The title was lovingly rendered in 3D to compliment the “imaginary real location” paradigm that was adopted for the page design and layout.

The “landscape orientation” concept present a design and technical challenge but has proved to be a valuable idea.

I have been waiting fervently for this release for over a month, resisting the temptation to jump ship to Reeder many times over. Phantom Fish, the developer, promised its delayed release would be on the 10th and it has been delivered!

My biggest impatience with Byline was Instapaper integration which was not being considered as an upcoming feature until enough people asked the developer. After discovering the service and its iPhone application I am hooked on cleanly formatted web reading, devoid of annoying banner ads and fast caching on my phone. As well as the whole “I don’t have time to read this now but it looks interesting for later” idea that Instapaper facilitates.

Byline 3.0 delivers Send to Instapaper and more by actually using Instapaper’s webpage formatting engine to cache all webpages loaded by Byline! This is pure gold! And it is not just the pages it automatically caches when updating feeds but also pages loaded by clicking links in articles. In a way this is bad: once you get used to how fast things load mobile Safari surfing is agonising.

Other features include:

1. post to Twitter (finally),
2. new icons,
3. intelligent caching of partial feeds,
4. expandable folders to isolate individual feeds,
5. in-app settings configuration,

Feature #3 is interesting but doesn’t work well with “the great aggregators” like Digg as their actual pages are concatenations. This is no fault of Byline but more an annoying fringe deficit from the mechanics of these websites. Thankfully, as mentioned above, on-clicking to that actual article gets formatted beautifully and loads crazy-fast.

A friend was quite sheepish about the announcement of #4, expandable folders. He feared that it would turn into an interface mess the likes of NetNewsWire on iPhone. This rubbed off on me so I am glad to report that Phantom Fish sat down and thought this through, successfully integrating the feature without negating the core functionality of Byline (reading assorted feeds in folders) and without having a huge, cumbersome list. I have noticed an odd thing which I am hoping is something that will sort itself out: my Apple folder, as an example, doesn’t contain all my feeds. Perhaps, since it is synchronising or the first time they will show up when they have new posts in them… fingers crossed.

#5, in-app settings, is fairly explanatory and very welcome for fast tinkering. The only thing missing I can think of is the white-on-black or “night mode” formatting for articles/webpages like the Instapaper app.

Zeus himself would be rolling in his monotheistic-crafted grave at this clumsily polished Hollywood remake fronted by the blockbuster-killing Sam Worthington who recently contributed to ruining Avatar. He plays almost the same roll: a quiet-spoken, over-privaledged, uncharismatic “hero”. This time he is the bastard son of Zeus and wields it like the self-consious nuevo-rich annoyance. I don’t completely blame the actor himself, but rather the powers that choose to wield his abilities in this fashion and the fact that he is now a Schrödinger’s cat for action-packed [soulless] blockbusters. Unlikeable, unbelievable, shallow and block-headed. It is a real shame as the supporting cast were really good with the exception of Zeus and the rest of the Gods looking a bit like characters from the dated Mortal Kombat movie.

“Zeus” is immediately apparent as miscast, he just looks wrong. Coupled with the stupid blooming, ill-fitted costumes makes the gods very un-godly.

This movie comes complete with lines of script to crush any nuance or hint of subtext. Surely if people don’t know what putting coins on a dead person’s closed eyes means, they can appreciate it as a ritual without having the point driven home by an obtuse line of dialogue.

Lacking in brutality and very weak in treatment of its subject matter, your enjoyment comes down to the props. The Kraken is as awesome as you hoped but the scene doesn’t last long, nor does the Kraken do much besides taking a very long time to stand up. I am unsure about the d’jins; the desert scorpian-riders seem to belong to a different mythos.

If anyone compares this movie to the line of epic quasi-historic movies like Last of the Mohicans, Braveheart, Gladiator and Troy, dismiss it as marketecture, this movie is not in the same league nor possesses the same depth or emotional content.

God of War 3 (GOW3) pushes the action-adventure genre forward on the Playstation 3. The stunning graphics and epic opening battle paves the way for an exhilarating 10 hours of savage, cinematic, gaming glory. It took Santa Monica Studios a while to get this into our hot hands but there is little that disappoints.

This video provides a great catch-me-up. Although it will spoil things, so if you haven’t played the first two games don’t watch this movie.

I bought the Ultimate collectors edition which comes in a replica of Pandora’s Box. I don’t regret the purchase at all but I am a fan of this series and objectively, it may not really be “worth it”. Especially since the included art book is a total joke. It is the same size and only slightly better than the throw-away-voucher-code booklet by virtue that it is printed on thicker stock. I would have preferred a digital version of something well-thought out and viewable without having to squint. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an GOW3 exclusive metal album via download although this does not make up for the art book.

GOW3 is brutal, epic and showcases some of the best game graphics and design in any console game. An aspect that I found surprising was the implementation of the quicktime events having the button symbols on the correlating side of the screen to the respective button positions on the controller. This really helped make these usually annoying tropes actually quite enjoyable as an interactive element to a cutscene and made things flow a lot better. It also meant that the action, the whole point of a stupid quick-time event, is front and centre without any button graphics overlaid.

One of the first things that I found disappointing about GOW3 was Kratos’ voice actor. Being the main character I would of expected them to be a bit more attentive to him not sounding like an amateur attempting to play huge-man. Thankfully most of the other voice acting was pretty good and Kratos is not overly verbose anyway so one does not have to suffer for long.

The cinematic camera is fairly good; I certainly wouldn’t trade it in for one I could control. There were some annoying points where I couldn’t see myself behind a mob of creatures or something in the foreground. But this only happened about 3 times throughout the entire game so that is within reason.

Story issues

I must admit that I found some of the story aspects a little incongruent after the epic opening. Perhaps “incongruent” isn’t the right word but something just didn’t feel right throughout and at times I felt like I was just playing a game rather than being immersed in an adventure. Some of that I put to the implementation of the “bosses” which felt a little shallow and JRPG-like: all posey and “here is the outline of what you face throughout the game”. Hades in particular just sort of happened without much depth. It was a great fight but I kept thinking how much better the boss King Minos was from Dante’s Inferno.

Another sticking point is Pandora. This, perhaps, ties in with Kratos’ poor voice acting as his sudden change of heart towards her was abrupt and hard to believe. The concept was there and I believed how he could treat her with remorse due to his family but the transition from “I am Kratos I must eat you if you’re in my way” to “no Pandora don’t die, I have your teddy bear with me” was sudden, contrived and stupid.

The “conclusion” of the game also annoyed me somewhat. I won’t spoil anything but wait through the game credits and you should see what I mean. Also apparently there was a big sequence cut from the ending which is disappointing.

Re-playability

I noticed after I finished the game that when changing costumes it not only affected the game model but the menu and cutscenes, meaning that most/all the in-game movies cutscenes are game engine which is just amazing! This certainly helps re-playability since the costumes look pretty cool as well as adding some interesting perks.

The game itself did seem short. Especially as a concluding piece and in the wake of such life-draining titles as Final Fantasy 13. The challenges are quite fun although some are frustratingly hard and thus I haven’t got access to the intriguing “Combat Arena”. I was hoping for some ingenuity regarding a multiplayer aspect after seeing Dante’s Inferno’s Trials of Lucia but was not overly surprised to not find anything.

Dante sets out on a rescue mission to save Beatrice, but he soon realizes he is also in Hell to face his own demons and ultimately to redeem himself

~ Electronic Arts

It started with a dark scene of Dante sowing and tapestry of his sins to his chest, dying and eventually throwing the player into a fight against death as Dante rejects the idea of being claimed for the underworld. All guns blazing so far and leading towards the main thrust of this review (and what many other people have said also): this is an extremely well-made clone of God of War. I imagine they worked very hard to get it out the door before GOW3, since after it releases Dante’s Inferno will be a vague gesture in comparison. It is to GOW3 what Torchlight is to Diablo 3: something to pass the time until the real thing comes out.

After the first boss fight there was a bit of a lull as I realised how blatantly and absurdly this resembled GOW. Not just resembled but copied EVERYTHING:

1. The way you get health, mana, experience from shrines.
2. How you start in a sectioned off area to fight a certain amount of lesser minions before doing anything.
3. Save points being statues.
4. Finishing moves on creatures.
5. Being caged in and area until you kill everything.
6. The rage bar that increases the more you kill.
7. Too many more to list here…

As a whole Dante’s Inferno feels like the studio got the source code for GOW2, re-skinned it, bolted on a couple of original, though poorly implemented, ideas and pushed it out the door.

Taking into account the “game” is GOW, all they have up their sleeve is originality and tapping into the richness of the original Divine Comedy poem. This shouldn’t be hard given that the poem is a blueprint for the entire landscape and Gustave Doré’s etchings provide explicitly graphic scenes already thought-out and rendered. The game picked up in this respect during the first four areas (three circles) of hell: Purgatory, Limbo, Lust and Gluttony were fantastic and had awesome bosses. Kudos for the harlots that attack you with deformed vaginas. The City of Dis was very scenic and fun to smash through. But as one progresses the originality plateaus and eventually becomes non-sensical as you fight no new enemies in certain circles and instead fight enemies from previous areas – disappointing.

One original idea was the levelling up system: awesome, moral choice throughout the game… Ha! No, no we’ll have none of that! Even worse than it having no bearing over anything asides for which particular attack weapon you want to level up first it does not work even function properly as the reward system is biased. If you punish one of the whimpering characters you come across during the game you don’t get the extra souls that you get by absolving them and playing the Beats for a minute. And during a fight punishing enemies is usually quicker and more effective in battle than absolving. Given that EA are charging for souls in the Play Station Store it is unlikely that any intelligent player will parse moral judgement on the characters properly as one is out to get the souls to level: i.e. absolve. This completely breaks this game mechanic and the whole premise of the game allowing the user to pass judgement. Perhaps, like other parts of the game they ran out of budget to create the punishment mini-game *snort*.

From about the 5th circle till the battle of Lucifer the game looses traction and becomes a bit repetitive. Once you get to the Desert of Burning Sands the quality of cutscenes and polish of the levels really diminishes. The Fraud circle is completely laughable and stupid with ten clunky challenges that reeked of incompleteness. Thankfully, once you pass this you are through the worst part of the game and it can only get better – though not to any new highpoint unless you got off on seeing Doctor Manhattan’s enormous wang.

Dante’s Inferno had the potential to trump the God of War series by being darker, more hardcore, and more full-on but it fails. This game is worth the play but I would borrow, rent, or buy it cheap.