It has happened! I love World of Warcraft, but I have only played it for a couple hours in the past week (4 weeks if you count my Scotland trip).

One of the reasons is Devil May Cry 3 on the Playstation 2. The concept: you are a human-demon slashing and gunning hordes of demons in a quest to prevent the Demon World from taking over Earth, while uncovering the secrets of your family as you progress. Character names and title are inspired by Dante Alighieri’s "Divine Comedy", but that’s about as intellectual as it gets. The rest is fast combat, over-the-top combos, high-impact weapons, gothic environments and lame dialogues.

Devil May Cry 1 was the first game I played all through several times since Quake 2 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The sequel tried to expand the game, but chose the wrong directions. DMC3 takes the few good points of DMC2 (wallrunning for example) and delivers a supercharged version of the first game’s gameplay. Different combat styles, more skills then you can ever hope to buy, and a large collection of bosses.

And a pretty tough difficulty curve.

DMC1 had a "rite of passage" in the form of the boss in level 3. It was incredibly hard, at a point when you were still getting used to the game’s controls. Many of us were offered switching to "Easy Mode" by the game itself after a few deaths, and could only defeat the Balrog-like scorpion thanks to online tips and walkthroughs.

DMC3 provides many such challenges, almost one per mission. And always at the end. Yes, you will find yourself replaying missions quite frequently. It gets a bit frustrating, especially when the rest of the game is fairly easy. I have died in excess of 20 times, every single one of them at an end boss.

But this problem is easily forgiven, because the game is truly fun and rewarding, with fantastic producion value (the best engine-driven cutscnes I’ve ever seen). Lengthwise I think it will prove short but very replayable.

Reports are that God of War is just as good as DMC3… It’s going to be a great month for my PS2.