Infamous
Infamous was a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. Not the game itself so much as deciding whether or not I wanted to buy it. Initially, there was a release trailer for this game and Prototype. Both games seemed very similar; sandbox style games about a new superhero who may or may not be a very nice guy. Prototype was multi-platform, Infamous was PS3 only and I heard good and bad about both. Honestly, I was leaning more towards Prototype as the one game of the two I would try, but then I my eye caught a screenshot or two that struck me just right. Everyonce in a while a game comes along that is released at just the time you want to be playing that exact kind of game.
I saw a shot where the main character is zipping along bridge suspension cables towards a huge city at night. I got this great feeling of wanting to experience open world travel around this gritty metropolis from high up places. I almost bought it at release, but there was a PS3 demo available almost immediately and so I figured I'd be best of at least trying it out first.
The demo was one of the worst I'd ever tried. Not that there was anything technically wrong with it, but it's terrible cut of the game's whole meant I was left with a bad taste in my mouth and I had no interest in the game whatsoever. Infamous' 'morality system' where you get to choose whether or not to act as a good or bad superhero were so terribly black-and-white it seemed absurd. Choosing to keep rations for yourself, or spread them amongst the other survivors, being told outright that 'people will probably die' felt ridiculous. On top of it all, the in-game cutscene contained horrible animations and were generally worse than even those of an MMO.
Months later, Sony had a big security leak, lost people's credit card info and had to shut down their online service for about a month. After everything settled down, they offered everyone who was affected their choice of 4 free title downloads; one of which was Infamous. Free sounded like a pretty good price and so I figured I'd give it another chance. It was a good thing I did too, because as it turned out, the demo was a very very poor representation of the whole game. The moral choice system was actual great, when in proper context, since the goal isn't to become a mean superhero or a good superhero but instead to become a hero or a villain. At which point leaving people to starve and generally electrocuting baddies left-right-and-center makes a lot more sense. The horrible cutscenes turned out to be few and far between and any important cinematics were actually done using a motion comic-book style of storytelling, which was actually nicely done.
So as it turned out, Infamous was actually very enjoyable. The gameplay was lot of fun, the world a blast to explore and your evolution as a superhero or supervillain is a great experience. I was super excited to find out that there was a sequel, but believe it or not I never did end up playing it. Even though I have it free from being a PS+ subscriber, I've yet to give it a try. Now there's even a third part to the series on the PS4, one that I've considered trying, perhaps skipping out on Infamous 2 altogether. Or maybe I'll finally just give part 2 a try someday soon. You know, since I own it.
I saw a shot where the main character is zipping along bridge suspension cables towards a huge city at night. I got this great feeling of wanting to experience open world travel around this gritty metropolis from high up places. I almost bought it at release, but there was a PS3 demo available almost immediately and so I figured I'd be best of at least trying it out first.
The demo was one of the worst I'd ever tried. Not that there was anything technically wrong with it, but it's terrible cut of the game's whole meant I was left with a bad taste in my mouth and I had no interest in the game whatsoever. Infamous' 'morality system' where you get to choose whether or not to act as a good or bad superhero were so terribly black-and-white it seemed absurd. Choosing to keep rations for yourself, or spread them amongst the other survivors, being told outright that 'people will probably die' felt ridiculous. On top of it all, the in-game cutscene contained horrible animations and were generally worse than even those of an MMO.
Months later, Sony had a big security leak, lost people's credit card info and had to shut down their online service for about a month. After everything settled down, they offered everyone who was affected their choice of 4 free title downloads; one of which was Infamous. Free sounded like a pretty good price and so I figured I'd give it another chance. It was a good thing I did too, because as it turned out, the demo was a very very poor representation of the whole game. The moral choice system was actual great, when in proper context, since the goal isn't to become a mean superhero or a good superhero but instead to become a hero or a villain. At which point leaving people to starve and generally electrocuting baddies left-right-and-center makes a lot more sense. The horrible cutscenes turned out to be few and far between and any important cinematics were actually done using a motion comic-book style of storytelling, which was actually nicely done.
So as it turned out, Infamous was actually very enjoyable. The gameplay was lot of fun, the world a blast to explore and your evolution as a superhero or supervillain is a great experience. I was super excited to find out that there was a sequel, but believe it or not I never did end up playing it. Even though I have it free from being a PS+ subscriber, I've yet to give it a try. Now there's even a third part to the series on the PS4, one that I've considered trying, perhaps skipping out on Infamous 2 altogether. Or maybe I'll finally just give part 2 a try someday soon. You know, since I own it.
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