March 20 marks the Feast of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Cuthbert, or “Cuddy” as his friends called him, was one of the most popular saints in medieval England, particularly Northumbria, which he is today the patron of.

As frequent readers of the feast calendar know, saints are often depicted holding their own severed head in their hands, Headless Horseman style, but Cuthbert is one of the rare saints who is usually* depicted carrying someone else’s severed head, in this case St. Oswald of Northumbria.  Don’t worry, though.  It wasn’t because Cuddy beheaded Oswald or anything untoward.**  Rather, when Durham cathedral was being dedicated in the twelfth century they transferred Cuthbert’s remains there from a nearby church and when they opened the reliquary they found Oswald’s head in there, too–where it had been put, mind you, by previous caretakers to keep it safe during the chaos that followed William the Conqueror’s conquering.  So I guess that means that Cuthbert’s usual attribute, the crowned severed head, commemorates a temporary lack of storage space.  Oops, make that a holy temporary lack of storage space.

A day later, on March 21, the Feast of St. Benedict is held, he of the famous and eponymous Rule for monks.  For this, Benedict is considered the granddaddy of Western monasticism, and since the mid-sixties he’s also moonlighted as the patron protector of Europe entire.  In addition, he’s in charge of protecting spelunkers, school children, civil engineers, coppersmiths, and servants who’ve broken their masters’ belongings and is proof against fever, witchcraft, kidney disease and nettle rash.  Saints as important as Benedict have awesome miscellanies.

On March 25 the medieval calendar celebrates The Annunciation, the visit by archangel Gabriel to announce to Mary her impending mother-of-Godness.  For those of you keeping count, March 25 is nine months exactly prior to Christmas.  When they invented the AD (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord) system of dating, the Annunciation was also set as New Year’s Day for the liturgical calendar.  So if you need an excuse to go out and party on March 24, there you go, it’s Liturgical New Year’s Eve. The Annunciation, or Lady Day as it was known throughout England, also roughly corresponds to the vernal equinox, which is probably why it was placed there.

You probably don’t need me to note it, but nevertheless, Easter, or The Feast of the Resurrection falls shortly after The Annunciation,*** officially pegged by the Catholic Church to the first Sunday after the [ecclesiastical] full moon after the vernal equinox.  But they cheat the calculation and use March 21 as the vernal equinox, even in years when it falls on some other day,**** and they further cheat by using lunar tables to calculate the ecclesiastical full moon that don’t correspond to the actual position of the moon in the sky.  If you find yourself always surprised by the date of Easter, this is probably why.    So remember for next year to always look at the spiritual moon, not the one that’s in the sky, when calculating when to hide eggs on the lawn and distribute your chocolate rabbits.

The Feast of St. Gabriel these days has been moved to September 29 for a joint feast with St. Raphael, but in the Middle Ages it came on March 26, the day after the Annunciation.  As I’ve said before, I don’t get why angels get to be saints, but then again I’m not in charge of canonization so carry on, Catholics, carry on.

And as I said just a few paragraphs back, Gabriel was the angel who brought the message to Mary that she would bear the Savior, so Gabriel has become the patron saint of all messengers. Today that includes not just postmen, but also newscasters, journalists, and presumably even TV weathermen.  I’m not sure if blogging counts as message delivering, but if it does, I suppose that makes Gabriel my own patron saint, so I guess I’ll stop being skeptical about the the appropriateness of angelic saints, because check it out my saint can totally beat up yours.

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*Once again the artist of this MS lets us down and just depicts a bishop without a severed head clutch.
**Or interesting…
***The calendar I’m using for these posts puts its marker for Easter right after the Annunciation, which is why I’m discussing it here.
****Such as this year, on when it falls on March 20.

This week’s image is found in MS 16 (fol. 223r.) of Castle Huis Bergh’s collection of late medieval art:

On the one hand, it’s just your average image of a monkey riding off to joust on the back of a wild pig. Monkeys do this sort of thing all the time (in manuscript art, I mean). But on the other hand, check out his haircut. It’s more than a little reminiscent of a tonsure, which is to say the haircut that medieval religious types were known to wear from time to time, making this guy a monkish monkey, a lame pun that only works in English and so almost certainly wasn’t intended. So what was intended?

Given the angle his head is cocked at and the fact that his skin is the same color as his fur, there might not be a tonsure there at all, but something closer to a Beatle mop, which avoids the temporally-displaced pun but doubles down on the anachronism.  After all, Peter Tork–of the Monkees–was also known for his Beatlish mop back in the day.  Could this monkey with a Monkee’s haircut be some time traveler’s signal to us?  And just what are they signaling?

I worry that Dan Brown might get word of this image, so nobody mention it to him, OK?  Dude loves both puns and anachronisms, and to make matters worse the monkey squire there is found in the margin of a late-medieval extra-Biblical account of Mary Magdalene’s journey to and subsequent life in Provence after Christ’s death–you know, the legend that inspired the whole Da Vinci Code thing. 

Actually, on second thought, do mention it to Dan Brown.  If there’s anything that would improve the inevitable Da Vinci Code sequel’s sequel, it’s time-traveling manuscript-illuminating Peter Tork-worshiping monkeys.

It occurs to me that video game reviews are generally expected to at some point talk about the game as, well, a video game, offering thoughts on the subject’s graphics and gameplay and all that.  Granted, that angle has by now been pretty well covered by just about every respectable video game journalist out there–and quite a few disrespectable ones as well–but lest I be remiss in my reviewerly duties, allow me to finish up my review by touching on those very points.

Graphics

Not bad, really. Never before have I seen a game attempt to render giant towers made of monstrous human genitalia, so I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but still, nice job. I particularly enjoyed the giant faces you sometimes see on the walls that vomit neverending streams of damned souls.*

Sound

Likewise, not that bad. I don’t know what a writhing mass of twisted, groaning bodies being boiled in molten gold sounds like in real life, but this seems to me a decent stab at replicating it.

Gameplay Theology

As everyone else on the Internet has already pointed out, the game is pretty much a direct swipe of homage to God of War and its sequels with one important innovation: the addition of an ‘I Win’ button, by which I mean the button that you use to employ Beatrice’s holy cross in combat.

While the scythe that Dante swiped homaged borrowed from Death looks cool on the cover of the game’s slipcase, it is so much dead weight compared to the cross that Beatrice gives him. With this powerful holy artifact, the game allows Dante to shoot multiple glowing crosses that automatically lock onto his foes, even foes all the way across the screen, even foes that aren’t yet visible on the screen. The glowing crosses are faster than Dante’s scythe, do more damage, and aren’t as easily interrupted.  And every time you use the cross’s ‘absolve’ power on an enemy, you get special experience points that you can use to make the cross even stronger.  Oh, and did I mention it has unlimited ammo and no cooldown?

There’s probably upward of two dozen special combo attacks that Dante can pick up throughout the game, but I don’t really know for sure because my game was one long series of [cross] [cross] [crossity] [cross].   And I’m not alone in this.  If you go to GameFAQs.com, you’ll find that the strategy guide for Dante’s Inferno is two sentences long. Actually, why don’t I just quote it in its entirety and save you the trip?

When you see see the first enemy, push the cross button over and over until it’s dead. There are approximately 1,297 enemies in the game, so repeat this 1,296 more times.  

Now, many reviewers regard this as a serious flaw in the game, but that’s because they care more about “fun” and “not wasting twelve hours” than they do about medieval theology.  Allow me to explain.

As any student of medieval romance or saints’ lives can tell you, one of the chief virtues of Christianity in the medieval mind is that it is 100% effective against all manner of goblin, devil, and bump-in-the-night-goer.  No exceptions.  If a saint is confronted with a dragon, all he has to do is remind it that God’s power is infinite, and the dragon has no choice but to slump its shoulders and slink away and hope that no one in the next town it plans to plague will remember that it’s powerless in the face of Christianity.**  Just making the sign of the cross is good enough for Galahad and company to defeat an entire castle wall’s worth of succubi.  Heck, if it’s just one or two demons all a Grail Knight needs to do is to be reminded of God’s power by glancing at something vaguely cross-shaped, like the hilt of a sword and bam, demon problem sorted.

I, for one, commend the makers of Dante’s Inferno for their bold theologically-driven game design.  Sure, it means that the game can be played equally well one-handed while staring out the window, but sacrifices have to be made if you want to stay on the good side of any omnipotent supreme beings who might happen to wander into the Gamestop.

Final Judgment

Because someone who actually plays video games might stumble across this review, I feel I must continue to bow to the accepted standard and end by assigning numbers to everything I’ve said so far.  How else will you know if you should buy this game?  So here goes:

Graphics: 001 1101 11001 101 0 1
Sound: 340.29 m/s
Breasthavingness: 44DDD
Flatness of Characters: -44DDD
Similarity to More Popular Games: ∞ -1
Theogameplology: α & ω
Total: 7s, 3s, E/8s, X, 4L***

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*Back off, grammar snobs who are now no doubt composing me emails saying, “with your dangling modifier I can’t tell if it’s the faces or the walls that vomit souls, hnar hnar hnar.”  The walls are made of giant vomiting faces, so who’s got egg vomited soul on their face now?
**A colleague tells me that in Scandinavian literature this gets so bad that the devils actually cry and whine that if Christianity keeps spreading north, they’ll not have anywhere left to live.
***Quipu! It’s not just for Incan grain warehouses anymore.

I hate being such a Johnny Come Lately all the time, but today was the first I’d heard (via Crooked Timber) of the now weeks-old controversy over the National Review piece “An Exceptional Debate” which claims that America was absolutely 100% founded on the principles of modern conservatism and that all of our current woes are probably somehow caused by a departure from those originary principles.  You probably ought to read the article for yourself and not just take me at my word when I say that it’s the worst sort of intellectual dishonesty, full of outright equivocation (the Puritans really were proto-capitalists–their merchants used the motto “in the name God and profit” and that totally means exactly what it means today), historical cherry picking (the Founding Fathers apparently include Lincoln as an honorary member but not Jefferson, that damned agrarian socialist), and random free association (how telling that the Declaration of Independence was published in the same year as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations).*

But since others have been chewing, swallowing, and regurgitating this cud since late February, I’m not going to join in the debate, nor the debate over the debate (nor try for a meta debate over the debate over the debate), but I am interested by one particular rhetorical flourish the piece’s authors, Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru throw out there.  They write:

Look at the archetypal American, Benjamin Franklin, whose name comes from the Middle English meaning freeman, someone who owns some property. Napoleon dismissed the British as “a nation of shopkeepers”; we are a nation of Franklins.

It’s almost as if the writers were schooled in etymology at a medieval university. Medieval thinkers just love this sort of move, where the history of a word makes a theological or symbolic point.** Dogs, for example, are called canis in Latin after the Greek work kuon, which is meant to represent the sound of their barking. In effect, a barking dog says its own name, which is fitting and proper because dogs are the only animals that recognize their own names when we talk to them.

Given the open hostility towards French ways of thinking in the rest of the article, I think maybe Lowry and Ponnuru would be aghast to learn that the Middle English frankeleyn enters English through Anglo-French fraunclein, where it ultimately derived from the Latin francus, which does mean “free” as they might hope, but which also means “Frank,” as in “the progenitors of the French,” the old Roman boogeymen the Gauls who lived in the part of the map that the Romans labeled Francia. And lest they protest that the similar etymologies for both “French” and “free” are some sort of coincidence, according to the OED the reason the word francus came to mean “free” was because of the belief that in Gaul only those who were of Gaulish birth or were adopted officially by a Gaulish family were truly free.  And seeing how the English were conquered and ruled by the French-speaking Normans, the word probably encodes a further level of insult, that to become a free man capable of owning property under Norman rule is to cease being an English-speaking Brit and to become, at least metaphorically, an honorary Frenchman.

That’s the problem with metaphorical etymologies. Trace a word far enough back and it’ll bite you on the metaphorical ass.
The image I chose for the top of this post is Chaucer’s Franklin as depicted in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.  Technically, he has absolutely nothing to do with the piece I’m discussing, since the authors never mention him in their brief lovesong to the humble franklin.  Yet since they so often argue by association and insinuation, I think I’m allowed a little digression myself. 

Chaucer’s Franklin is perhaps the perfect match for the sort of person who thinks “An Exceptional Debate” provides a well-reasoned historical argument for hating the Obama presidency and not a series of boldface equivocations and misrepresentations masquerading as logic.  Recall that Chaucer’s Franklin is on surface level a very pleasant man, the sort who’d definitely put on a fine spread if you were to be invited over to his place for dinner, but also the sort of class-conscious social climber who reflexively toadies before anyone he perceives as having a modicum of power.  When his turn comes to tell a tale, the Franklin tells the story of the love triangle between Arveragus, Aurelius and Dorigen.  Since it’s likely been a while since you all had English 200, I’ll remind you of the details.

Dorigen is the young, beautiful and loyal wife of Arveragus, a knight who leaves her alone at home (in France of all places) whilst he seeks his fortune in Britain.  While he’s away, she broods over the sharp rocks that line the beach and which she thinks must keep her husband from a safe return.  At the same time, she becomes the target of the affections of a lovesick squire named Aurelius.  Presumably because it’s flattering to be desired, even when you don’t desire your desirer, Dorigen doesn’t just tell Aurelius to sod off and instead promises herself to him if he succeeds in the impossible task of making the rocks she hates disappear.  Aurelius enlists the aid of a student magician who casts an illusion to make it look like the rocks are gone, sending Dorigen into a suicidal lament.  Arveragus returns, has the situation explained to him, and promptly decides that the only option that will preserve his honor is if Dorigen goes ahead and sleeps with Aurelius as she promised.  For love of her husband, Dorigen agrees.  Aurelius is so moved by this show of honor and love that he forgives Dorigen of her obligation, even though he had to spend a lot of money to get the magician to cast the illusion.  Luckily, the magician is so moved by Aurelius’s show of generosity that he cancels his debts.

The social-climbing Franklin hopes to flatter his fellow pilgrims the noble Knight and his son the Squire and the gladly-learnin’ Clerk (who would identify with the student magician), who by virtue of their membership in the other two estates are technically his betters.  Clearly, the Franklin thinks that the moral of his story is something like “generosity is always rewarded,” and asks his audience to ponder the unanswerable question of who in the tale was the most generous of all, but that’s a pretty bone-headed reading of his tale.  Everyone in the story may be generous, but only after their own blind pig-headedness has forced them into an untenable situation.  Dorigen’s obsession with the rocks on the beach is unwarranted since they don’t, in fact, keep her husband from her and she shouldn’t have made such a stupid promise to begin with; Arveragus shouldn’t have went off without thinking of his wife nor should he be so obsessed with his own personal honor; Aurelius shouldn’t be making the moves on an unavailable woman nor promising money he doesn’t have to pay for it; and the magician shouldn’t be aiding and abetting fornication with forbidden astronomical arts in exchange for cash.  They’re a perfect pack of scoundrels and thoughtless clods, not paragons of generosity.

So again, be careful of who you compare yourself to, because metaphors have this habit of going uncomfortably reflexive on you when you’re not looking.  Chaucer’s Franklin is then, I submit, the perfect match for Lowry and Ponnuru, but only as a fellow misreader of stories–in their case, history–who draws simplistic self-congratulatory conclusions that in the end reveal only his unacknowledged delusions and desires.

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*How especially telling since the Declaration was written by Jefferson, who we all know was just a socialist in disguise and died penniless.**
**Oh, yeah, and that’s not me just running on at the mouth, the authors specifically go out of their way to bash Jefferson’s intellectual legacy because of his end of life bank statement. 
***As I once noted in my Peabody-Award-winning discussion of beaver testicles.

I get a lot of spam through the old “Contact” tab at the top of the page, mostly from people who don’t seem to understand that it’s just a form for sending me email and not some magical portal to my credit card numbers.*  Occasionally, though, I get EXCITING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES!!!!!  Why, just today, someone working for an outfit called Seoboutiques.com contacted me offering to write blog posts for Got Medieval free of charge!  Exciting, original daily content–and all I have to do is join some affiliate program and provide reciprocal links, or so they say, links to places like DungeonKnight.com, an exciting web retailer that they tell me occupies the same “niche” as my humble blog.

I’ve always been curious as to what niche other people think my little collection of vaguely medieval snarkiness and crankery belongs in, so I followed their link to a page advertising, among other things, the following:

So, to be clear, they’ve decided to go with a picture of a man who’s manifestly not wearing a vest to advertise “Men’s Renaissance Vests,” a guy wearing a kilt for “Men’s Renaissance Pants,” and a guy wearing Roman centurion style armor for “Medieval Accessories.”  Obviously, these guys are some sort of Dadaist marketing geniuses who operate on a level I can scarcely comprehend.  I sure hope that’s my niche.  I’ve always wanted to operate on a Dadaist level I can scarcely comprehend.****

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*If you’ve recently** sent me an email through said contact form and I’ve not replied, it’s probably because of my imperfect system for dealing with the spam.***
**Recent = in the last six months 
***That system? Funneling everything to a folder in my gmail account that I can never remember to read.
****Or, to be properly Dadaist about it, I’ve always wanted that eggroll spleen #2341 post Wesley grom grom grom grin gran grom and don’t you foghat it!!!!shift-1!!

1. OK, maybe not laughing, but snickering, or smiling to himself with quiet amusement, and 
2. OK, not a man, but in fact the Word Given Flesh, Mr. Jesus H. Christ.

Still, why is He so giddy?  Apparently because He shares the lower margin of this late fifteenth/early sixteenth century gradual* with a naked chicken-footed man who’s dismantling the page’s floral border in an attempt to hide off to His left [our right].

Silly chicken-footed man, don’t you know that the Savior is omniscient?  There is no marginal decoration sufficient to cloak you from His amusement.

Oh, and if anyone’s wondering why there’s a phantom box of darker color around Jesus, it’s not because I botched an attempt at enhancing the image with Photoshop.  Rather, that’s probably the discoloration caused by hundreds of years of Christians touching, tracing, or kissing the little marginal medallion of Christ for good luck.

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*OK, three caveats.  It’s possible Jesus’s smile is an artifact of image compression, too, as I’ve never seen this MS in the flesh. But he certainly seems happy to me.
**UT Austin MS HRC 013 .

So, yeah, still working on the rest of the Dante’s Inferno review. In fact, I’ve got about a week’s worth of Dante-related stuff in the pipe.* But until then, enjoy this screenshot of Dante’s new outfit added in the Dark Forest DLC** this week:

Burn, Dante, burn. Disco Inferno!

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*Let’s hope this goes better than the last time I said I had a week’s worth of something coming.
**DownLoadable Content Pack.

Hey, have any of you guys heard of this game, Dante’s Inferno? It seems the good people at Visceral Games–you know, the same guys who made The Godfather: The Game, The Godfather II: The Game, and Dead Space–took the first part of Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth-century Divine Comedy and made a God of War style spectacle fighter out of it.  Weird, I know.

If this is news to you, you might want to go read my hard-hitting exposé of all the exposed breasts in which the game cloaks its meager plot first, because today I want to talk about the characters in the game who own and interact with those plot-breasts.  Let’s start with the game’s titular* hero.

Dante 

Apparently, at some point in the last five years, a memo was circulated through Hollywood to the effect that pre-modern masculinity is best captured by having a lead who bellows most of his lines.  (THIS! IS! SPARTA!, I! AM! BEOWULF! THREE! WORD! PHRASE!, etc.) The designers at Visceral got this memo and then some, giving us a hero who shouts his way through the Christian afterlife.  But unlike Leonidas and Beowulf–and yet, strangely, like Dante in Divine Comedy— the video game Dante is in a state of near-constant befuddlement, so the masculine swagger of the more famous bellowers is replaced by shouty confusion.  BUT!… I! DON’T! UNDERSTAND!, WHERE! IS! BEATRICE!?!, VIRGIL! HELP! ME!… It must have been hell on the copy editors who worked on the game’s script.  Does the exclamation point come before the ellipsis or after in MLA style, I wonder?

Other than the fact that HE! WANTS! BEATRICE!, the game designers didn’t give much thought to Dante’s motivations.  In this respect, too, I suppose, they betray an unexpected fidelity to their putative source.  When the game was first announced, I remarked offhand to my little brother that Dante was not a Crusader and had never actually touched Beatrice in real life. Naturally, he asked, “So, why did Dante go to Hell in the original?” and was unsatisfied when I told him, “Oh, you know, he gets chased by some animals and he just finds himself there and figures, oh, what the Hell.”

Of course, there’s no need to explain Dante’s motivations in the game’s tacked on princess rescue A-plot, swiped as it is from Orpheus and Eurydice (or, more probably, from every video game made since Super Mario Bros.). We can all agree, when Satan kidnaps your girl, it is on.  But there’s still the thorny matter of the hero’s new backstory.

As I’ve already discussed, Dante of the game is one of Richard I’s lieutenants during the Third Crusade.  Why he takes up the Crusader flag isn’t ever addressed.  It’s war, I guess, and Dante’s a warrior, so ’nuff said.  Dante leaves after having one steamy night with his beloved, Beatrice, and heads off, promising to be true to her and to return to marry her after the war and also to protect her brother Francesco while he’s away.  Why he doesn’t just marry her before heading out is, likewise, never addressed.

So then whilst on Crusade, the video game Richard (who seems to be modeled directly on Sean Connery’s cameo in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) takes some 2,700 Muslims prisoner at Acre, as he did in the “real” Crusade.  But in the game, when Richard doesn’t immediately have them executed, the video game Dante is enraged and takes it upon himself to kill them all personally.  Some he burns during an animated cutscene, and others he apparently gives weapons to so that you can learn while helping him mow them down in wave after wave which button does what.  Eventually, Richard learns of the slaughter and is enraged, and for some reason, Dante lets Francesco–Beatrice’s brother that he swore to protect–take the blame for the war crimes and be summarily executed by the justice-minded Richard.

As if this all was not enough, Dante also allows one Muslim to go free, telling him it is on behalf of Beatrice of Florence that he is given mercy, but actually because that Muslim’s sister offered herself to Dante for one night of sweaty prison sex.  This little transaction becomes the key plot point of the game.  The Muslim Dante spared apparently tracks down Beatrice and kills her and Dante’s father in revenge.  And somehow, Dante’s breaking his promise to Beatrice is what allows the Devil to take her to Hell, and the infidelity on top of the betrayal of her brother is what convinces Beatrice to become Lucifer’s flaming-boobed hellbride once she’s there.

And so I find myself unexpectedly agreeing with the game’s version of Cleopatra when she asks Dante, “You gave up the keys to the kingdom, Dante, and for what, a Saracen’s tits?”****  I think we can all agree that the character’s motivations have gotten away from the designers when you find yourself saying to the hero, “Actually, the giant purple topless demon with monkey feet and nipples that shoot babies has a point.”

Dante has no answer to Cleopatra’s question because she asks it during a boss battle and there’s no button in the game reserved for “offer a consistent moral justification for your actions”.  But what the hell, Visceral?  This isn’t the troubled backstory of an anti-hero seeking redemption.  Dante’s pretty much a horny amoral psychopath.

Beatrice

In many ways, Beatrice functions in the game as she does in the original Inferno, as the distant object of the hero’s desire that motivates him on his journey, though her role is downgraded slightly from perfect intellectual idealization of romantic love to B-movie-grade sex object.  Now, I’m not going to gnash my metaphorical teeth over this reassignment, because it’s well-established that video games need princesses,***** and at least since Dragon’s Lair we’ve known that it doesn’t hurt to give that princess some porn-star quality cleavage if you want to liberate a dude’s hard-earned quarters.

Though the game never makes it explicit, it seems pretty clear to me that before the game took place, the Devil must have went down to Florence looking for a soul to steal.  Presumably he was way behind, running out of time, and looking to make a deal when he came across a young, nubile blonde (and she was hot), so he set right down on a hickory stump and said “Bea, let me tell you what.  I’ll bet you didn’t know it, but that ass Dante’s cheat on you, and if you care to take my dare I’ll make a bet with you.”  Then, I guess, he must have bet a fiddle of gold against her soul if it turned out that Dante was a cheating jerk.****** (SPOILER ALERT: He was!)

Otherwise, I’m at a loss to explain why Dante’s sins in the Holy Land somehow mean that not only is Beatrice damned she’s also forced to become Lucifer’s regular Saturday night thing.  But even then I’m still at a loss for what happens next.  When Beatrice learns everything Dante did, in short order she gives herself willingly to Lucifer and becomes his bride; accepts his magical tainted pomegranate of symbolism; embraces Hell’s corruption and transforms into a flaming sexy demon; takes over as the new mistress of Fraud, the eighth circle; and tries to kill Dante by sending ten waves of demons after him that can only be defeated in gimmicky ways like not using your block button for the entire wave.  And yet somehow, all it takes is for Dante to beg for her forgiveness and she’s back to being virginal and pure and worthy of ascending to Heaven.

The best I’ve got is that originally the game was supposed to be an adaptation of the 1985 Ridley Scott film Legend.

But for all it’s derivativity, the game does manage to create a novel, if disturbing, take on the old tired Virgin/Whore dichotomy.  Beatrice begins the game as Virgin Who’ll Still Totally Have Sex With You, and ONLY You, and then while in Hell becomes the Whore Will Have Sex With Everyone BUT You, Including Satan. And at the game’s end, I guess she’s back to being the Virgin, and we’ll have to wait until Dante’s Inferno 3: War on Heaven to find out who she’s having sex with while she’s there.

Virgil

When I started this review, I was certain I’d have something to say about all four of the game’s principles.  I even made a clever graphic!  But now I realize there’s nothing to say about the game’s take on Virgil.  Other than giving him spikes growing out of his head and some weird veiny roots on his chest, the game is absolutely faithful to Dante’s original conception of Virgil, so faithful that every line of dialogue he utters is taken word-for-word from the Longfellow translation of the Inferno.

This faithfulness does lead to some incongruous moments in the game, though.  Virgil blithely natters on about things like the Harrowing of Hell and the evils of usury, completely disconnected from the phantasmagoria of weirdness all around him.  But they don’t force him to explain how your buttons work in the tutorials, as I’d feared they would, so really it’s all good.*******  You Latin teachers and Classicists can breathe a sigh of relief.

Satan The Adversary The Emperor of the Woeful Realm Hell, let’s just call him “Lucifer” after all, it’s not like the Christians will really mind

If you need any further proof that the game is really Dante’s Inferno: Super-Fun Legend Edition, you need look no further than the game’s antagonist, who the designers can’t really decide if they’re going to man up enough to call the Devil or not.  Half of the time they use some vague euphemism, but then they turn right around and call him Lucifer right after that, so I don’t know what to do.  Even the achievement text for beating him can’t make up its mind:

But regardless of what you call him, he’s basically a palette-swapped Darkness, the Luigi to Tim Curry’s Mario, if you will, with a little bit of Milton’s Paradise Lost thrown in for good measure.

During the game’s ending cutscene, we learn that–SHOCK!!–Dante is as dead as he appears to have been when the Saracen stuck a knife in his back during the cutscene at the end of the tutorial, and the whole stealing the princess thing was just bait to get Dante, “the evilest man that ever eviled”, down to Hell to break him out.  Now, some internet types have taken this as evidence that the entire game takes place in Dante’s mind, that everything we see after the blade sinks between Dante’s shoulder blades is one big illusion from Satan, the Prince of Lies.  But if that were the case, Satan really shouldn’t have cast illusions on Dante that made him wander through Hell collecting all the souls he’d need to defeat him at the end of the game, should he?  Classic double-double cross, I guess… or is it? 

Emnightshyamalanry aside, Lucifer does, by default, manage to come off as the most consistently motivated character in the entire game, but I guess it’s not that hard to write the Devil consistently.  Dude just wants some revenge on the Almighty, and if he can get that revenge through mankind’s unquenchable fallen desire for porn-star quality boobies, more’s the better.

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*Meaning “the guy in the title”.  Just because the game is 85% boobs** doesn’t mean you can titter*** every time I use a word with the syllable “tit”.
**10% platforming, %5 lemon custard.
***Now what did I say, again? Don’t make me come over there.
****Here I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t have a save file close to this scene.
*****Even if it’s equally well established that said princesses are always in another castle.
******The girl said, “My name’s Beatrice, and it might be a sin, but I’ll take your bet, you’re going to regret, my man’s the truest there’s ever been.”
*******I don’t want to oversell my “fear” there.  I don’t mean to suggest that I spent restless nights tossing and turning over the possibility that they might make the greatest Latin poet of antiquity say, “Pusheth the A button whence thou wishest to useth thine scytheth, Dante!”  Though I must admit, it would be awesome if they made him say “Eyes of Skull Has a Secret!” or “Lucifer Dislikes Smoke!”

Got Medieval now has its own page on Facebook.  (I’m such a joiner.) Go there and, if you so desire, become a fan of it.  Or poke it.  Or marvel at its lack of status updates.  Hell, I don’t know what the kids today (with their clothes and their shoes) do with their facebooks.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a tool through which my friends can force me to look at endless pictures of their damn babies and annoy me by asking me to help them buy a virtual tractor to use in their gang war against some vampires.

But In the Medieval Middle has a Facebook page, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be less hip than those weirdos.  23 skidoo!