if Ben killed Penny and if not then what "business" did he take care of. Also, I don't get why they changed this episode around with the Locke/Jeremy Bentham episode. They made it look like Locke just said screw it and hung himself(which isn't probably true). And I still hate the "xx hours earlier" kind of episodes. "You saw the end, now look at all the boring stuff", yay!

How can it be trying NOT to be the book when the game is supposed "to re-introduce Dante to an audience who, until now, may have been unfamiliar with the remarkable details of this great work of art”. Again creating a character to go ass kicking through a version of Dante's hell is okay; saying that this is somehow going to bring people to the "remarkable details of [a] great work of art" when seeming to change those details is a bit silly, IMO. So it's the usual marketing bullcrap. We're not exploiting violence, we're educating. There was even a court case where the judge used God of War as an example of an educational game, lolz. Greek mythology is a body of literature same as Divine Comedy. There weren't any Spartans either who killed Ares, so that's a gross historical distortion. I think that an important difference here is that "Greek Mythology" is more of an open setting than a straight story like Divine Comedy. Having a fictional character killing stuff from Dante's 9 hells setting would be much better(totally ok if they changed the name of the game as well). Also, most of the stuff that is in God of War(that I have seen) is at least plausible thanks to the crazy stuff that happens in Greek mythology. Turning Dante the poet into a superhero with magic powers is pretty much redoing the story from their (weird)perspective. It's like no one even considers making anything other than a "superdude has powers and kills stuff" game. At least for AAA titles.

I'm going to beg to differ, or, rather, my personal experience LANing with NWN* (a game that checks the CD/DVD keys even if you want to LAN) has proved otherwise. *I have two legit versions and had three players, thus I had to re-use one set of keys on that PC (it was still my PC). I meant stuff that uses the company's server to register your CD-Key. I specifically said

A "guess" is less than anecdotal evidence. What's your point? Well his point was that back in the day developers just had to learn to deal with the fact that their games were being pirated. Probably one of the most successful anti-piracy tools I've ever seen was the Starcraft multiplayer Spawn that you could put on any computer and then have that computer play with the main game. Well that and steam, mainly because they don't limit you to putting it on one computer or what have you. I can see that. Most of the server and cd-key based stuff isn't really crackable anyway. It's pretty much a common notion that if you want to play multiplayer over the internet(not lan) you need a legit copy. Blizzard has done pretty well with this.

A "guess" is less than anecdotal evidence. What's your point?

Yeah, somehow I don't think that anyone will go "Hey I liked The Divine Comedy, I'll check out the game". No one would be dissing it so bad if it was just an honest to god God of War ripoff. It's great that classical works are in the public domain. It's sad that they went with the "people like to kill stuff" moneygrab and discredited any "games are a serious medium" claims. There's so much that could be done with Divine Comedy. Even a puzzle game would have more potential than a "God of War clone". The stupidity is mind boggling.

While the game is the same, the feel is different. I feel that a pinball video game is a cheap(er) alternative to the real, better thing. With Skate, the "game" itself is different and the experiences are different enough that you can't really compare them. Also, great that I could explain something to someone and actually have them understand what I was saying. Maybe this internet thing still has potential... Edit: I brought up flight sims, because they are pretty much as close to the real thing as you get in a sim. If you have a joystick then you could almost be flying a real plane(minus the potential to die).

I think that the point of games like Skate isn't to simulate the real thing. I certainly don't feel like I'm skateboarding, for me it's just another game. I collect things, get points and unlock new stuff. So it's like a on-wheels platformer with a skateboarding skin. What do you think about Flight simulators?

Maybe I misunderstood. If that is the case then I am sorry.

They'll be even more unfamiliar with it by the time these philistines are finished with it. So it's not about Dante going to hell to save his girlfriend Beatrice, because she was sent there wrongly? And he didn't slaughter the Devil himself, because he happened to be in the way? Now I'm confused

Umm yeah, skateboarding isn't as easy as it seems. It will take a year until you can do a slide on a handrail without breaking a bunch of bones. That said, the only skateboarding game that I liked was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. It was fun to collect all the stuff and unlock hidden areas. It's a bit like guitar hero vs real guitar.

Skate 2 review is up. Featuring: No intro and teatrays. My rating: average

My point is that it's way too late. If they had been on this from day one and got the laws changed then it might have turned out differently(not better for the customers, though). This is just a half-assed last ditch attempt to do *something*. Yes, faster internet helps pirate stuff faster. It also helps you watch stuff from Hulu, Youtube, download game demos, patches and other digital content. You can't stop technology growth because some people are unhappy and don't want to change their business model.

I don't think the personal justification for piracy matters. Increasing awareness and accessibility are probably the main driving forces behind piracy. The point is that it is gaining ever more momentum and there hasn't really been a way to stop it yet. The market has to adapt to the change or slowly die out. Trying to stop piracy at this point is like trying to plug holes in a dam that is going to break very soon. At this point it is all or nothing, small victories aren't going to do anything.

Yeah, this trial is a joke. The prosecution has already dropped half of the charges. While the concept of copyright is great, it doesn't matter much when you can't enforce the laws. It's pretty much adapt or die at this point. EDIT: And blaming the rampant piracy on higher broadband speeds is just stupid. If the laws/industry can't keep up with the technology it is their fault, not the technology providers'.

That's pretty good, have you considered a career in game design? Also:

Yes, they are making a game based on Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy. No it's not a story-driven RPG, here's some info: (from here) The game runs at a solid 60FPS and is brought to life by the excellent animations of its enemies and protagonist. Dante Aligheri, the Florentine poet of whom the game is based upon, has been turned into a “muscular six foot knight with magic powers” to suit the tone of the game. Dante is fighting his way through Hell to save his lost love Beatrice, who has been murdered and wrongly sent to the underworld. One of the first boss encounters takes place in “Limbo”, an area of lost souls who are agonisingly close to God but can never reach Him due to a life of non-believing. It’s here that Dante fights Death himself and steals his magical scythe before plunging into the underworld. The game shares the exact same control scheme as God Of War. Even down to Circle being used to open chests. The games artist Wayne Barlowe was chosen because of his work on Barlowe’s Inferno, a collection of images based on Dante’s poem. Structurally, the game is designed to take the player through the nine circles of Hell. The first circle, Limbo, is where you will encounter Death and moving through the world areas get more horrific. Circle 5, “The Wrathful”, is where violent people are forced to endlessly fight each other. The game will culminate in Circle 9, presumably with a massive boss fight against Beelzebub himself. The Executive Producer Jonathan Knight said: Also, I have added a picture of an action figure of Dante the “muscular six foot knight with magic powers”.

Then FEAR2 must be pretty bad with it's score of 5. Are you saying that it is good? And I said usually. Probably more objective than gamers. Review scores is an argument that never leads anywhere. The difference is that game journalists actually do it for a living and one would expect a level journalistic integrity from them. I have to agree that arguing over review score is pointless. I am just trying to say that the game reviews are a joke compared to say movie reviews.