inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood (PS3, 2011)

inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood is a PSN title that to me seems like it was initially an inFAMOUS 2 expansion. In fact, they still refer to it as an expansion, but it doesn't actually expand anything and is downloaded and played like a separate game. Anyway, those details are irrelevant. I enjoyed inFAMOUS 2 a lot and decided, I should get this game as it was criminally cheap at the price of $7.99. Somehow, though, even at 7.99, I felt short changed.

The story this time around doesn't seem to connect with the actual story. It seems like it's a fun Halloween adventure set in an else worlds setting. Zeke is in a pub trying to pick up a girl, and he explains that one time he had to save Cole, the hero of New Marais. The girl is intrigued to here his story, and as he starts telling it, you start playing it. It's pretty cool in that respect, especially since it's such a bizarre ass story. Cole is saving people who got stuck in a catacomb....for some reason. When he gets captured by vampires... Uhh... what? Did I say vampires? Oddly, yes I did. They then drain some of Cole's blood into a coffin to resurrect Bloody Mary. Seriously, that is the plot of this game. Cole get's blood rage and starts having to drain people to keep powered up.

The only real point of this game is that Cole's powers change. Sure he still shoots lightening, but now he gets vampire senses (cause they turned him into one) and he can turn into a swarm of bats and fly across the city (this is a great addition). He has to kill Bloody Mary before sunrise or else he will be stuck as a vampire. This works out, because doing everything there is to do in this entire game takes about 3-4 hours.

Don't get me wrong, from a game design perspective, this is a very solid game. Just when the ending comes to be, you are left wondering what the point of the whole thing is. It has it's moments of charm, but the karma system isn't there, and the only side missions in the game are those frustrating user generated missions, where I would say lies the weakest points of the whole inFAMOUS series.

From an ethical perspective, I can't say that it's ok to make a super short 2 hour game and allow users to pad it out with their user generated content. Sucker Punch is a better studio than this and I feel like this was a cash grab in the most obvious of ways.

I don't recommend this game, unless it finds it's way down to 2.99 or something. Then it's a good very short time killer that let's you try out some fun vampire powers.

Man-Bat...seriously!

Could this be Bigfoot!?

This picture has recently been released  and is being called the clearest and greatest picture of Bigfoot ever! Could it be real?

Well, I'm here to tell you, it could be. Using my highly advanced digital technology, I picked out a reflection of the so called bigfoot's face on a leaf in front of it. The image that I found may be disturbing to some. Only read on if you have a strong stomach.

Please keep in mind that I am only interested in presenting the needed information. It is your job to decide for yourself what this is.

This can only be called a sign of the end times. Dear me.

inFAMOUS 2 (PS3, 2011)

I need to be up front about this review right from the start. I loved the first inFAMOUS. It's fun to feel so powerful and hover down from rooftops to bust criminals. The simple mechanic of absorbing electricity from anything that had it to replenish your strength made you seem like a battery with limited resources. This allowed moments of dread when you walked somewhere where the power was turned off, and honestly makes you seem more badass for moving forward regardless.

I have played many games since I played 2009's instant classic, and I didn't quite remember various things about the story, but inFAMOUS 2 came along and reminded me of the story up to this point. It manages to walk a fine line by not being hung up on what has happened in the past, but not ever forgetting about it. Every now and again it will have a casual line in the dialogue that shows that the characters are still effected by the events of Empire City, but the big action of inFAMOUS 2 starts right in the opening seconds when you realize, that stuff before was nothing compared to the stuff now.

I need to get this out of the way too. Cole, our main character, has since had a change of  voice actor, and this is actually an improvement. Before it was a standard growly voice, but now it's a very unique voice that perfectly fits his face and has a lot of personality.

Where this game excels is definitely in being different than other games, and only now can I say that it has become a completely unique thing. In inFAMOUS, you had great combat mechanics, amazing powers and brilliant climbing, pared with a cool story that allows decision making. inFAMOUS 2 looked at the formula and said, "let's make what was good better, and give it all a whole new style that no one has seen in a game before." Simple things changed, like the location, from Empire City to New Marais (or New York to New Orleans) allow for beautiful scenery with swamps and bayous as well as beautifully designed New Orleans style buildings. Throw in some of the most original and incredible music from a more jazz and blues background and it changes the feel completely.

The story itself starts off shortly after inFAMOUS' ending where Cole defeats his alternate future self who came back to make sure Cole was ready with his powers in time to deal with "The Beast". Since then he has found a scientist from New Marais who can help him grow his powers so that he'll be ready for whatever this beast is. As he is getting on the boat to go to this scientist, the beast shows up and starts destroying Empire City. This whole first mission finds you flat out facing the beast in all out mortal combat, and draining most of your power just blowing him away. In the end, you find yourself nearly dead. Eventually Cole wakes up on the boat going to New Marais with the discovery that The Beast has just reformed himself and destroyed Empire City. A wave of destruction is moving down the east coast of the U.S. from Empire City to New Marais and no one can stop it. This game is about getting ready for when The Beast arrives.

This is not The Beast. The Beast would mess this thing up!

This whole game has a whole sense of dread to it, as you've seen how powerful this adversary is, and you keep hearing the news refer to it as a force of nature that is wiping out cities by the day. These places literally vanish with no one able to report it, so the government doesn't even know what is happening. On top of that, a plague has begun to spring across the country killing hundreds of thousands. That is a lot on your shoulders! It doesn't help that when New Marais flooded, it was taken over by a militia that was lead by a power hungry tyrant named Bertrand, who just has to be a superhuman himself. The whole story just glows as an awesome superhero story!

Another fun thing is that this time around, if you play the game as a good guy or a bad guy really does matter. In the past games have had certain things change depending on how good or bad you've played before it, but this game really has to take the cake with how big the difference is. I advise two playthroughs just to see how amazingly different the final missions are as well as the endings.

When Uncharted 2 came out, it changed gaming in a big way. Now people are really looking for honest to goodness characters. inFAMOUS 2 has learned from it too in a big way. The interaction between Cole and his best friend Zeke (who has to make up for some big mistakes from the first game), is at least as good as that between Nathan Drake and Sully. There is a mission that requires you to go hang out with Zeke and just watch a western on TV and drink some beers. It may sound dull, but it's played as hilarious as possible and this is what I feel games need more of. Make me care for these characters and I'll put more of myself into trying to do what's best for them.

There isn't much that is negative to say about this game. I'm even pretty fond of the user generated content that is added on, though I'm not entirely convinced that it really is needed for this game. Essentially that feature allows people to make their own missions for other people to play. Sometimes they are amazingly fun and other times they are so incredibly terrible that it's just depressing.

Overall, the missions do tend to eventually be a bit on the repetitive side, but I like it a lot. Both endings are great, but the good ending is perfect, and I'm very excited to see if there will be an inFAMOUS 3 as, I have no idea how you move on with either of these crazy different endings.

A New Way to Play (Part 5)

Gradually the gaming companies were moving into and past the silly gimmick based controllers for video games. These things served to remove all connection between the player and the game. As Sony did with it's PS Move controller setup, Microsoft found it's own way to move into this realm. I would argue that Microsoft was more misguided than any of these things that I have written about in the prior articles.

Chapter 5: The Dis-Kinect of Microsoft

While I have never been one to champion the Xbox 360, I have always, at least, been able to say that it was a real hardcore gaming system. I feel like most of it's exclusives are misguided, especially Fable and Halo, but have always owned a 360 for Gears of War. At the end of the day, as a Playstation guy, I feel like our biggest disconnect has always been that I am not the target audience of Microsoft's console.

While Nintendo threw all of it's decades old fans to the wolves, the last thing I expected was the youngest of the big three to flip off it's fans and show things like this.

Seriously... That wasn't just one part of it's big E3 conference of last year. That was the tone of most of it. Microsoft basically said, "Hey kids! You like Battlefield? You like Call of Duty? We're announcing Halo 4! But let's talk about this stupid fucking camera that you can set on top of your TV you can and flail around like the products of inbreeding that you probably are."

It seems to me that many Xbox fans were upset by this, and justifiably so. It is also worth noting that with the exception of Forza 4 and Gears of War 3, I don't think Microsoft released one new exclusive game in the past year that wasn't just a vehicle for the Kinect.

For those of you who don't know, the Kinect is a camera that very accurately detects your movement and in some ways detects your voice. If you haven't tried it, I'm surprised, as it's sold over 11 million worldwide at this point, but oddly enough I've never seen one at anyone I know's home. Perhaps it's Kolect-ing dust underneath their Wiis.

The big concept of the Kinect is the for all of these years we actually haven't enjoyed playing video games because we've been using controllers and when we've been sleeping the controllers have been molesting babies and murdering your grandparents. This is honestly how Microsoft is making it sound. Arrogant Dipshit Kudo in the picture below actually went as far as to say that only now, with the Kinect, can we really play games.

Ok. That face has convinced me that I'm wrong about the Kinect. Controllers have always ruined video games. What cases do we have for the Kinect as an actual gaming device? Dance Central and it's sequel, an embarrassing looking Star Wars game, that at E3 even made people who were excited about it shudder, and mini game collections, because the Wii didn't give us enough of those. Out of everything, it is good for dance games. This hasn't reinvented the wheel, it's just a slightly advanced Playstation Eye Toy...which came out in 2003, and was treated and said to be exactly what it was. A camera that you could flail around in front of and hit cartoony objects on the screen.

Gaming has evolved a great deal and it keeps on growing and being able to do more, but these days there are too many resources being put in to making games do less for people who don't play games. Here's how it works. People who don't play games, rarely play because they don't know how to play. They don't play because they don't really feel like putting the time into learning, because video games aren't important to them. Kinect and Wii and Move just show these people that video gaming is as stupid and 'lowbrow' as they have always thought they were.

I love gaming. I love being engrossed in an experience. I love actually having a connection to the stories in video games, and I think a better way to get someone who doesn't play games interested, is to show them how much games are like movies now. My mom saw me play some Uncharted 3 the other day and now she is asking about getting "one of those machines".

If this misguided attempt is the best the game industry can come up with to grow the market, it's pretty sad. Games like Uncharted, Flower, Papo and Yo and other things to that effect are what is gonna make it happen. Not because they are the best games, but because they are trying to do bold things that non gamers don't realize gamers do. To win them over, we must finally put an end to the debate about whether or not video games are art. I know they are, but people think they aren't because they haven't seen good examples.

It's not about the way you play, so much as it's about making what you are playing worth learning.