Dante’s Inferno (Xbox 360)

Burn, Baby, Burn:

Reviewing 18 month old games is fun and relevant! Just this Saturday I wrapped up a Zealot (Normal difficulty) playthrough of Dante’s Inferno.  It’s an early 2010 release from Visceral Games and EA.  Loosely (probably very loosely) inspired by The Divine Comedy, the player controls Dante, the Templar Knight, as he descends his way into Hell after killing Death and stealing his scythe, so that he can free the soul of Beatrice, the woman, he loves from Lucifer’s clutches.

It also features a metric crapton of creepiness, gore and nudity.

Pictured: Strategically Placed Hand.

Roof Racks.

Those racks on the top of bigger vehicles that are supposedly for hauling around canoes or skis or other stupid crazy active living garbage on the roof of their vehicle.  No one uses them.  Ever.  For anything.  But almost every large vehicle has them.  Why?  It’s exclusively to piss me off, I’m sure.

Why does it piss me off?  Snow.  The fucking things collect ice and snow like a fucking OCD penguin.

Satan’s Greatest Tool.

Look at the picture.  Just fucking look at it.  See that big square it makes an inch and a half above the roof, just waiting for some kind of ice/snow mixture to gather up inside it?  You can almost feel the cold wind blowing by as your arms tire from flipping from scraper end to brush end, each time getting no closer to having a snowless rooftop.  Along with rolling up the rim of Tim’s cups to “Essaie Encore SVP” and watching the pre-empted Canadian commercials of every televised Super Bowl, scraping off the roof a vehicle with these things is just one of the many forms of familiar eternal punishment awaiting all Canadians when we get to Hell.

And how fucking insane is that roof rack site?  Look at the links…  “News”, “Press Office”?  Is roof rack technology that fucking cutting edge that there’s news?   MODEL #36GBM5-78IOS NOW AVAILABLE IN TITANIUM GREY!  NEW VERSATRACK™ SYSTEM INCREASES STORAGE CAPACITY 22.7%.  I could just piss with excitement.

A Glimpse Of Hell

I meant to write about this experience Wednesday night before getting Lost. But the blocky adventures of Tetris with Mel kept me from writing.

You see, around 6pm Wednesday night, Mel wanted to go look for a canvas, and then go to The Salvation Army to buy a cushion or a frame or some kind of bric-a-brac that someone bought at the dollar store and then gave to their grandmother on her birthday, who then died a couple weeks later and had the executor of her estate donate it to The Salvation Army.

So, after looking for the canvas with Mel, I followed my first inclination when dealing with TSA. And my first inclination when dealing with TSA is, of course, to stay the fuck away. The reason for this is because other than maybe looking at a couple boxes of records that they have packed away in a corner near the shitters, there’s nothing there that I’m interested in.

So, while Mel goes to TSA, I head to the Co-op to get some Diet Pepsi™. As is pretty much always the case, this took much less time than scouring TSA for the perfect cushion, frame, or Dead-Lady-Garbage, and I headed over to TSA to tell Mel that I was heading to Cockbuster Video to look at their used games.

Immediately I notice something odd. The parking lot surrounding TSA is solid fucking full of cars. Not just parked cars, but cars hovering about looking for spaces like it’s December 23rd, 1996 and Walmart is having a half-price sale on Tickle Me Elmo. After nearly getting T-Boned by a half dozen crazy old women in a Buick Century, I manage to find a spot about a quarter mile from the store. I park, and freeze my ass off as I head for the store.

Inside the door, I see the cause of all the kafuffle. Apparently, every Wednesday from 6pm to 8pm it’s HALF PRICE ON ALL CLOTHING at the Salvation Army. Which, obviously, is something that everyone everywhere needs to be a part of.  It was my own personal hell.

Normally, the musty smell of TSA (or any 2nd-hand Clothing Store) over powers me.  But on this occassion it mixed in with the smell of cold elderly and made me cringe.  The line up for the cash registers–that’s right, registers, 3 were open–had about 25 people in it when I entered.  Rows and rows of clothing racks had women of all ages in them, sorting, lifting and judging.  But more noticable than anything, was the noise of the coathangers as they screeched across the steel racks incessantly.  By the time I had found Mel in the DLG section, I was ready to snap.

I told her where I’d be, and bolted for the door as fast as I could without looking like a complete lunatic.  But noticed something odd as I was headed up the aisle.  There, at the end of the aisle was a woman, mid to late 30s, leaning against her shopping cart.  Her appearance just barely betrayed that she was mentally handicapped.  Her hair was red, and curled in a perm.  Her eyes were small, but the irises huge.  She and her cart were stopped at the end of the aisle, taking up about 3/4s of it.  And as I walked the entire length of this long aisle, she never once stopped staring at me.  Not even long enough to blink.  Coupled with the screeching, it was about the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.  I quickened my pace, arguably reaching the point where I did indeed look like a complete lunatic, shot passed the woman as she slowly turned like a zombie, and raced out the doors for the car.

Safe once more from the threat of the nearly dead, I headed out to look for videogames.  As it turns out, I picked up Left 4 Dead for the 360.  It’s a game about Zombies.  I really hope there’s no Salvation Army level.

…blouses…