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Half-Life 2 In Japan

inFamous... inFamous... inFamous... what can I say about inFamous. Its famous for being in? I know I always start off these reviews with a witty pun or something, but its just not coming to me tonight. And I know you're saying "But Woggy, how can you give us your completely biased opinion if it doesn't have your biting sarcastic wit?" Patience children, we shall-

Make with the funny or I will turn you into a fucking lightbulb.

Sir yes sir. Anyway, inFamous is a third person... action shooter thing where you control Cole. Cole is a delivery boy who is delivering a completely non-suspicious package when it, you know, explodes. But not like bomb explosion. Like if an EMP and the atomic bombs they have over in North Korea had a child, and that child was a midget with a violent temper, that would be this bomb. It devestates a HUGE amount of Empire City (totally not a rip off of New York City), and you're the only survivor for miles. After you kinda plow head first into a downed power line, you gain totally awesome electricity powers, combined with Spider-man speed and agility. He lacks the gecko ability to climb walls, but he can run across them, I suppose, so it works out in the end.

The game plays out from there like a cross between Mass Effect and Crackdown. You know, two REALLY good games. From the start, you can make leaps off skyscrapers and not even notice it, shoot bolts of lightning from your hands, and kill the shit out of people. As has been advertised, there is an alignment system built in, good or evil. Now, as with most alignment systems, this has its ups and downs. Pros for inFamous' morality code is that as you become more evil or more good, you unlock certain abilities for purchase. This is good, as a paragon of the human race dedicated to helping the down on his luck fugitive (see: The entire population of Empire City) should not be able to blow people up. Much. Likewise, an asshole who thinks only for himself and on occasion his overweight "roomate" (their room is the roof of a building) shouldn't be able to heal random civilians. Another pro is the way alignment affects appearence. In most of these games, it affects physical. Good guys seem to glow and be pretty and attract bunnies, and bad guys are twisted wrecks of what was once human, but manage to pull off the "badass" look much better then those sissy bunny-lovers.

Not pictured: A friend to bunnykind

Instead, your physical appearence remains the same, that of a gritty late-twenties-delivery-boy-turned-electromagnet (you're much cooler then that sounds, trust me), but something else changes. Your electricity. Does it make sense? No. Is it awesome? Yes

You have three seconds to guess if I went good or evil before I boil your blood out your ears.

But every morality system in a game has a glaring flaw. There is no neutral option. You can either be the love child of Gandhi and Mother Teresa (ewww....) or you can be the child of Cruella DeVille and Sauron (still kinda gross...). Not only that, but other then a few cutscenes and street cheers/jeers, alignment changes nothing. You're still going to investigate the water tower and purify it for the citizens, even if you just came back from massacring 400 orphans.

Enough about alignment. Gameplay is intuitive and genius, to say the least. It takes getting used to, but half an hour into the game, I could scale a ten story building faster then... something fast. The powers are awesome to the MAX, including a wave of force that knocks back enemies, to just super-grading your lightning bolts so that they evaporate your victims. I mean foes.

But downsides exist as well. You know how I said it took me half an hour to master the controls? Well, that half hour is going to be VERY frusterating, and you're going to die. A LOT. Not to mention the actual lightning shooting controls (which involve holding down L1 and firing off bolts with R1) are confusing, annoying, and seem to want to kill me. Well, more then most games do. And thus, by Thor, this game is given

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