Official Dreamcast Magazine (UK) Preview - April 2001

NOTE - Names changed to protect the innocent... :)

Hellgate

A shoot 'em up based on Dante's Inferno? With Hell's Angels? From Wales? STEVE HILL is confused

It may be the natural habitat of the mullet and stone-washed denim, but North Wales is also home to Jester Interactive. While not yet a big noise in the world of games, the Mold-based developer's priimary contribution to the joypad-grapplers has been the award-winning music creation titles, Music and Music 2000 in PlayStation. They are currently making inroads into gamesville though, and have a number of projects on the go, including Hellgate, which at the time of writing is residing on the "publisher required" list.

As the name suggests, hell plays quite a sizeable part in the game, which is actually a rather ambitious rewrite of Dante's Inferno, albeit with heavily armed hover bikes. And if you're not familiar with Dante's Inferno, suffice to say the 13th-century Italian poet's rambling opus isn't exactly a laugh-a-minute short story. Jester Interactive have thankfully taken a degree of poetic licence through and, as Hellgate's lead designer X-Badger says, "It's based on Dante's Inferno, but we begged, borrowed and stole from Greek mythology, as well as medieval stuff. And we just liked the Hell's Angels angle as well.

Oh yeah, the Hell's Angels. Look, let's start at the beginning. The game's protagonist, Marv, is leader of the Nevada chapter of the Hell's Angels. One night, they're cruisin' around, drinking cheap liquor, listening to Hawkwind, doing Hell's Angels kind of stuff. Imagine their surprise then, when the entire chapter (bar Marv) is mercilessly butchered by a firm claiming to be the real Hell's Angels in that they're actually from hell, and indeed mighty annoyed at some earthbound slackers using their name. During the ensuing scuffle, Marv kills a demon, steals his bike and follows the real "Angels" into hell to avenge his buddies by retrieving their souls. However, guided by Dante himself, there's a hidden agenda in that Marv has actually been earmarked to kickstart Armageddon by killing a host of demons and opening the gates of hell.

Fortunately, Marv's new bike is a step up from the leopard-skin Harley he's been used to, and as such can hover forwards and backwards, strafe, and hold machine guns, Gatling guns, grenade launchers, rockets and so on. Clearly the phrase "shoot 'em up" springs to mind, but according to its designer, "I don't think you can peg it for any one thing. It's quite quick in a shoot 'em up way, but it's also story-based so you can follow the cut-scenes, and there's also an element of figuring stuff out as you go through. There's a number of different ways of playing it, all of which work."

Having seen it with our own eyes, we can certainly vouch for the speed, and the handling. Lead programmer Duff Man concurs, "It's very twitchy. The bike is capable of high speed for the speed sections, but the idea is to be able to control the bike and not just go round at massive speed. We basically wanted to be able to get to maximum speed practically instantly and to stop again, but we want people to use the analogue throttle to get around carefully."

Killing demons is always a good concept, particularly when they explode into giblets of freshly cooked meat, roping great arcs of hot blood over the walls and ceiling, something that any prospective publisher will have to take into consideration. The game certainly has a chance, and allied to an array of multiplayer modes, including eight-way Internet play, it could be worth looking out for. If they get it right, it might just be the best thing to come out of North Wales since the road to Chester.