This is the discussion me and my PS3 having friends got into last night on Xbox live because I started talking about Prototype. They responded by saying the game looked generic, and Infamous looked much better. I've been looking forward to Prototype since it's announcement 2 years ago. The month before I received my first glimpse of Prototype I saw a quick teaser for Infamous. All i saw was a junk golem being hit by a lightning storm. I looked it up online and found out it was PS3 only, so i basically wrote it off. As the months and years passed I read, and watched any media I could find on Prototype. For a year I worked for Vivendi before the Activision merger. With the aid of my ninja training I was able to find press releases with information and videos the company put together to show the media. For lack of a better word i was obsessed with Prototype.



A year later gameplay videos for Infamous came out. After watching them I was pretty much back to my mindset of not caring about the game. To me it just looked liked Crackdown, only instead of guns you used lightning, and you couldn't super jump only slowly climb up the sides of things. Basically it was Mark Echo's Getting Up with a 3rd person shooter mechanic added to it. I've always been more fond of running up and killing my enemies with my hands or melee weapons when given the chance, plus the whole idea of being a super powerful being capable of anything seemed more up Prototype's alley with the main character running up the sides of buildings, gliding, and elbow dropping tanks. I much prefer slicing a man in half as opposed to shocking him to death. Both games focus on one form of fighting but do offer up the other. Prototype gives you access to several guns, while Infamous lets you used electricity powered punches to dispatch anyone that gets to close. Still my money is on the guy with razor sharp claws. Now don't get me wrong Infamous looks like fun. Being able to climb on top of a light post and shot some guy in the face with 1.21 gigawatts of hate would never get old, and the main character seems to be capable of causing some serious destruction. I also did get a kick out of watching him rip the bio-electrical energy out of someone, even if it did resemble when Alex Mercer consumed the mass of one of his victims. Still I prefer keeping the fight up close and personal, and as brutal as possible.

Now where the games seem to hit a stale mate for me is in the missions. Both games seem to offer up a variety of missions, and the different gameplay mechanics of both games also seem to factor into these missions. In one mission in Prototype we see Alex Mercer sneaking into an army base to kill and consume a helicopter pilot. Now disguised as him he has to fly the attack chopper around aiding in on different assaults against the infected monsters destroying the city. He has to keep this up in order to get the location of a key military figure they want him to pick up to bring back to base. he of course has different plans in mind for the man. In Infamous Cole McGrath has to rescue a train of hostages from a gang that has been terrorizing the city. The gang won't stop coming so Cole has to get the hostages to safety. Using his body he supplies energy to the train to get it moving while he takes out any opposition along the way. These are just a taste of some of the more thought out missions. with a variety of other missions ranging from escort, to rescue, to destroy this, and the go to this location missions seen in sandbox games.

I can't really say much about the stories. They both seem interesting, but I would actually have to play both to get a better understanding of them. Both games have different ways for you to get the backstory and some foresight into the main story. Infamous has the player collecting old audio logs left behind by people who fled the city after the blast. Some tell Cole about what happened to the city while he was in the hospital, while other explain what was going on in this part of the city while Cole was off somewhere else. As for Prototype Alex has lost his memory. To find the truth he must complete the web of intrigue . To do this he must hunt down key individuals, kill and consume them to add their memories to his own. When you do this you get a minor flash back from your victims perspective that might offer insight as to what is really going on, and what happened to you. In this one brutality wins over exploration.

Now one aspect of Infamous that makes it shine over Prototype to me is the good/evil system. It's nothing new, it's been seen in many games before, and like all the others it will result in a good ending or a bad ending. But along the way you shape your experience based off the choices you make. The people react differently to you and the city changes to reflect you. The sky will turn dark red from your evil ways, or heroic posters of you will begin popping up all over the place as you save lives, and help people out. Also certain powers are only available to the certain alignments. I think it might be possible to get all of them if you go evil, then bust your ass to become good. But it might just be faster to play the game a second time. Sadly Prototype's Alex Mercer is a man driven by revenge so he doesn't really care about anyone. The only choice you get is do you go all out when fighting, or be precise to minimize the collateral damage.

Well as I bring this to a close, I'd like to state one more time, I don't have anything against Infamous. My lack of a PS3 has given me no reason to care about the exclusive game, and anytime I've compared it to Prototype was just me pointing out why in my own opinion Prototype is more interesting to me. I'm not saying one game is better than the other, I'm just saying there are certain reasons why one is more appealing to me than the other. But if I was going to say Prototype is better, it's only because of the Alex Mercer figure you get if you reserve the game at Gamestop. LOL, shameless plug for a company I don't work for, and I somewhat hate, check.