I don’t know why I bought Devil May Cry on the PS2 when it came out.
Because if there’s one thing that annoys me - and I mean really annoys me - in games, it’s the fixed-point camera system. You know the one, where the camera flicks to a stupid ‘arty’ perspective at inopportune moments that completely disorientates you and usually results in having to dispatch enemies who are now off the screen.
It annoyed me in the original Alone in the Dark (although that I forgave because rendering about 100 polygons was basically the machine’s limit, and all the backgrounds were hand-drawn) and it’s annoyed me ever since.
It’s why I never got into the Resident Evil games despite being told over and over how great they were.
But for some reason I bought Devil May Cry, and for some reason the perspective changing stupid camera system didn’t annoy me at all. If I was a proper journalist or games commentator I could probably make some sort of hypothesis about that, but unfortunately I’m not so I can’t.
Anyway the point is, that the original Devil May Cry was amazing and an utter blast from the joyous start to the proper videogame ending, “YES! That’s what all final boss battles should be like!”, etc. I’ve not played the sequel, or the sequel’s sequel but I’ve been told they’re more or less the same.
But now we’ve got number 4, and this time it’s on XBox360 and PS3 which means even more ridiculously good-looking graphics rendered from a fixed perspective. And I think it’s about time I got back into the series. Yes, the game looks like it’s been well and truly designed for adolescent teenage boys - as Eurogamer puts it:
it’s also the quiet comprehension that Devil May Cry 4 is an incredibly adolescent game. I sort of don’t want that to sound as pejorative as it does, but hell, this is such a teenage boy fantasy that it is, at times, flesh-cringing in its audacity. The moment when female executive of the Holy Knights, Gloria, shows up on a snowy bridge wearing a strip of cling-film is astonishing. She’s made of Japanese gelatinous lady-physics (you know the kind of hyper-elastic bounce I’m talking about) and - I swear to God - there’s a Matrix slow-motion shot up the cleft of her exposed arse. I mean seriously boys, there’s exploitative attitudes towards women and there’s… yeah. Upskirt bullet-time bum zooms.
But in spite of that, the stupidity is kind of what made the first game fun. If you take the “bum zoom” and apply the equivalent to “shooting things and whacking them with an improbably sized sword” then you’d probably get the idea of how stupid, but at the same time amazing the action is.
Read Eurogamer’s first impressions here.
Microsoft have announced that they’re opening up Xbox360 to User Generated Content, which presumably means more dross than you can shake a stick at.
As build-up to the almost inevitably prematurely canned T.V. show Lost increases, Ubisoft are set to release the accompanying videogame on PC, PS3, and XBox360.
