Hit Play with PixelVixen707: inFamous

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I'm no expert on superhero comics. But in the pile of comics in our living room, stuck between The Boys, Walking Dead, and Air, are a few out-and-out good guy vs. bad guy books -- and the best of the bunch is Ultimate Spiderman. Never mind that it's an unusually good retelling of the story of everyone's favorite geek hero. Never mind that Mary Jane has a mean right hook, or that Gwen Stacy went punk. I like the book because it gives us a Spider-Man who's still learning right from wrong.

Spidey taught us -- and say it with me -- that with great power, comes great responsibility. But really, that's just his opinion. And if he didn't have the memory of his dead uncle nagging at him all the time, would he always play nice?

As the SG Gamers group caught on, Cole MacGrath, the star of Sucker Punch Productions's PlayStation 3 sandboxer inFamous, owes plenty to Spider-Man. As the erstwhile motorcycle messenger, you can scale buildings and fall from any height -- not to mention shoot lethal bolts of electricity from your fingertips. Like Spider-Man, when you start out everyone thinks you're a menace: accused of being a terrorist who turned the city into a free-fire zone, you're scoffed and spat upon everywhere you go. But unlike Spider-Man, you live in a city that can't stand in your way. Sometimes the cops sneak out of their hidey-holes to take potshots at the gangs, and the military mans the barricades around the island. But inside the city limits, you are the law. And everybody else looks very, very helpless.

In most games, the run-of-the-mill civilians fall into two extremes: they're either crucial, or insignificant. In a game like Grand Theft Auto, pedestrians are just moving targets. Running down a sidewalk full of people may get the cops on your tail, and a stick-up might bring you a few bucks, but your rampages have no long-term ramifications. The little people just don't matter. At the other end, a real-time strategy game will give you a population to protect or an army to deploy -- and every last one of those folks is a resource. Lose one or two and it's no big thing, but waste too many and you're going to lose the game.

In inFamous, the civilians matter -- but they don't matter much. You can help them, but the rewards are minor. And thanks to that design decision, you'll focus on the role you want to play rather than the points you need to earn.

To be clear, you're also confronted with boldface, lunkheaded moral decisions between a brave act and a craven one, such as, "Do I take a couple bruises from this giant walking trash monster -- or let a dozen people burn to death?" These shift your hero rating as well -- but they're not as interesting as the choices you aren't forced to make.

Choose to be a hero, and you can stop every five feet and heal someone who's wounded and dying on the sidewalk. You get a few experience points for every save, but that's just a "thank you"; knowing that you've saved hundreds of lives is the real reward. On the other hand, have you ever tied your ex's dog to the back of a bus? Or maybe grabbed the last beer in the fridge? If you're the villain-type, inFamous lets you wreak havoc on an already wrecked city, torturing the populace and even draining the last gasps of life from victims dying on the street. All these crimes will nudge your karma toward evil, but in the scheme of things, a few murders here and there don't add up to much -- and anyway, you'll quickly learn how hard it is to do good.

Maybe Spider-Man had time to catch baby carriages and save grandmas from falling taxis. But in inFamous, stray passers-by love to jump in the middle of a firefight, and who the hell has time to protect them? Plus, most of them are obnoxious. I talked to one gamer who tried to play nice, until he got trash-talk from one too many civilians -- so he walked up to the guy and knocked him across the street. Could Spider-Man get away with that?

Yes, he could -- if he wanted to. And nothing made me appreciate the masked webslinger like trying to follow his example, and failing in so many little ways. Don't get me wrong: this ain't Watchmen. The story crams 50 pounds of nonsense in a 5 pound bag, and the hero is just some guy with a squeaky messenger bag and a rechargeable battery for a brain. But the game puts its stubby little finger square on how it feels to be the ubermensch. Nobody can judge you, because nobody can stop you. And yes, all those little people matter -- but they only matter a little.


Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

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