Innovations in recent years have run the gamut: the recharging health bar of  Medal of Honor and Halo 2, or the tell-me-where-to-go button of Shadow of the Colossus or the recent Prince of Persia. Assassin’s creed simplified all the badass movements to a one-button affair, and it sold in droves. World of Warcraft cut enormous amounts of the ridiculous challenge from Everquest and it is now a revenue generating monstrosity.

Then of course you have the advent of easier difficulties, something which even the punishing Ninja Gaiden stubbornly handed over in the form of “Ninja Dog” mode. Miyamoto seems to be taking all this a step further with the introduction of “Demo Mode” which plays the tricky parts of games for you. Gears of War now lets co-op mode players each choose their own difficulties, more easily allowing the gamer dad to play with their son, or the gamer boyfriend to play with their newcomer girlfriend. These concessions are everywhere.

My point is that perhaps greater a barrier to entry than the many-buttoned controllers that confound newcomers, are the difficulty of games. This is an issue that has been difficult to adress in a culture of 20-somethings that brag about their great achievements versus challenging games, and flaunt them like marks of pride to their friends. The problem is is that this chest thumping, meat-grinding culture doesn’t really translate into fun for the average consumer or would-be gamer. Something that teenage boys and young men adore turns off a much greater number of  less masochistic individuals. This trend is something that I would like to discuss at greater length, but I believe that the Developer’s at Sucker Punch have had their ears to the ground more than most, because inFamous is one of the most accessible, enjoyable, inspiring games I have played in quite a few years.

Infamous follows the tale of a young bike courier name Cole McGrath, with an unfortunate voice I’d liken to Christian Bale when he’s in his batman suit. Unfortunately for Cole, he just so happened to be carrying a package that contained a fictional bomb that blows up half the city, absorbing all the bio-electricity of its victims and placing it all inside Cole, turning him into a walking super-battery. The narrative is very comic book, very fun, and serves as an excellent device for doling out new gameplay mechanics and pacing devices. It’s the perfect compliment to the gameplay.

The game is a joy to play, thanks to painless controls and pitch-perfect platforming mechanics; yet it doesn’t feel as if the game plays itself,  something many maligned of the aforementioned Prince of Persia. This is because the jumping is left in full control of the player, except the game is extremely generous with the “stickiness” of Coles maneuvers, assuring that the player rarely feels cheated from a jump they felt they should have made. It’s further enhanced by a beautifully executed animation system that allows Cole to climb on damn near anything, be it a telephone pole or a slightly jutting rock. It’s what Assassin’s Creed should have been, its Parkour style free-running done right.

The design of Infamous stems from the now ubiquitous GTA mission structure. Its an open world, choose-your-mission sort of affair. Unlike GTA however, you generally only have one story mission to choose from, and then a wealth of side missions that thankfully are rarely do-overs. This is something of a miracle in a game like this, which normally take two or three mission types and carbon-copy them over and over throughout the game. A single mission type will only repeat itself every so often, and even then there are always twists the game pulls to shake things up. It makes the side missions feel much less like filler and much more like thoughtful and varied playgrounds in which to enjoy the games core mechanics.

The story missions themselves never rinse-and-repeat even once, each is a new event and some are down right jaw dropping in their scope and set-pieces. Pipes that break apart and fall as you run on them, collapsing bridges, giant trash golems. The amount of variety is pretty stunning, and I found myself persuing a mixture of side missions and story missions as I crafted a narrative in my head  as I played. I was just having fun with it, pure and simple. Something I don’t experience as often as I would like to anymore, now that I’m a little bit too jaded for my own good.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the games brilliant checkpoint system. After you do anything in the game, be it defeating a group of enemies, finding a hidden unlockable, or completeing a cutscene or mission, the game saves. You almost never have to redo anything, ever. It’s almost uncanny how they pulled it off, because you never once get stuck in a situation where the game saves in a no-win situation, and it saves so often that you would swear the people who made Gmail were behind it.

In a way, Gmail is the perfect analogue of Infamous. The designers have cut out damn near anything that might impede you from enjoying the game or becoming frustrated with it at all. In the same way that Gmail is so useable and fresh and intuitive, so is Infamous. Brief load times (if any), few glitches and bugs, a gracious checkpoint system,  platforming that is dynamic and easy, combat that is simple and pared down the pure essentials: there are no useless powers, no frustrating cool-downs, no overwraught combos, and by some miracle, no cheap deaths.

All of this accessibility does not make the game feel unchallenging or unrewarding, it simply removes a dozen barriers to entry that games like this usually suffer. It simply allows the player to get to the juicy, delicious meat of the game, and boy, does it taste good. The environment is fully fleshed out, set in a city that comes alive with character and color. The enemies are atypical and creative, somehow avoiding gangster stereotypes such as a homeboys, mafiosos, or cholos. GTA avoids stereotypes by turning those stereotypes into human beings, Infamous avoids them by being imaginative enough to eschew them alltogether, despite being set in a very contemporary setting. Then the world is filled with a million touches that make it come alive, such as puddles that fill with electricty when our hero stands in them, dumpsters that rock convincingly when thrown into, or the random pedestrian snapping a picture of Cole on their camera phone and shouting “The guys are never going to believe this!”

As for the combat, I’ve already mentioned its lean finesse, but it is also very fun and very deep, emergining from a foundation set by the advent of Cole’s electric powers as a narrative device. Rather than firing an AK, you fire bursts of lighting, rather than an RPG you launch bundles of deadly energy. All the powers creatively stem from the character’s focused identity as an electricity based super hero, allowing the designers to focus on those abilities and refine and refine, and it shows. It all feels focused and perfectly balanced. All of its wrapped in a somewhat bland good/evil system, that thankfully serves only as a way to give variety to players who want to play the game more than once, as certain powers and events only are avaible to the moral route you choose to follow.

At this point I have to admit that I could keep praising this game all day, but this review is already overlong. Suffice it to say it was the first game in years to have captured my attention so thourougly. It inspired me both as a lover of games and as a designer. Imagination and creativity shines throughout, and you would be worse off for letting this one pass you by. I can’t count how many times through the course of the game that I had to smile and shake my head just because of  sheer genious of it all.

Even if you normally find games too challenginge or too confusing, this one cuts out so much of those common hinderances that it may just make a believer out of you. Did I mention the perfect camera or complete lack of load times? OK OK, I’ll stop.
Oh yeah and it has one of the best original scores In a game I’ve ever heard. Just saying.

Go play it!

JNB

Keep an eye on this blog for my musings on Game Design, Gaming Industry and Press, Game Analysis, and other thoughts on all things that influence and excite me. Hopefully, you’ll see contributions from others, be it a friend, professor, or a person that I particularly would like to see write something about something. It should be fun, so stay tuned.

As for me, I’m a student of Game Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design entering my senior year, and I think that ultimately I either want to design environments for big games, or design smaller games with a small group of trusted friends. Otherwise, I’ll just write about them.

So, here’s to games, to life, and to fun!

See ya around,

JNB