A Tale of Two Douches: Infamous 2 and Prototype 2 (PS3 & 360)

I never finished Prototype 2. In fact, I only got about 4 hours into it before I quietly but firmly said “Enough.” and even more firmly stood and strode not walked to the xbox, whilst commanding it to eject the disc like a pile of Bieber vomit.

I never finished Infamous The First either but I did finish Protoype the prototypical Prototype game AND I finished Infamous 2:More Infamous’r, so it all evens out.

Prototype 2 introduces Heller, a man give’n’er’ Hell so to speak. Apparently Alex Mercer, the sentient virus-that-walks-like-douche from the prototype Prototype caused the death of Heller’s wife and child. Heller sets out for revenge in an Uncharted inspired entirely linear sequence, only to find that he, not unlike every other soldier in the world, does not have enough bang-bang to annoy much less kill Mercer. So Mercer does what every creature annoyed by a gnat does: he gives Heller super powers. The same powers Mercer himself has, only more particley and prettified if you can call stringing the guts of a severed corpse between two buildings pretty.

Prototype the Second suffers from two major issues: Heller is an unrelenting stereotypical angry black man that fails to maintain the slight empathy generated by the setup and his gameplay centers entirely around doing horrible things to innocent people. As much as a cipher as Alex Mercer is there is no question he is not a GOOD DUDE. Heller is presented as a man seeking revenge for the death of his innocent family by killing lots of innocent families which is oxymoronic at best.

The greater crime is that P2:Judgement Day is a carbon copy of P1 with a shiny coat of paint. The UI is still brutally complex, though simplified from the first, and the jank is untouched but looks better. Players still have the ability to run straight up a building until something juts out from the building to cause them do a mid-air backflip and try to run up the building again. Lock-on is still mired with a hopeless camera that sways like a drunken cheerleader who strips on weekends on a party cruise during a tsunami. Everything troublesome and wrong about the first attempt is presented in its unvarnished glory, only with colors outside of red, pink and grey.

Infamous 2:The Messenger is a different shade of douche entirely. Cole the literal Messenger boy returns from the first game in time to see the city he and you worked so hard to save burn to the ground under the fiery fingers of The Beast. Weakened, he takes a slow boat, literally, to a post-Katrina New Orleans knock-off. Gifted with a new voice and some markedly better writing, Cole awakens into a whole new world, where super-powers are a new religion and bad people abuse that religion.

Unlike Prototype 2, Infamous 2 resolves many of the mechanical issues that plagued the first game as well as resolved many of the character issues that plagued the first game. Zeke, the annoying sidekick from the original is tolerably less annoying and there are even love interests that play into Cole’s gained (in)famy towards the end.

Cole still remains a gruff snarky douche, less a man chasing his destiny than a dog chasing its tail. Events happen around him as he follows endless radio directions guiding him through the ostensibly open world but hopelessly linear story. Both franchises draw from the strengths of each other, with Prototype 2 creating a populated and lived in New York under military quarantine, while Infamous 2 has a broader leveling system and some borrowed EFX from other Sony developers.

Heller’s master class in douche kept me from playing more than a couple hours of Prototype. Cole’s understated douche wasn’t enough to keep me from finishing Infamous 2.

Your taste for douche may vary.