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Dante’s Inferno has music. Who knew? I, for one, was entirely too busy ripping the heads off of organic boats, riding monsters, and killing evil babies to pay attention to the original score. But the game does have a famous — or at least notable — videogame composer doing the music. It’s Garry Shyman, the dude who composed the original score of the eerie shooter, BioShock.

In the official release, Shyman said that Dante’s was one of the most “challenging projects” he’s ever done. He added that being asked to score Hell was “fantastic.”

We like the enthusiasm.

Dante’s Inferno will ship — with music (and evil babies) — on February 12th. If you’re the pre-order type of person, you can grab a wicked deal over at GameStop.com right now.

Our Indie Nation series highlights cool independent games.

What is this? An interactive poem? A fast-paced Choose Your Own Adventure? A smarmy existentialist critique of videogames and the status quo? A silly bit of conceptual game art a la Tale of Tales?

Ergon/Logos is all of these things. Or maybe, it’s none of them. Or it’s some of them.  I’m not a hundred percent sure. I am sure of several things, however: it is free, it is very well paced, and it is interesting. Once the basic premise behind Ergon/Logos becomes apparent (I won’t spoil it here), you will either laugh, pontificate, or close the browser window. It’s that sort of a game.

If it’s even a game, that is.

Hit the jump for more ramblings about whatever the hell Ergon/Logos is.

Most artgames, for whatever reason, positively revel in their ability to be as slow-paced as humanly possible. I can’t blame anyone for not enjoying The Path, nor for not particularly looking forward to The Night Journey; for whatever reason, time passes differently when you’ve got your hands on a controller, and seconds can feel like minutes if something relevant isn’t always happening.

That’s part of the reason I like Ergon/Logos. It’s not terribly subtle and can be downright irritating at moments, but you’ll never be outright bored while "playing" it. A typical "playthrough" lasts less than a few minutes; you may find the experience pretentious or uninteresting, but you certainly won’t feel the familiar sleepy-eyed irritation one typically gets from so many modern artgames. 

Then again, it’s not really a game. It asks nothing more of the player than the ability to read relatively quickly and mouse over words at their own leisure. I haven’t bothered to check out every possible "story" branch, but there is not, as far as I can immediately tell, any definite "win" scenario. Or, if there is, it’s probably no more meaningful or interesting than the far-more-numerous "losing" paths that all seem to end in the word "DYSLEXIA" flooding the screen, for whatever reason. This isn’t the sort of game I’d hold up as an example of the medium’s expressive potential, so much as it is an interesting experiment in…well, something. Choice-based poetry where the choices don’t really matter. High-speed, self-reflexive narrative. 

I have a hard time pinning down what the hell Ergon/Logos is, and that’s what I like about it. Maybe you will, too.

This kind of slipped past my radar, but it seems thst Namco Bandai composer Kennosuke Suemura did a little bit of idea ripping for his Super Robot Taisen series game soundtrack. He was accused of stealing from both Chrono Trigger ("Magus’ Theme") and Lufia II (“The One Who Will Save The Earth"). Sounds like this stealing composer likes 16-bit role-playing games as much as I do.

Did he steal, or were people just blindly calling him out? No, I’m pretty sure he stole these melodies. Original Sound Version linked us to a video which you’ll find below the jump. It plays the songs in question, letting you compare them to the original pieces. This dude had no shame!

What’s crazy is that the composer did this before, earlier with Warcraft II! OSV tells us that Namco Bandai has since released a formal apology and paid a settlement to resolve the issue. I think Namco Bandai needs to send this guy home to play his 16-bit RPGs.

Last month, Harmonix unveiled Rock Band Network, an upcoming service that will allow musicians to get their songs into Rock Band and actually make cold, hard cash by doing so. It’s a groundbreaking project that has the potential to change the face of the music industry. In fact, indie label Sub Pop is already convinced — A&R executive Tony Kiewel recently said that the company is looking into releasing some of its back catalog (including artists like Nirvana and The Shins), as well as future music, on Rock Band Network; he imagines such a digital release as just “another format alongside vinyl and CD.”

But how is this all going to work? How do you get from recording a song in real life to actually putting it up for sale through Rock Band Network? And how accessible is the process? I headed to MTV’s offices in Times Square on Tuesday to find out the answers to those questions and more — hit the jump for a detailed write-up on the future of music.

Rock Band Network (Xbox 360/XNA)
Developer: Harmonix
To be released: Fall 2009

Two Harmonix developers demoed Rock Band Network to us: Audio Lead Caleb Epps and Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus. According to Epps, the idea that was a precursor to Rock Band Network was that Harmonix needed better internal tools to author Rock Band tracks. Harmonix had always done them by hand, which was a painstakingly slow process, so they went looking for a better method. What they ended up with was a customized version of Reaper, a PC/Mac digital audio workstation that’s similar to software like Pro Tools.

Apart from a few extra controls, the version of Reaper that Harmonix is making available to RBN users is functionally identical to the internal tools that the developers themselves will eventually use to author songs (Epps explained that Harmonix isn’t entirely switched over to the new system yet, but some employees, including him, are already using it). “As part of the Rock Band Network, we’re laying our entire MIDI specification bare,” said Epps, so you’ll be working with fully featured, unadulterated software.

Nordhaus outlined four steps to getting music onto Rock Band Network: (1) create the gameplay in MIDI in Reaper; (2) compile the audio and note charts into a song file and audition it on a 360; (3) upload the song to the RBN Web site for peer review; (4) get it into the RBN store upon approval. It’s a rather complex and involved process, and it’s definitely not for everyone. The backbone of Rock Band Network is Microsoft’s XNA development setup, so you’ll need an XNA Creator’s Club account ($49 for four months or $99 for a year) to participate.

I’m not familiar with MIDI authoring programs like Logic Pro or GarageBand, so to me, the basic interface of Reaper looked pretty damn intimidating. Harmonix is offering comprehensive documentation on the RBN Web site with “all the accumulated knowledge that [they have] come up with over the years,” but Epps cautioned, “This is a technical thing you have to do — this isn’t just ‘mash a bunch of buttons and gems come out.’ You have to have some understanding of music and of audio, because the audio you put in is exactly what’s going to appear in the game.”

To begin, you create a “tempo map,” the foundation for your song. Thanks to a custom Harmonix macro for Reaper, you can automate this process to an extent; the program will detect bass drum hits and set the beat accordingly. Then you draw in your note gems. This has to be done note by note, and unlike GHStudio in Guitar Hero — which will use your note input as the Expert chart and automatically generate charts for lower difficulties — you’re responsible for creating the Hard, Medium, and Easy charts as well. You have full control over how your songs look in the game, right down to the animations for your drummer as well as camera cuts and lighting.

If you’re more comfortable with playing the vocal part on a keyboard, you can do that. Getting your lyrics in is very easy — just put them in a text file with multi-syllable words split up, and load that document into Reaper. Once your song is all set up, you use a tool called Magma (PC only, because it has to connect to the 360) to compile the audio and note charts together before you send the whole thing to your 360 to try playing it. Magma is also where you set the price of your song (80, 160, or 240 Microsoft Points — that is, $1, $2, or $3), input your song’s information (artist, title, genre, etc.), make minor mixing tweaks, and set difficulty. You can even upload album art from your computer.

Magma’s song info has a separate slot for “Author,” which allows for individuals or groups to be recognized for actually putting a song onto RBN as opposed to creating it. Companies like Rhythm Authors have already sprung up, offering their services to musicians who want to sell their songs through RBN but don’t know their way around authoring software. The RBN store will let you browse by author, so such companies will be able to grow their reputations as authors.

An upcoming patch for Rock Band 2 will add “Audition” to the game’s Extras menu. That’s the place to test created songs, whether they’re your own, or ones you’ve downloaded for review. Songs can only be auditioned one at a time and cannot be played with friends online. It’s designed specifically to help you test your songs — you can set parts (guitar/bass/drum) to play automatically and adjust speed on the fly (for example, slow a song down to make sure that the in-game drummer is hitting the right things at the right times). The interface shows the number of the current measure, too, so you’ll be able to easily keep track of the places to make changes back in Reaper.

Also included in the patch is the Rock Band Network Store, which is separate from the regular DLC store. Here, you can browse RBN songs in a variety of ways (including author, artist, country of origin, and genre), and demos are available for every song — you’ll get to play the first minute or 35% of the song, whichever is less. Users can rate songs from zero to five “lighters,” too. Once a song is purchased, it’ll show up in Quickplay just like any other Rock Band track, and when it’s being played, an RBN song is indistinguishable from a regular Rock Band song.

The final part of the Rock Band Network experience is creators.rockband.com. Currently, the full functionality of the Web site is available only to RBN beta testers, but upon launch, it’s going to be the home for the RBN authoring community. There, authors will post new songs, which will be in one of two states: playtest and peer review. When a song is in the playtest stage, the author is looking for comments and suggestions from players on how to refine the track (each song will have its own forum thread).

Once an author is satisfied with a song, he/she will put it up for XNA peer review. In that step of the process, other XNA Creator’s Club members will look at the song and ensure that it meets the RBN Store criteria (for example, in order to keep everything within Rock Band’s “T” rating, profanity is verboten). If a song passes peer review, it’ll be put on the RBN Store for the world to buy. Just like all XNA developers, authors will get paid every quarter — in this case, they’ll receive 30% of the proceeds from a song’s sales.

It’s apparent that Rock Band Network will require a significant investment of time and money, but I imagine that it’ll be worth it for musicians who are looking for a new avenue to sell their songs. Who knows? In the future, we may see lesser known artists put out Rock Band Network versions of their music day and date with the CD and iTunes releases.

What do you like on your hot dogs? Me? I’m a mustard and relish kind of guy. Or, on rare occasions, hit me with the chili and onions (and mustard again) for more of a knife and fork kind of meal. Sauerkraut, though? That’s not my style, I’d…oh, wait. Not Sauerkraut – Sakuranaut.

Sakuranaut is an upcoming Nintendo DS role-playing game, and not a hot dog topping. It comes by way of Marvelous Entertainment, set to hit Japan on November 5th. 1UP says that the game tells the story of two towns and two mysterious sakura (cherry blossom) trees, one in each, that have something to do with a new girl in town being targeted by ghosts. Your character, a young boy, sets out to set things right.

Some big-time RPG people are working on this game. Composer Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy) is doing the music, while Kazushige Nojima (Kingdom Hearts) is doing the writing. Hideo Minaba is working the visuals, just as he’s done for the Final Fantasy series, and Akira Ueda will be the chief designer, just as he was for Contact.  

This should turn out to be a pretty good game. Let’s hope it gets localized.

Yes, it is just like Radiohead, isn’t it?

Eidos is introducing a consumer-friendly pay scheme for Championship Manager 2010, offering players the chance to buy the game for as little as one English pence, plus the obligatory £2.50 transaction fee. You can pay more than 1p if you want, choosing your own price to reflect how much the game is worth. 

"This is the first time an initiative like this has ever been tried in the videogames market," says general manager Roy Meredith. "This is the best Championship Manager the studio has ever made and we want as many people as possible to try the full new game as once they try it we’re convinced they will come back again and again."

This is going to be very, very interesting. I can see how this works in the music industury, where a number of bands have very loyal fanbases who want to give away money and support the acts. However, the games industry has very rarely been able to inspire a similar sense of loyalty. I can’t wait to see how deep into the pockets gamers will actually dig for this.

Over the past few weeks, I have written harsh criticisms of the way Sony and Microsoft conduct themselves, calling them out on a variety of problems and attitudes. One thing I have attempted to make clear is that I do not hate the systems they have made. I have problems with the companies behind the PS3 and the Xbox 360, certainly, but I love the consoles themselves.

The Wii is a slightly different matter. I had a Wii, once. I don’t anymore. I sold mine for a tidy profit before I left Europe for the United States, but so far I have not considered an NTSC Wii to be a worthy investment. Unlike the 360 and the PS3, I have no real love for the Wii. I barely consider it a game system. At least, it’s certainly not a system intended for someone like me. It could have been. In fact, it could have been a system for everybody, but it’s very clear that’s not the way Nintendo, especially Nintendo of America, is headed. 

Yet Nintendo keeps talking like it is, and I really wish it wouldn’t. The smug, passive-aggressive comments about the game industry and the almost gleeful dangling of carrots has become quite ridiculous. Nintendo is a man telling you he’s your friend while he’s steadily kicking you in the groin. For that, Nintendo definitely needs to STFU.

The final nail should have been E3 2008. That was the day Nintendo of America showed its true colors. A huge room full of gamers, and Nintendo stood there, boasted about how rich it was, spent an hour simpering and smirking, then unleashed the embarrassing horror of Wii Music upon the land.

While a man called Ravi Drums had some sort of seizure onstage, a once proud and legendary game designer held a Wiimote like a penis to his mouth and tried to convince us he was playing the saxophone. Then a group of clearly mentally impaired adults attempted to make a decent tune, which became a cacophony, a blasphemous rape of the Mario Bros. theme tune that had become an icon to many true gamers. That’s what Nintendo did. Nintendo thinks this is high quality entertainment.

For me, it demonstrated that Nintendo did not consider itself a part of the game industry. That’s not something I’m angry or bitter over. I personally have never had any real loyalty to Nintendo so I don’t feel "hurt" or "betrayed" or anything similarly melodramatic. What annoys me isn’t the fact that Nintendo "abandoned" the "hardcore gamer." It’s the fact that Nintendo keeps pretending it hasn’t.

E3 08 showed that Nintendo of America is pretty much ashamed of its own roots. During its press conference, NoA saw fit to show us such titles as Animal Crossing, Wii Sports Resort, Wii Music, and some shitty snowboarding game. Easy stuff. Safe stuff. What some call "casual" stuff. If it wasn’t cute, instantly accessible, and ran some perceived risk of scaring off the mainstream crowd, however small, then Nintendo didn’t want anything to do with it. That Wii Music was Nintendo’s grand reveal, while Pikmin 3 was announced quietly to a handful of journalists the next day, typifies Nintendo’s attitude: Keep the "embarrassing" stuff behind closed doors to make sure the mainstream crowd doesn’t see it, lest they get frightened and run away. 

Reggie Fils-Aime seems to be the one who enjoys stringing what he calls "core gamers" along the most. When he addressed the negative response to E3 08, he smugly declared that he could not understand why people were disappointed. His attitude perfectly encapsulates Nintendo’s philosophy when he said this one statement: "How could you feel left out? The Animal Crossing that we’ve been hearing about that people wanted, fully connected to the Internet, go to other people’s towns."

Yeah … Animal Crossing was Reggie’s answer to a new Legend of Zelda or Mario. According to Fils-Aime, a boring game where animals warble insane crap at each other like, "I think pasta is tasty, let’s go to a rock concert," is a game we should be grateful for. That’s part of the root of my problem with Nintendo right now, the belief that its longest-serving consumers should be thankful for the few scraps that get tossed their way, as if they couldn’t get a more fulfilling experience anywhere else. 

Ever since it crawled itself out of third place last generation, Nintendo has swiftly adopted a sneering, condescending attitude toward the rest of the industry and the game-loving public. Fils-Aime is certainly the biggest outlet for that, consistently laughing at gamers with patronizing statements like "the core gamer is insatiable." He seems to enjoy the bait-and-switch that Nintendo pulls, where it appeals to hardcore gamers for one day out of 364, gives them the occasional treat, then ignores them again. 

At this point, you may say to me, "But Jim, E3 09 was the shit, son! They had Metroid. Think of the METROID!" Again, however, this merely proves my point. After the disaster of E3 08, a press conference so bad that even mainstream outlets like Yahoo came away disappointed, Nintendo had to do something. So it did what Nintendo does best: It threw a few bones, put up some smoke and mirrors, then sat back and basked in the jizz of naive Nintendo loyalists who screamed, "Nintendo is BACK," or "Nintendo has redeemed itself!" People are so quick to forget Nintendo’s bullshit, and so quick to claim REDEMPTION at every turn. Nintendo played them like a Hammond organ, and it worked like a charm. How many more "redemption" moments will Nintendo have before this generation is out?

A new Metroid, Mario and the teased new Zelda (Pikmin 3 appears to have been forgotten by this point) do not exactly make for a killer lineup, especially considering the fact that it’s been a year since E3 08. Yet Nintendo fans will justify the company’s attitude by actually being grateful for it. As if Nintendo has done an amazing thing. Really, Nintendo has done what it’s always done: Made a big show of being "sorry" for its arrogance, tossed a mere handful of interesting videogames our way, then gone back to its usual embrace of soccer moms and grandmothers. The fact that Nintendo fans lap that shit up like starving dogs is kind of pathetic, really. 

Its executives say things like, "Only geeks and otakus want a hard-drive on their Wii," but if it announces just one Zelda game, all is forgiven, like an abusive husband who kicked the shit out of his wife one night, then comes home with cheap flowers the next. Nintendo of America has adequately demonstrated its contempt for the "core" gamer, and does very little but patronize and mock, yet it still sticks around for no good reason whatsoever. 

It’s the half-measures that irk me more than anything else. If Nintendo wants to be an arrogant, condescending shit, then that’s fine. That’s fantastic, in fact. However, it never wants to go all the way. It should have abandoned events like E3 long, long ago, but it sticks around, possibly because it knows nobody stands on top of the industry forever and it’ll need loyalty from the people it’s currently laughing at one day. Maybe it’s simply because it realizes it can still make plenty of money out of a demographic it’s shown public disdain for. Not many companies can laugh in the face of its consumers on a public stage and still command their loyalty. That would make you feel like some sort of God.

Whatever the reason, I hate that Nintendo sticks around, tossing down chicken feed with one hand and smacking people around with the other. Nintendo of America ought to have the balls to go the whole way with its attitude. Shit or get off the lavvy. Not act like the two-faced bitch it’s currently being. 

That’s not a criticism of the Wii, I hasten to add. The Wii just is what it is. It’s neither good nor evil, merely shaped by good or evil hands. I don’t have an issue with the Wii’s wasted potential, I just wish Nintendo would keep it on shows like Chelsea Lately where it belongs. That’s Nintendo’s core audience now. Still pretending that’s not the case is just adding insult to, well, insult. 

Oh but wait, there’s another Mario game! All is forgiven!

Available now — right this second for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii — is a free download for Guitar Hero: World Tour, the "Activision Music Track Pack."

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you can rock out to the main theme to Prototype or the multiplayer menu music for Call of Duty: World at War. While that would be awesome, the "Activision Music Track Pack" is made up of three bands featuring musicians from "the Activision family." 

• Awaken – "The Silence is Deafening"
• H is Orange – "Nothing All the Time"
• Hundreds of Reasons – "I’ll Never Know"

No, I’ve never heard of those bands, either. But one can’t argue with free, and maybe one of those three groups is your new favorite band. If that’s not doing it for you, next week’s Guitar Hero: World Tour DLC will be a recording of "Dueling Banjos" by Steven Ouimette. And now I’m thinking about Deliverance, and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.

Activision also notes that this will be the last batch of DLC before Guitar Hero 5 hits stores on September 1. But don’t fear — all of this DLC will be compatible with Guitar Hero 5, so if H is Orange does turn out to be your new favorite band, you’ll be good to go. 

When Pop’n Music was announced for the Wii at E3 this year, kitty and bunny ears everywhere perked up among its dedicated fans. They then dropped when it turned out that, not only was there no 9-button mode, there wouldn’t even be a traditional Pop’n controller to play it with.

I can somewhat understand the need to dumb everything down to appeal to a wider audience, but if you’re familiar with Pop’n, this is rather like Rock Band coming without any guitars or a drum kit. DDR with no dance pad. Admittedly, the game can be difficult if you want to swing that way, but to remove those options entirely for the game’s established fanbase pretty much rips out its Bemani spirit and stomps on it.

You can rabble and cry "elitist" all you want, but If so much of what made the game what it was has been stripped away, why call it by the same name? New IPs are a good thing, you know. I’m all for inviting newcomers and giving people an easy version of the game, but here was a great chance to appeal to a more hardcore audience, which has instead been completely left out in favor of the former.

If you’ve never played it, however, this could still be a nice gateway into the world of rhythm games for you. Some of the franchise’s beloved characters are still around, and at least we can say it sort of looks like Pop’n Music, which means it immediately beats the pants off of the abomination that was Beat ‘n Groovy. You can see for yourself by taking a look at these new screenshots in the gallery below.