Infamous (PS3)
2009 Sucker Punch
The Short Version: Surly bald bike courier gets power over electricity, and it’s up to you whether he uses it for good or evil. Spoilers: he remains surly either way.
The Long Version: Infamous is a much-needed reminder that all things in life are absolute. I often find myself thinking that people who oppose me have good points to support their views, and acknowledge that I may not always be right. But in actuality, all of life’s choices are creating points to be tallied toward the side of good or evil. Black or white. Democrat or Republican. So on.
One fine day, bike courier Cole McGrath is out delivering a package of mad science, when he gets a call to open it, and thinking nothing suspicious of it, does so, unleashing a massive wave of destructive energy across town, devastating the cityscape and awakening dormant superpowers in both himself and every insane vagrant in town. If you remember the Kids’ WB series Static Shock, it’s a lot like that, only they made the hero whiter. And much like Static Shock, inFamous warns us of the dangers of guns by making sure to shoot you to pieces any time you stand around for too long at a time. Whether you’re fighting the Reapers, not to be confused with the Reapers from The World Ends With You- actually, fuck, very much to be confused with the Reapers from The World Ends With You- or the dastardly Superhobos, every bad guy in town is a trained sniper with a machine gun. They’re also psychic to a degree, able to sense Cole’s presence about six blocks away and perfectly converge fire on a single point.
Another helpful lesson inFamous teaches players is reinforcing the old adage that “Good is Dumb.” I think that was Tolstoy who said that. A couple of the good karma choices I ran into along the way involved the ways you can shut off the goo tanks poisoning the water and mutating the locals into a massive force of armed Todd in the Shadows clones. You are given the option to turn the valve off yourself and get a faceful of hallucinogenic tar to the face, or telling some random bystander to do it for you. Apparently turning the valve from the side or leaning over the pipe from behind wasn’t an option. He really, really NEEDS to get his face directly in front of the release tube. You’re given a similar option multiple times after that and never once does the game allow you to be good and avoid damage. I guess good immediately equals martyrdom, and evil means more airborne cars. I think you can probably guess the more fun path.
I have to give the game credit for taking the classic ‘3-D action game barrel roll of safety’ move and not making you completely invulnerable during it. They also do a good job of compensating for how 3-D platforming inherently blows by making Cole magnetic or something, though he really, really likes to latch onto anything and everything in his path, ruining your graceful death from above swoops by seeing a shiny stoplight or piece of cable that he MUST grip in his grimy meat hooks. Of course, when you reach the later parts of the game involving crawling around a shanty town made of jutting pieces of scrap metal, he refuses to grab onto the bits of grating and dangling cables that look like sturdier grip points than half of the things he CAN stick to. I would also complain about the area around the prison being difficult to get around in, but I guess saying ‘prison is hard to get around in’ is stating the obvious.
Overall, I’d say it’s not a half bad game, speaking as someone who didn’t have to pay for it. I kept thinking while doing the repeated ‘go into the sewers and jumpstart the generators’ missions that I could pretty easily see Mega Man or something being brought in a similar style if someone wanted to modernize an old character. The controls are mostly easy to pick up, and there’s a decent margin of error for the platforming parts, which I think is more of a must for games that insist on it than giving people an invincible quick-dodge technique to compensate for battles that you can’t balance another way or be arsed to come up with simple patterns for players to master and counter. I have a weird hate-on for that game mechanic, I’m not sure why. Maybe it just feels cheap to be able to spam evade-rolls and survive 90% of a game. But there is one especially awesome moment I simply MUST bring up, spoilers be damned. You can let the bitchy girlfriend die… AND it’s a good karma option. YA HEAR THAT TRISH? THE GODS OF YOUR WORLD HATE YOU. In said mission, you are given the choice between saving her or saving several doctors, because the villain is a sadistic jerk who wants to see whether or not you’ve seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. When I went toward one beacon and the villain said he was disappointed in me for valuing her over the lives of many, I pulled a fucking U-turn and went the other direction with only 15 seconds on the clock. The only drag is that you have to deal with vengeful brooding the rest of the game, but then again pretty much every cutscene is vengeful brooding anyway. So, no real loss there, I guess.
