If you haven’t played Dante’s Inferno yet, you should. The atmosphere of the game alone is enough to merit the 8-12 hour excursion into the epic poem. Find a rainy weekend and rent the game at the very least. If buying is your thing, though, you can get EA’s latest slasher for just $39.99 at Target next week. That’s a damn fine price for a fresh title – a full $20 off retail.

Target is also having a sale on NBA 2K10, dropping it down to $29.99. There are also a few Pokemon deals going down if you want to have the most random collection of games this side of a Sega Saturn. I should probably also remind you that Bad Company 2 and MLB 10: The Show both drop on March 2nd, though those will be full price. Not an altogether bad week for gaming.

As you surely know, Dante’s Inferno launches next Tuesday on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The fiery slasher is highly anticipated and has already received very solid reviews. I got the chance to talk with EA’s Phil Marineau, the Senior Product Manager on Dante’s Inferno, to talk about development, the game’s place in the action/adventure genre, and the upcoming Super Bowl ad for the game.

Fearless Gamer: Obviously the game’s based on Dante’s Inferno so why that poem, why that source material?

Phil Marineau: Well, ever since our executive producer read the poem – and he’s somewhat of a literary buff – if you go online and you go on Google and you type in Dante’s Inferno and you search images everyone throughout history who’s read the poem has been inspired by it. The image you see the most is the cone, the cone image, where someone’s sort of drawing Hell. And it gave us the idea that, you know what, this sets up perfectly for a level-based video game. You start at the top, on the surface, you fight through nine levels of Hell, and at the end you have the ultimate boss battle with the ultimate bad guy, Lucifer.

As we were going around pitching it internally people were like, “Yeah, I totally get it.”

FG: So what makes Visceral and EA’s vision of hell different from what we’ve seen. There are a lot of games out there that take the hell concept, what makes this different?
Read the rest of this entry »