Friday, February 27, 2009

EA Adapts Great!Lit for the Gaming Screen


It certainly took them long enough. Can EA really be the first to have the idea of turning the Divine Comedy into a video game? Nine circles of Hell with Satan as the final adversary? Three-headed dogs, zombies and religious symbolism? It practically begs to be adapted! And EA seems to have done a creative job. The literature student in me cheered when the announcement trailer began with the first lines of Dante's Inferno, but the pseudo-female Virgil was a departure from the text ( I suppose they felt it was not that much a change to insert a guardian angel in the place of one of the greatest classical poets?) and Cerberus looks bizarrely cartoon-ish. The trailer progresses with what looks like a rollicking good time. The ad has great visuals--they owe quite a bit to the pioneering visual style of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I guess everyone does these days)--but I wonder how they interpret some of the more, shall we say, contested sins? I can imagine quite a dinner-table conversation sparked by little Johnnie inquiring why the homosexuals are doomed to wander a burning desert in the seventh circle of Hell for all eternity. Anyway, it looks like agency G-Net has done right by EA, at least in terms of eye-popping presentation. Maybe Dante's Inferno will one day rate a sequel, but I'm not holding my breath for a game staged in the nine circles of the Paradiso.

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