The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I am now someone who owns a PS3, and so there is now a wealth of old PS3 exclusives for me to go back and play! So I put a bunch of them up on my Gamefly, and the first one to come in was inFamous, Sucker Punch’s super hero open world game. Note the very important spelling as inFamous, with only the F capitalized. Very important, apparently.

Haven’t not played Prototype, I can’t make any statements on that now old debate. But this certainly did seem the better game, and it certainly was pretty solid. You don’t really expect it to be a 3rd Person Shooter when you go into it, but even though you’re throwing lighting bolts, that’s totally what it is. It pulls all of that off pretty well, too. There’s no problems there. You feel just about the right amount of super-powered and fragile, and you eventually get some good movement things going.

But there are two main reasons why I only beat the first island of the three before returning the game, and that’s the incredibly badly handled morality stuff and the repetitious nature of the game.

First off, that Penny Arcade Comic? It nailed how stupid these “moral” choices are. They are so heavy handed and so… dumb. Even the more interesting ones are ruined by the main character going “I could do this… or I could do… THIS WHICH IS EVIL!” in a little game-pausing internal monologue, which just makes the decision seem stupid. For example, early on, there’s a barricade you need to get past with a crowd of protesters in front of it. You can either open fire on the guards from the crowd of protesters, so that the guards focus on the crowd as its enemy, or you can walk in front of them and start opening fire from there, making yourself the clear target. This is a very interesting decision. I could see myself being shocked and genuinely moved by firing from the crowd and realizing that was an “evil” decision. However, without the sense of discovery or actually having power over your actions that the internal monologue outlining the decision takes away from you, it’s ultimately meaningless. All the choices are “Do I want the red powers or the blue powers?” That’s all it is. It’s a really stupid story thing, and honestly brings the game down more than it helps it.

The other thing was the repetition. The game gets into this serious grind. Go do this stupid underground climbing thing to turn power on. Do a mission. Go home. Rinse. Repeat. If the underground missions weren’t exactly the same, maybe that wouldn’t have been so awful, but they pretty well are. After four of those, I was kind of done with those missions forever. The other repetitious part are the side missions. “Just ignore the side missions!” you say. “If they’re repetitious, just don’t do them!” But not doing them is much worse than doing them, because that is how you stop the random enemies from spawning around the city. Each one you do extends the “safe area” where your superpowered heroism has influence. Moving from one place to another with enemies about is VERY ANNOYING. Killing guys isn’t a joy like it is in Crackdown, it’s fairly difficult, and these guys can pot shot you to death and completely distract you. You want them gone, badly. Thus, you do the repetitive side missions, which sometimes have variety, but often don’t, and then you get bored of those too.

It’s a shame, really, because the core mechanics work pretty well. It’s just that the game itself doesn’t offer up enough original content to keep you going the whole time. If you’re someone who wants a game that you can wring all kinds of gameplay out of and get so many hours of play for your buck, I suppose inFamous would help you out with that. These days, though, I don’t have time to put up with that kind of bullshit. I want compact games that are interesting and fun the whole way through. inFamous wasn’t. Still, I’d be very interested in an inFamous 2. They’re set up a very good groundwork here. If they can give things more variety, I would be totally down.