Infamous Review

I haven’t written a review (or indeed anything) on the blog for a while as I have been concentrating my written output on Easy Ear Training, but I recently completed Infamous on the PS3 and got to thinking that it was an awesome game with a few flaws which is the most interesting kind of game to review. Couple that with the fact that it is featured in Sony’s new Playstation Plus promotion and Infamous 2 is on the way and I figured it was ripe for some comments.
I guess if you are reading this you probably have an idea of the plot, but for those of you that don’t you play the part of Cole a courier who has suffered the inconvenience of having the package he was delivering explode destroying half the city and equipping him with super powers. He awakens some time later in a city which has been quarantined by the government and taken over by violent super powered gangs. The city is roughly based on Manhattan and is split into three islands which become available as the game progresses. Playing as our hero you must kick vast amounts of ass in a third person, open world, shooter, come parkour influenced platformer where you complete story missions and optional side missions indicated by flags on the map. “Wait a darned minute” you quite rightly say. Isn’t that like just about every other game I’ve played for the last five years?
Well pretty much, but there’s a twist. Cole has power over electricity but he doesn’t generate it himself he is instead reliant on the power grid of the city for his powers. Initially armed with a peashooter lightning bolt charging yourself up from overhead power lines, generators and streetlights heals you and grants you access to all manner of additional powers such as lightning grenades and force fields. The only thing that stands in your way of a baddy zapping party time is the unfortunate fact that most of the cities grid has been knocked out in the explosion. Arriving on an island for the first time you are presented with violent gangs on every street corner and no power to juice yourself up with. Many of the main quests revolve around restoring the cities infrastructure by locating fixing substations. This is a very cool element of play as the increasing power in the grid provides a very natural way to grant the player new and awesome powers like surfing on power lines or gliding on static which are usually required from that point on to complete missions. The side quests tackle the gang side of the equation. Each mission is given to you by a needy member of the public and completing it marks that area of the map as your territory meaning enemies are less likely to appear there. This is a cool game mechanic, but has one obvious downside. When you get to a new location you are well and truly under the cosh with bullets coming from rooftops all around and few opportunities to recharge, but as you complete missions you become stronger, face less opposition and are never more than a few meters away from life giving power meaning on medium difficulty you can pretty much just stand in the open wailing on your enemies and slurping up street lights as soon as you get shot. This means that the difficulty level is somewhat uneven and even worse once you have completed the game there are so few enemies around it becomes difficult to even find enough targets to practice trophy winning “stunt” kills on. This is made up for by the fact that it is undoubtedly fun to be Cole. You feel pretty bad ass at the start, but by the end once you have unlocked all the powers and upgraded them with the XP you earn for most actions you are a one man army. Tossing people around like rag dolls and blowing up cars and petrol stations with gay abandon. Moving through the city also feels great. You need to get up high to get around without being sniped and the parkour come power line surfing mechanic makes you feel like a cross between Spiderman and Silver Surfer. Unusually for a third person game the camera is nearly always where you want it and jumping into an abyss by mistake is a rarity. The control scheme feels natural and the only real downer is that the combination of a Gears Of War-esque cover mechanic and acrobatic platforming means that often when you are racing away from a hand grenade you will inexplicably stick to a wall and meet a messy death.
The side missions should be singled out for special praise they feel like a part of the core experience rather than a tack on and encompass: Taking prisoners to jail, treasure hunts, rooftop races, protecting citizens, solving murders, deactivating surveillance devices and fixing trains. So much better than the go to place x, shoot 5 guys and collect Maguffin y, repeat until coma that many games think is acceptable.
So far I haven’t touched on the morality mechanic that gives Infamous it’s title and that’s with good reason as I feel it adds pretty much nothing to the game. Blowing up half the city has made Cole public enemy number one and you can choose to use your powers either to change the mind of the populace and become a hero or punish those who rejected you and become Infamous. This mostly manifests it’s self as nothing more than morality based quick time events where you press “X” for good or “O” for bad action, you don’t even have to work it out for your self as a handy red blue chart appears on screen. In addition to this various actions like killing or healing members of the public has a cumulative effect. It would be cool if the decisions were worth a moment of your time, but once you have taken your first good or bad step you would have to be an idiot not to take the same course with every successive action. Extremes of status grant new powers so trying to act in a “realistic” fashion and alternating means you miss out on all the optional powers. This means that far from being a complex game of morality it is simply a linear game that you can play through twice should you wish to. The net result of your morality choice is a handful of mutually exclusive good or bad side missions on each island and two optional powers one of which I didn’t ever use and the other of which is fairly similar regardless of which side you get it from. At several points the game gives the illusion that your actions are having a significant impact on the plot, but on a second play through you will discover that regardless of the decision the game contrives to provide virtually the same outcome.
The final moan is that the game crashed a couple of times and you may find your self sinking through more complex terrain due to some dodgy collision detection.
When it comes down to it Infamous is a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing it all the way to the end though it didn’t offer enough for me to want to start again with an evil play through.
If they can fix the few annoyances that stopped this from being a true world class game then Infamous 2 is going to be an absolute riot.

Playstation 3

So I'm taking the plunge on my next geek venture and grabbing myself a PS3 this afternoon.
For those of you who know what a hardcore Nintendophile I am you maybe a little bit confused about this so allow me to enlighten you.
I've had a rather nifty HD LCD for about a year and a sad lack of HD content to watch on it and it occurred to me that if someone had been offering a Linux media centre that output 1080p played Blu Ray movies and had 6 (count em) 3Ghz processors for £300 quid I would have bitten their hand off.
Such a beast is a PS3. Having done a bit of digging it turns out that not only can you run Linux on PS3 it is officially supported by Sony and you can boot in and out of Linux from a menu option in the PS3 native OS. The other rather nifty fact is that the PS3 uses a standard SATA laptop hard drive which can be fairly easily replaced by the user to give it some serious media centre drive space.
Under normal circumstances I would baulk at the high price of the films and games, but luckily I have a Love Film subscription which means I can hire them out at will for no more than the cost of a regular DVD.
Anyone else out there in blog land got a PS3?
The deal I'm getting comes with Burnout, GT5 and Army of Two so if anyone fancys some multiplayer goodness let me know.

Finally apologies for those that read my blog as I've been really busy lately and haven't had the chance to update. Hopefully I'll get back to some semblance of regularity over the coming weeks.

Linky Love - Fun Stuff Round Up - 24 02

Well yesterday was a total geek fest so today I'm going to focus on fun stuff:

I've been meaning to share this for ages so it's likely that you may have already seen it, but I love planethiltron who photoshop celebs back to normality. if all magazines did this we would be rid of eating disorders at a stroke.

This collection of famous poems reworked as limericks is inspired as I proved when I had a crack at doing some myself and failed miserably.

I've heard plenty of great music mashups in my time, but this flash game mash up of Metroid and Megaman is awesome. You get to control Megaman taking on the space pirates on the original Metroid maps. Great stuff!

For those of you interested to know what desktop wallpaper I use on my machine at home you will be excited to know that I have this picture of Haggar piledriving a shark and yes it does come from a site called gay gamer!

This collection of HRD photography from Japan is hyper real. I Love the way that at first glance it appears to be a painting.

Got some time on your hands?
Why not fold yourself a towel monkey.

I haven't got around to downloading this crazy 2D physics simulation game
yet, but the demo video looks just great.

Staying on gaming. Nintendo have announced that they will be putting C64 games on the Wii virtual console. 500 points seems a bit steep though.

Finally this tiny Korean kid playing Hey Jude cracks me up.

Can Guitar Hero Make You a Better Guitarist? + Free Guitar Game

I just read this article by Rob Walker about Guitar Hero from the New York Times with some interest.

Since Guitar Hero III came out reviewers have speculated that playing might improve your axe skills or give you an advantage if you were to take up the instrument. The consensus seems to be that it doesn't, but I'm not so sure.

The little plastic buttons on a Guitar Hero controller certainly bear no relation to the demands of fretting, but the need for spot on timing is universal.

If you have ever listened to a beginner play guitar the first thing you notice is that they speed up on the easy bits and slow down on the trickier sections. This is the bane of guitar teachers lives and is the reason they bug you to practice with a metronome. Once you start playing with a drummer you suddenly discover that you have to start marching to the beat of another and your kick ass riffs suddenly start sounding a little sloppy. I know plenty of people who can wail on a guitar, but dry up and blow away when faced with recording to a click track.

In an example from my own life. I've been playing guitar for about 13 years (at one point for about four hours a day) but a few years back I was getting frustrated with my playing and needed a change so I started playing drums in a band learning as I went. Gradually my guitar playing slipped and I realized that my Strat had been sitting unplayed in its case for 3 months. When I dug it out something strange had happened. My technique had gone to shit and I found I got cramp after a few minutes, but my phrasing had come on in leaps and bounds and I had made the breakthrough that made me interested in playing the guitar again.

So do I think that Guitar Hero III could make you a better guitarist?

If you are a beginner, or your phrasing gives you grief then I think it can only have a positive effect.

If you are wondering what all this Guitar Hero fuss is about then I suggest you try out Frets On Fire. It's a freeware game which you play holding the keyboard like a guitar and you can get it here .