Back in my High School days, like I imagine many individuals that write about video games on the internet, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call popular. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, something of a nerd.
Now, being six-foot-three and the next best thing to 200 pounds didn’t always make me a prime target for the ire of bullies but I was definitely a lonely youngster. In those days I would prefer to sit off, by myself, and read books or draw pictures while my peers would “socially interact” and “go out on dates”. Or, at least, so I’ve been told.
One day, with the help of a fifty dollar gift card to Barnes and Noble, given to me by my aunt (as a Confirmation gift or a birthday present or something similar) I saw fit to by my first comic book; a compilation of the first 50 issues of Briand Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man.
Ultimate Spider-Man thus became my first true introduction into the world of a superhero just learning to understand his powers and his own, new identity. As a young buck on just on the verge of finding his own new identity in this world, it really resonated with me. I still look back with heart-wrenching sympathy on the choices, the sacrifices and the consequences thereof that poor ol’ Petey Parker had to endure and which act as surprisingly poignant metaphors for my own life, even to this day.
Cole McGrath, the lightning-slinging protagonist of Infamous 2 may very well be my new Peter Parker.
With the original game, Sucker Punch proved that they knew how to make cool superpowers and build a fun environment for the player to play with them in. Unfortunately, that original game came packaged with quite a few rough edges like bad textures, weird character models, stark moral decisions and a few lame bad guys.
Infamous 2 feels very much like the developer took a sandblaster to its predecessor. The graphics are sharper, the pacing moves much more smoothly through the slightly reduced open-world city of New Marais and the whole game just seems to shine with a sense of style that was lacking before. New players might not notice it at first but it’s in the way that the camera swoops behind Cole as he grinds on a power line and the tone in the terrified, begrudging tone of a character’s voice when she asks or hero for help whilst in a situation that he only recently overcame himself. It certainly helps that the down-home, obviously New Orleans inspired digi-city of New Marais feels so alive and distinctly unique from every other open world environment on the market today.
It’s somewhat of an intangible but the game just feels much more like what I imagine Sucker Punch wanted in their first effort; all of the humanity and none of the technical jank.
With most of the technical wrinkles smoothed and the just plain grooviness of the new aesthetic, it’s now a hell of a lot easier to focus on the parts of Infamous 2 that really bring me back to my web-headed hero of days gone by.
Cole is a little bit older than my old friend Spidey. He’s much more in line with where I’m at in my life today but, just like in real life, reaching your twenties and escaping senior year haven’t made his decisions any easier. You see, the choices made in Infamous 2 carry a real accountability that is not only felt in the way that the story treats you and the other characters but in the very way that you play the game.
Your moral choices, or “karma moments” in the first Infamous provided for some minor jukes in the story here and there but the end result was pretty much the same. And while being a “Hero” or “Infamous” altered Cole’s powers, they ultimately amounted to little more than a palette swap.
The newly introduced fire and ice powers feel distinct. On top of this, the game now holds you much more accountable for collateral damage with a notification telling you just how many innocents you’ve harmed or killed. Believe you me, if you’re truly intent on playing path of the straight-and-narrow, the notification that you’ve killed a civilian is like a screwdriver through the belly button. Between this and the L.A. Noire “wrong answer chime”, developers have pretty much put me into a perpetual, Pavlovian state of wanting to tear off my own skin.
Infamous 2 captures the nature of the sadistic choice nearly as well as any comic book ever did. The characters and the world are so well realized that you truly care when you are forced to make a sacrifice, you really do feel it the pang of remorse at having locked yourself out of that particular path, constantly left wondering “what if”? This theme of growing responsibility and sacrifice culminates in the final, moral decision of the game which is alone worth the price of admission to this already finely tuned thrill ride.
Seriously, I unlocked the good ending three days ago and I still feel hollow inside every time I think about it.
Infamous 2 will slake any gamer’s thirst for a summer, action blockbuster. Not only that but it provides that greatest of gaming satisfactions in that it actually makes you care about what you’re doing, while you’re doing it.
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