Clive Barker has become the mouthpiece for the “video games are art” crowd through no fault of his own. Roger Ebert’s now infamous anti-video game tirade came as a response to Barker’s comments at the Hollywood and Games Summit earlier this year. Besides galvanizing the gaming community against him, Roger Ebert’s assertion that games are incapable of artistic expression established Barker as the counterpoint to Ebert’s point. And though Ebert has continued to confront gamers directly in the weekly Q&A columns hosted on his website, Barker has remained almost entirely silent on the issue, going so far as to tear up his written response after learning of Ebert’s battle with cancer. Because of this, the gaming press has been slobbering over every scrap Barker throws their way. Conveniently, he also has a new game coming out.

His first game, Clive Barker’s Undying, is as unique amongst video games as it would be in any medium – it’s a horror story that’s genuinely frightening. The game puts players in control of Patrick Gallows, an occult researcher summoned to the gloomy shores of Ireland at the behest of his cursed friend. Over the course of the dialogue-heavy plot, players uncover the mysteries surrounding this supernatural curse. A first-person shooter with a fully developed magic system, Undying also features strange, otherworldly platforming sequences that blatantly embarrass Half-Life’s Xen segments. The game is really very good, the sort of critical success and commercial failure that serves as a sure-fire recipe for a cult hit. It’s tense, creepy, and challenging. And it features the only simultaneously phallic and yonic boss encounter in video game history.

Fast forward six years and one cancelled project later, and Clive Barker’s second game is less than a month away from release. Clive Barker’s Jericho, like Undying before it, is a horror-themed first-person shooter. Far darker than its predecessor, the game follows the Jericho Squad, part of the United States’ Department of Occult Warfare, as they fight to reclaim the city of Al Khalid from demonic influence. The game is a squad-based shooter, with players hopping between members of the Jericho Squad on the fly, each of which sports unique weaponry and paranormal powers.

Jericho is being developed by MercurySteam, a Spanish developer whose sole credit is another possessively titled game – American McGee’s Scrapland, the very pretty, if very dull, GTA rip-off. Add mixed impressions from those who’ve played it, and Jericho doesn’t inspire as much confidence as a game from the man that has become an unintended champion of the medium should. At least it looks nice, anyway.

Today, Codemasters released a Jericho demo across all platforms the game will be appearing on (PC, 360, PS3). Eager to see how Clive Barker’s second foray into the world of video gaming turned out, I downloaded the demo despite not meeting the game’s minimum requirements. Though my graphics card isn’t even in the same ballpark as those supported, the rest of my four-year-old machine skirts in just above or below the suggested specs. Sure, it would be an ugly slideshow of an experience, but at the very least I could get a gauge on the overall quality of the game.

Having spent far too much time downloading and installing the game twice, each time from a different source, I can state with authority that Jericho will not run on my PC. Unfortunately, it just crashes almost immediately after launching, giving me a general error message. As I have no way to actually play the game, this is the point where the update loses all momentum and whimpers away with its tail between its legs. I seriously considered continuing from this point, writing as though I had played the game by pulling information from the various impressions and previews saturating the Internet, but for your sake as much as mine, I won’t.

Generally, this isn’t the sort of update I would bother uploading, but seeing as how I just spent the last three hours working on this disaster, I’m going to put it online anyway. The day’s almost done and I have a quota to meet. Just because I can’t run the demo on my PC doesn’t mean you can’t play it on yours. Unless you fail to meet the system requirements too, in which case just ignore the rest of this.

In true Web 2.0 style, I leave it to you, the one reader whose PC can run this game (Jeremy Hahn), to download the demo and continue where I have failed by posting your impressions of the game and whether or not they live up to the persona Clive Barker has had constructed around him. Sure, the demo’s only ten minutes long, ends abruptly with a Shenmue-inspired QTE, and almost certainly offers no real insight into the quality of the final product, but don’t let that stop you from making broad, sweeping judgments. This is the Internet, after all. The Web 2.0 Internet.

Tomorrow: Something less terrible. I promise.