Well I've been around Destructoid for a pretty good while and for the most part have found everything to be very honest and pretty dead on. I'm really, in a way, glad to see that it took so long for the Dtoid staff to finally drop the ball on something but I'm at the same time disappointed to see how blatantly far off the mark they were with something. The Destructoid review of inFAMOUS hit the front page today and it is very clear that the staff completely swung and missed with what the scope of the game was. The video review alone was enough to make me ask if they just got done with an all-night session of Devil May Cry or God of War, something that would make them play inFAMOUS in the most wrong way possible.

First and foremost; it's almost midnight while I'm typing this, it's been a long really rough week at work already and I don't feel like going through the process of slapping together pics for this blog. Maybe I'll do it in the morning or something later. By the way - Niero if you're reading this, you should really have someone look into the content that goes through some of the banner adds on the site. Some of the ones that pop up on the site have some nasty little “cookies” in them that light up my workplace's anti-virus systems like Times Square. I really don't want to explain to my boss why I'm getting trojan and spyware alerts on my machine 30 seconds after visiting Destructoid (yes, I know I shouldn't be surfing the web at work but everybody has slow days at their job).

Here's how obviously off the mark they were with the review. During the video review itself Jim Sterling is talking about, or more or less bitching, about Cole being frail and vulnerable to attacks... and this is immediately followed up with a clip - at the 1 minute mark roughly – of Cole using his shockwave attack right in front of a fucking car. I seriously had to stop watching at that point because the review was expecting and seemingly demanding the game to be something it never set out to be. inFAMOUS in no way was ever meant to be Hulk: Ultimate Destruction were you could just blast away at enemies at your own leisure. inFAMOUS is a game that rewards you for not playing the game like a mindless dumbass. It's a game were you have powers but still have human vulnerabilities, y'know so stuff like bullets actually hurt you and detonating a gasoline filled car at point blank range actually hurts you. The inFAMOUS review has honestly made me concerned about what Destructoid is going to think about Batman: Arkham Asylum, because if any of you have played the demo you will quickly realize that Batman goes down faster then Cole does once bullets start flying. In this apparent world were all superheroes are apparently invulnerable, this will probably be an instant dock against Batman. Did you honestly expect Cole to jump into a group of 10 heavily armed thugs and just take his time hurting everyone and think bullets wont hurt? If his levels of invulnerability were anything more what they were in the game, it simply wouldn't make sense. Lighting powers are in no way linked to enhanced muscle mass, thicker skin tissue, or any sort of crazy magic comic book crap that makes people take a shitload of damage. Spider-Man doesn't punch Green Goblin's pumpkin bombs out of his way at point blank range, why's that? Because it would probably fucking kill him.

Another complaint comes from the apparent “crack shot enemies” that inFAMOUS puts out. First, I hate the double standards people have about games becoming easier and easier and then complain when a game gets hard. Secondly, if you're doing this thing called moving the enemies within inFAMOUS aren't exactly Warthog-Side-Seat-Marine-Snipers. Basically strafing or running in one direction other than directly towards or away from them means that they usually miss you with their shots, since they don't know how to lead targets very well. I don't get the complaining about inFAMOUS's enemies, I ran through the game on hard and it was challenging but it wasn't even close to being so hard that it warranted docking the game for it. inFAMOUS didn't throw infinitely respawning enemies at you that threw more grenades then they could possibly hold, and expect you to simply push forward (I'm looking at you Call of Duty).

I think the biggest problem with the staff's view of inFAMOUS is very simple, they probably wanted it to be more like Prototype. Now while we already know Mr. Sterling's viewpoint on the matter – in an article that was nowhere near the appropriate gold that was the Killzone 2/Halo 3 article, and really didn't need to grace Destructoid's frontpage – the topic of inFAMOUS vs. Prototype has been going on for a while now. I refrained from saying anything simply because I did want to rent a copy of Prototype and try it out for myself. Well, I did rent the game and play it for a bit and I'm going to keep my opinion short and sweet.

If you really liked Prototype, you really are a fucking moron.

I hated Prototype. It was a brutally unpolished game, had major control issues, a story and main character about as generic and uninteresting as possible, graphics and a city that made Clive Barker's Jericho look like Viva Pinata, very little replay value, and no sense of consequence or morals. Plus, there's a whole different level of reason I don't like Prototype. I don't like Prototype for the same reason I don't like Bioshock, there's another better near identical game that came before it. If you've ever played System Shock 2 then you've pretty much played an older and much better version of Bioshock. If you've played Hulk: Ultimate Destruction then you've played a much better last generation version of Prototype that tops Prototype in pretty much every area except for graphics – maybe. Prototype is a simple cookie cutter sandbox game that is fun only because you can run around and maim countless amounts of people. Yeah okay, Grand Theft Auto 3 came out 8 years ago people. It's well past the time to praise games for allowing you to do exactly what you can do in almost every other sandbox game that's come out post-GTA3.

I dunno, this is one of the rare moments were I'll actually vent and rant about something. But I have no other way of explaining that Dtoid, you simply missed the point entirely with what inFAMOUS is. I mean honestly, you reviewed it in the totally wrong scope expecting it to be some stupid hack and slash sandbox game when it's really more on the lines of an adventure game with a world you can explore on the side. I think most people will agree with me that the only commonalities between inFAMOUS and Prototype are that you have some crazy powers and it's in an open world environment. Reviewing one game and expecting it to be like something else is stupid. My whole rant isn't here isn't just because I liked inFAMOUS necessarily (it's a great game that sill has some slight faults), but rather just that the review of it basically meant that the entire shape of the game needed to conform to the reviewers and not the other way around. I'd be equally pissed if Ghostbusters was reviewed and people expected it to be on par with Gears of War.

So, yeah, I'm done talking at this point. Glad you read my rant, but for the record I am generally a person who hates telling people simply "You're doing it wrong" and even with this blog I still say there is no exception for it. This was just a slight wrong I needed to address, now if you'll excuse me I need to go get some sleep. It's starting to storm out and I don't have a very stable surge protector yet for my new computer, plus I feel like being awake and alert for work tomorrow. (Hooray payday)