Simple as they are, it doesn’t matter too much what the characters’ motivations are so long as they’re committing acts of over the top, superhuman badassery with such flair that even bitter old cranks like me have to utter “That was f*cking COOL!” when witnessed. There are a few support characters and villains to add some intrigue amidst all the slaughter of Satan’s salarymen, but all are largely one-dimensional, with a signposted bad guy, frenemy or competing badass roles to contrast with Dante’s near-immortal “God of death with a heart of gold” routine. Each game follows the adventures of Dante, a half-demon demigod who works as a monster slayer for hire out of his shop, “Devil May Cry.” The plot of each game centres around the same basic premise as Dante descends into a Hell of sorts in the form of a demonic haunted house/tower, fights a bunch of lower-level demons until he gains enough power, skill and equipment to defeat the most powerful demon who happens to be waiting around to slain. Originally billed as an adaption of Inferno, the first canto in the Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, the DMC games are too ridiculous to maintain such a lofty pretension. Wayward metaphors aside, in the case of the first and third DMC releases, these are some of the most significant action games of all time, but is a re-release of the HD Collection worth your time and money? That, and he looks desperate enough to stab someone if you openly display your disinterest. Sure, the stories are great, but you’ve already heard better stories from more recent times. If the annual release schedule was a party, and publishers were the guests and their games the conversations, Capcom would be the suspicious old looking dude telling people about AC/DC concerts from thirty years ago, all the while smelling of engine grease and fermented socks. And yet, like clockwork, Capcom is here once again, fresh off its fortune reversing success with Monster Hunter: World, to resume the status quo with a re-release of a re-release of a trilogy from the early 2000s. Preying on nostalgia continues to be a depressingly cynical cash cow for publishers in the off-months of the year as an increasing number of older games are being palmed off under the banner of “HD Remaster.” Few releases actually earn this title, though, and with recent notable exceptions like Shadow of the Colossus and Crash Bandicoot, it makes it even harder to accept the prominence of resolution-bumped shovelware being used to pad out the second quarter of each year.