Infamous Vs. Prototype

Photo by Dan Siney

INFAMOUS
Platform: PlayStation 3
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

VS.

PROTOTYPE
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Publisher: Activision

Infamous

and

Prototype

are an interesting pair. Released near-simultaneously, both are sandbox games set in wrecked cities (like

Spider-Man: Web of Shadow

s before them) with superpowered protagonists who fight mutants and monsters created by the same process that gave them their superpowers.

In

Infamous

, you play as Cole McGrath, a bike courier and parkour practitioner who’s granted electric superpowers in the explosion that devastates the (fictional) Empire City. In

Prototype

, you play Alex Mercer, an amnesiac who wakes up in the morgue with body-horror powers granted by the viral epidemic that’s wiping out New York.

Of course, it’s the differences that interest me.

Infamous

is a PS3 platform exclusive, heavily hyped as all blockbuster PS3 games are.

Prototype

, appearing on both major platforms plus the PC, has gotten less attention. Of the two,

Infamous

is the prettier and more graphically polished.

Infamous

has a simpler story, told in a more straightforward manner, and it branches—you can play Good Cole and get precise blue-lightning powers, or Evil Cole and get chaotic red lightning. I also found

Infamous

the blander of the two, with the more repetitive gameplay and a much less intelligently executed story.

Prototype

feels rawer in terms of its gameplay (it had some clumsy boss fights), but Alex Mercer has a wider variety of interesting powers.

In

Infamous

, Cole’s main power is the lightning bolt, a simple ranged attack. He’s got limited energy (replenished by sucking it out of electric devices, enemies, or bystanders), but his basic lightning attack doesn’t cost him any. A lot of his secondary superpowers are upgraded lightning bolts that do slightly more stuff, like home in. As a result of this, for all that Cole feels nimble out of combat, most of

Infamous

’s gameplay is spent with one finger on the L1 button to bring up aiming mode, and the other tapping R1 to zap dudes. While this is happening you will strafe from side to side to dodge enemy fire, and sometimes you’ll hit a different button to shoot a slightly different lightning bolt.

Prototype

’s Alex’s main powers are all melee and movement. You can slash people with claws or punch them with enhanced strength. You can slice them with a big axlike blade arm or an extending bladed whipfist. You have your choice between armor, which makes dodging difficult, or a shield, which breaks after absorbing too much damage. Though normal-size for a human, Alex is dense—he absorbs biomass by eating people and he can easily pick up and throw cars. When he drops from a skyscraper, the shock wave and the crater he leaves when he lands are both epic. He’s also fast, absurdly so, and he excels at hit-and-run tactics. For stealth, Alex can assume the form of the last person he ate, and he absorbs their memories as well—much of the story is told through brief cut scenes that play whenever he consumes someone who knows something about his past.

The two games’ approaches to morality bear mentioning. Video games that focus on ethical choice are, well,

infamous

for offering a choice between sensible good behavior and laughably, stupidly evil behavior.

Infamous

does exactly that: “Do I protect this police station? Do I accept that old lady’s payment to kill a guy she hates?” Moreover,

Infamous

will punish you for playing evil—not only is it harder when Cole has to go without the support of the city’s surviving police, but you’ll get fewer experience points, because healing injured civilians grants XP but sucking the bioelectricity out of them doesn’t. On the other hand, Alex Mercer in

Prototype

is no longer even remotely human, and the game does not care whether you only eat soldiers and mutants or whether you eat civilians as well. Alex and Cole have something in common: A lot of their most fun special moves do hideous damage to everyone around them, enemy and civilian alike. In

Infamous

, I had to be careful never to use those moves, while in

Prototype

I used them all the time.

I did like

Infamous

. As a superhero sandbox game with impressive polish, it’s of high quality. It deserves its blockbuster status. But for me,

Prototype

came out ahead—the story is more interesting, the city is more expansive, and while it’s not the hottest-looking game out in the last six months, it sure packs a lot of dudes on-screen at once while keeping its frame rate up. It’s not as polished as

Infamous

, but I found it more fun.

GHOSTBUSTERS: THE VIDEO GAME

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Atari

Ghostbusters

is a great game made from all the parts of a superlative game, misassembled.

As a child of the 80s, of course I’m a huge

Ghostbusters

fan. I grew up with the original cartoon, played with the toys, watched the first movie when I was still too young to get all the jokes, watched the second movie in theaters, etc., etc.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

is essentially scripted as

Ghostbusters 3

and features the voice talents of all the original cast except Rick Moranis, who’s been retired since his wife’s death, and Sigourney Weaver, who dragged her feet until she was written out. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who wrote the films, worked on the game’s script as well. The voice work is uniformly excellent except for Bill Murray, who sometimes sounds like he’s voicing Peter Venkman and sometimes like he’s voicing Garfield. The story is good, and in many ways much more of a sequel to the first film than the second movie is. It hits all my nostalgia buttons

really well

.

The core of the gameplay—catching ghosts—is perfect. You hit the ghost with a proton stream to sap its psycho-kinetic energy, causing thousands of dollars of damage to the scenery in the process. (Don’t worry, it’s insured!) Once the ghost’s PKE is down low enough, the proton stream automatically becomes a capture stream. At this point, you bash the ghost into the walls until it stops struggling. At some point during that process you’ll have tossed out a trap, so you move the ghost over that and then there’s a quick “keep the ghost centered in the entrapment cone” mechanic. Outside of actually ghostbusting, you can use the capture stream to move objects around in the environment, or you can use your ecto-goggles and PKE meter to search for cursed artifacts or to scan the ghosts you’re hunting to learn their backgrounds. It all feels exactly like ghostbusting should feel… theoretically.

And then they throw four or five ghosts at you simultaneously, plus a huge number of weaker ghostly minion things that disperse when blasted instead of needing to be trapped, or flying, fireball-spitting gargoyles that need to be grabbed with the capture stream and smashed into the scenery. It all becomes repetitively shooterlike—too much blasting, not enough trapping.

The core of the gameplay is awesome. Don’t let my concerns dissuade you from checking it out. It could just have used a few more tweaks.

Gameplay tip:

Do not upgrade any of your equipment until you get the photon darts (the first weapon unlock; it’s a secondary-fire mode for your proton stream). Then buy the two photon-dart upgrades. You’ll thank me when you get to the architect’s office, I promise.