Infamous-cover

My Long Road to Finishing inFamous (Part 1 of 2)–The Third Time’s the Charm

So, I finally finished inFamous, and I really enjoyed it. It only took me three years.

Of all the games in my pile of Shame, inFamous was at the top. I have an attachment to the game because it was one of first big games I covered for Comic Book Resources back in the day. I got to meet some of the devs and spend some time with an early version of the game at a Sony event. I even interviewed Director Nate Fox about the game for CBR (which you can read here). Needless to say, I was excited to finally get my hands on the finished version when it released in 2009.

When I actually started play however, the game just didn’t click with me. At the time, my favorite game of the generation so far was Crackdown, and I kind of expected inFamous to be similar to it (the open world, super powers, shard collection, etc). But the game felt very different mechanically, and I couldn’t stop comparing the two. When the story didn’t grab me right away, and the mechanics didn’t click with me, I never got past the first five hours before trading in the game and moving on to something else.

Fast forward to mid 2011, and Sony’s infamous (pun intended) PSN outage. As an apology for the PSN hack and subsequent outage, Sony offered inFamous as one of the “Welcome Back” gifts for returning PSN subscribers. I downloaded the game, fired up my old save, and jumped back in. This time around, the mechanics did click with me, and I was far enough removed from Crackdown that I could enjoy inFamous without constantly comparing it to my other experience. I put another five hours or so into the game, and made some good progress before getting distracted by other games and leaving inFamous again.

Fast forward to June of this year, and Sony’s E3 press conference. Part of the conference was a rebranding of sorts for PlayStation Plus, which was being molded into more of a subscription game service, with users getting access to a selection games for free each month. To kick things off, Sony offered free access to a dozen titles, one of which was inFamous 2.

Feeling that I couldn’t possibly start inFamous 2 without finishing the first game, I dove back into inFamous, determined to finish it this time. Lo and behold, not only did I finally finish the game, but I really enjoyed my time with it. The power leveling system is great, and as I got closer to the end of the game, I had really customized my version of Cole (the game’s protagonist) to fit my playstyle. I’m more of a ranged attack guy, who likes to swoop in and finish enemies off after softening them from afar, and that style is totally supported by the game. I ended up enjoying the comic-y story as well, even though it took some big leaps of logic toward the end of the game. The entire story is a huge setup for a sequel, and I believe the events of inFamous 2 pick up almost immediately after the first game. All in all, lots of fun, and I’m glad I took the time to finish it.

Finally completing inFamous got me to thinking a lot about how I approach games in general and how rarely I actually finish them. I’ll talk about that more in my next post.