All human life is here, from the feeble old dear, to the screaming child...

"I have to say, I was disappointed in this book. It was well written don't get me wrong, but it wasn't in the least bit funny."

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a genuine quote from a review of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy on Amazon.co.uk. Christina Martin, the author of that quote, you are a special, special person. Of course it's followed by a comment pointing out the hand-clapping retardedness of the review, and sequentially a retort from Ms. Martin claiming to be a patron of sarcasm instead of a window licker, but when someone is that keen to cover their tracks after saying something like that, you have to worry.

Now where was I? Oh yeah. Dante's Inferno, a game developed for release earlier this year by Visceral and published by EA, is a... well, I'm sure there's an official term for the genre, but if any game deserves to be called a God of War clone, it's this one. It's a videogame adaptation of Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, and chronicles the titular Dante, now re-imagined as a Knight Templar, on his quest to reclaim the soul of his lost love Beatrice from the clutches of a decidedly well-endowed Satan, after his own sins condemned her to hell.

I'm not even going to try and sugar coat the God of War references, the game is God of War, just not as good. That's not to say it's a bad game by any means, it just lacks the epicness and polish of even the last generation second of Sony's trilogy, and just seems bland and incomplete in comparison. Hell, for instance, is really well-imagined during the first couple of levels, but after the Lust section (think phallically-shaped towers, writhing scantily clad whores who attack with concealed penises and a 100ft tall woman with mouths for nipples that lick their lips and lactate unbaptised babies), and the fleshy bile-filled Gluttony, the other circles just become routine and virtually identical to each other, and each of them seems to be a short walk followed by a boss fight, rinsed and repeated. When you do come to a puzzle, often the screen is so dark that it's frustratingly difficult to work out what to do as well.

It's hard not to make a Connection between Dante's Inferno and Assassin's Creed too, with Dante being a Templar, and the sect being illustrated as evil in this media too. Not to mention the fact that the short chapters set on Earth are in Acre and Florencia, major settings in AC and ACII respectively. Assassin's Creed II also references Dante Alighieri too, along with Marco Polo, which struck me as clever marketing on Ubisoft's part by drawing association with Dante's Inferno and Uncharted 2, two other major franchises. Who knows?

Be thankful for what this image actually doesn't show.

So anyway, Dante is a very average game, but enjoyable. To those of us who are owners of the XBox 360 exclusively, and no doubt won't admit their burning envy of their God of War playing peers, the game is a godsend. For me, however, it was a decent warm-down session after GoWIII's sensory assault. If I was to give my reviews a score, Dante would be somewhere around the mid-seventies.

Back onto Metro 2033 then, eh? I've come to the conclusion that yes, I do in fact like the game. It's just very hard work. The gas mask filters that were once a very scarce commodity eventually become commonplace, and the weapons gradually get upgraded (my assault rifle, for instance, began as a 'Bastard Gun', a cobbled together atrocity of a weapon which sprays bullets everywhere apart from where you're aiming, and I now carry a scoped AK 47). I've decided that it feels like a piece of Fallout 3 DLC, which at £40 is a little bit steep. I definitely recommend it, but wait until it depreciates in value a smidgen first.

Metro 2033 paints a considerably bleaker post-apocalypse than Fallout 3.

Finally in this week's short-but-sweet report, I've had a go with Invizimals on the PSP. The latest contender to the Pokemon phenomenon's throne, Invizimals comes bundled with the PSP's digital camera, which once equipped allows the player to search for the obligatory tiny battling creatures in one's own home, the bus, the toilet, wherever you want. Once an 'Invizimal' is found, the player catches it, usually by performing an act of animal cruelty such as shooting or hitting them with the palm of your (real life) hand until they submit.

Once captured, the domesticated critter can be forced into cutesified cock-fights with other Poke... Invizimals, which operate more like a one on one fighting game than the turn-based battles in Nintendo's established franchise, and works to a degree, but it's more based on timing than statistics.

And the whole thing is interrupted by filmed cutscenes featuring an annoying hyperactive Japanese 'PSP Scientist' and, who else, the mighty Brian Blessed, who's booming English tutorials give a similar feeling to the patronising tones of Stephen Fry in LittleBigPlanet. In short, Pokemon is awesome, the technology utilized is awesome, and Brian Blessed is awesome. Pokemon might be better, but this is a great alternative for PSP users.

If this picture doesn't make you want to go out and buy Invizimals you're dead inside.

So there you are, a theme! A poor man's God of War, Fallout 3 and Pokemon, right there for you. I know I said I'd play Lost Planet, but truth be told, I've spent too much time playing Red Dead Redemption for that. Yeah, thanks to the generosity of my wife, I have Rockstar's epic, but I'm neglecting to write about it just yet, as three days just isn't enough time for it to fully sink in. So I'm not going to bother closing by saying what to expect next week, because I never live up to it. Apart from Red Dead that is, you can expect that.