After being brutalized by inFamous, I wonder if I'm the only one,

I recently played through inFamous (original) thanks to the Welcome Back program, and long story short, I fucking hate that game. I'll be putting up a review if anyone wants to read a brutally mean review of it, but god do I think that is a bad game. The controls were poor, it put me on hard without even telling me, and because of that one part in particular ended up being totally off the walls ridiculously hard that I nearly went to kill the son of a bitch who designed it, and it thought it was a lot better at it's mechanics than it really was, and as a result asked you to do some really dome shit.

Yet I still beat it. Not to review it. Not to get trophies. I don't even KNOW why I fucking beat it. Part of it maybe was because everyone seems to adore it and I wanted to have said "yeah, I played that one game that everyone loves". But rarely was I having fun. Even when it wasn't frustrating and just plane bad, I don't remember a single moment that was awesome or fun in any particular way. The most fun I had was sipping along the tracks and putting out a huge barrage of rockets everywhere. Which was cool for about... two seconds, and then the delay from button press to firing made me shoot into a post and kill myself and I decided to stop being dumb.

So I am curious... has anyone else had this experience with a game? Is there a game you fucking hated to pieces, that made you scream, cry, bleed, or act violently to a small mammal that for whatever fucked up reason you couldn't help but beat it?

Clearly people can't just accept that some people just don't like some games.

I don't think inFamous is an awful game, I just think it severely needed a sequel to fix all the issues I had with it before I could enjoy it, not you. A lot of people greatly disliked Mass Effect because of the combat and controls and stuff, but I loved that game to pieces, it's still probably my favorite 3rd person shooter, and in the top 3 games ever for me, and I actually enjoyed the shooting, even if I never was blown away by that aspect of the game. Coincidentally, Mass Effect was a hard ass game on the hardest difficulty, and I not only beat it on said difficulty, I enjoyed it.

Maybe I shouldn't say that the controls were awful. THey weren't amazing, and you cannot deny that a shooter having controls that look like they belong in a God of War style game is a bit odd and clunky. WHat I guess I mean is that if they had designed the controls around shooter conventions, it could have been much more fluid, smoother, and dynamic, allowing you to do a lot more with way less managing and shit.

I'm with you 100%. I thought it was pretty garbage.

@Zacagawea: I seriously don't get what everyone loved about it.

So no similar experience for you? I just don't want to be the only crazy out there!

I thought it was decent, but I've been spoiled on games like Assassin's Creed.

Well, I felt the same way with Halo 3. I just didn't enjoy it, no matter how much I liked Halo 2, and how much people were saying it was good. I just did not see it.

@Twitchey said:

I thought it was decent, but I've been spoiled on games like Assassin's Creed.

so overrated games with easy combat and awful platforming controls bad good stories

Yup, same game actually. 
 
Fucking hated Infamous but I was still driven to finish it. 

@Zacagawea: That is exaclty how I felt when I wasn't busy getting killed by the controls. Or the couple of really intense story bits where they throw basically WWIII at you. On hard, the Prison defense part is just... it's practically impossible. And they give you unlimited energy, too.

@Chop: maybe it's the game. Shit, I dunno. I mean, I had wanted to play it for a while because it sounded pretty cool, but then.. jesus, it was AWFUL.

This is some kind of sick joke, right?

@mylifeforAiur said:

This is some kind of sick joke, right?

... Uh, no.

Alan Wake....jesus....what is wrong with people?
 
Killzone 2, or any other PS3 exclusive FPS too.

I played it on hard when it first came out and it could be tough at parts, but I got through it without a problem. I thought it was fun and the controls didn't bother me at all. I liked it because you're basically a super human tesla bomb that can throw 50 electricity bombs at anything. The karma choices were fun to choose as well. I recently decided to try out Infamous 1 after beating Infamous 2 and it was so different, i thought it was a different game. I probably won't play it again, but all i know is that it was fun as hell when it came out. Btw, it says "Based on your performance, we will put you on hard mode" after the fight for the food at the beginning. Maybe a glitch for you? Anyways, a game I hate and beat anyways would be  Kane & Lynch 2. No f'ing clue why I put up with that game from start to finish. Now for me, that game was hard as hell.

@delorean99947: The controls were silly. Face buttons for most of your useful combat skills, when there are 4 perfectly good bumpers/triggers not really being used? in fact, a lot of buttons just not being used at all. And the traversal stuff was cool in concept, but there was way too much sticking to shit you didn't want to be on or clipping through wires you were trying to grab onto or refusing to actually STAND on something, preferring to hang off the side, stuff like that. It felt like it was trying to take the good parts of Crackdown (jumping around and being very mobile) with the good parts of Assassin's Creed (feeling relatively in control without having to worry about screwing things up because you were a little off) but instead it felt like all the bad things about those systems (too little control, little mistakes or no mistakes at all resulting in no action from the character at all, etc). ANd maybe it was a glitch, but I never noticed it for damn sure. Regardless, the game was really tough in specific instances. Most of the time it wasn't too bad, a little annoying but nothing I couldn't handle pretty well, but I've already mentioned things like the prison defense sequence which was awful for me.

I actually have a friend who did the same thing with K&L2. Bored to death with it but for some reason kept playing. I think that was more of a DNF kind of situation for him though.

I played through inFamous recently as well, and yeah, one of the most annoying game experiences in recent memory. Given how much praise it received, I feel like I must have been doing something fundamentally wrong, because it just felt like a sloppy mess the whole way. Remembering how Brad took issue with the nature of GTA4, I have a hard time understanding how he called this game "the most playable open-world game to date", or something along those lines. To me, this defines "open-world jank" and highlights lazy design for the genre quite nicely.

@Twitchey said:

I thought it was decent, but I've been spoiled on games like Assassin's Creed.

so overrated games with easy combat and awful platforming controls bad good stories

No, IMO the controls were pretty good, the action was hectic and fun and it was not out-worldly hard. I don't get why you just couldn't change the difficulty to Easy if it started you for some reason on Hard.

I was never clipping through wires, I latched mostly to what I wanted. And the placement of powers on buttons makes perfect sense, due the nature of the "gunplay" and the amounts of energy they eat up. So yeah, it makes perfect sense grenades are on Square while the shield is on L2. So yeah, I don't understand a single thing you're talking about.

The only real gripe I have about the game is that it spends way too much time in the second district, while the third one is probably like 6 missions.

Infamous is 3/5 AT BEST. There way too much shit wrong with the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamous_(video_game)#Reception 
 
/end thread

Could you be more specific about brutalised? Sounds like you just died a lot, which is understandable if you went on hard straight away. There's nothing wrong with the controls in that game though, they are damn near perfect.

I thought it was pretty good, but had no desire to play the sequel.

I liked infamous a lot. I can't say I agree with really anything you said. I thought the combat was great and I think it's one of the best controlling third person shooters of this gen. As for the platforming well its apples and oranges. There are problems with all games that rely heavily on platforming. Some people can overlook these problems and enjoy the game regardless and some can't. No game is perfect not by a long shot but it just seems you and Infamous just didn't get along.

side note: You didn't have to play it on hard you could have easily dropped down to normal and to answer your question Dante's Inferno. Seriously, I really did not enjoy that game.

I loved it, and was one of my favourite games of 2009 - as InFAMOUS 2 will be for 2011. The controls I thought were incredibly smooth, I was always in control, the combat was satisfying, the story was surprisingly engaging and tbh, the only criticism I can agree with you on is the annoying sticky platforming mechanic. But that wasn't anything to rage about. Everything else you had issues with, to me, makes you sound like a crazy person. I can understand that it just wasn't your type of game, but finding the game overly difficult with bad controls is... I can't even :o  
 
The thing about the game also apparently putting you on Hard Mode from the outset is like you're just plucking out excuses to hate on it. It defaults to Normal mode, and would only automatically (and would also notify you) change to Hard mode if you've already completed it and are playing through again. You must of changed it accidentally, maybe when you were most likely browsing the menu to change any control settings or what have you.

@Ghostiet: Had I realized I was on hard, I would have changed it, but I just figured I was never going to get the game down, and I had heard pretty much everyone saying that the game had a tendency to throw too much at you to deal with at a time. Mostly though the reason I died so much was because just struggling with the controls. There were a couple times I threw grenades and they somehow hit some random object right in front of me, or the platforming was too/not "sticky" enough, stuff like that. Rarely was it just because "game is hard." Except in specific missions where it just threw wayyyyyyy too much at you. Go and try to play that prison dfense mission on hard without cheaping your way through the mission (which is what I ended up doing, jsut trying one potential cheap trick after another).

And the nature of the powers and how much energy they use? It's a fucking shooter guy, and there is a reason that it should have shooter controls. The game would have been much more manageable if I didn't have to STOP AIMING TO DO ANYTHING BUT USE THE BOLT. Or if I didn't have to shrink my FoV down to next to nothing (and the same with the speed of the camera) just to throw one grenade. I always felt like that was like asking you to aim down the sights in CoD just to let you throw a grenade.

@xaLieNxGrEyx said:

One of the best games this gen, that remebers that last bosses should be hard. One of the most memorable last bosses in my history of video games, great story, great presentation, great art in the comics. Stop being a bitch dude you obviously just sucked ass at it. Back in the day all games used to be hard, infamous is still easy compared to those. Game put me on hard without me even knowing whine whine - lolololololol go whine somewhere else no one cares. PS - The games a couple years old, anyone that cares has beat it long ago, no one needs a useless review talking shit about a great game. Gtfo.

Man, I love you! Can I like, suck your cock or something to make you feel validated? Because really right now I'd love to do NOTHING more than that. XoXo

I like InFamous a lot, but it is very frustrating. I was about an hour away from beating it, but got so frustrated, so I gave up on it, and traded it to my cousin for $10.
I was finally able to finish it when I Downloaded it for free after PSN went back up and gave away the 2 free games.

I didn't hate it, but I thought it was mediocre. I didn't like the story, and the traversal was downright bad at times. It got bored of it and never finished it. 
 
 As unpopular an opinion it may be, I vastly preferred Prototype. I know they're totally different games but they had enough similarities and launched relatively close to each other for everyone to group them together. I actually reinstalled Prototype on my PC last week and played a bunch of it. So much more fun than inFamous. inFamous kind looks like crap next to it too, though that's purely the difference between running something at 1920x1200 with full aa and running something on the PS3 :p

@RiotBananas said:

Here's the thing, if you ever think "Am I the only one"

You're not.

I think they have a word for the technique I was using... Hmm.........

@xaLieNxGrEyx said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamous_(video_game)#Reception

/end thread

Thread isn't about inFamous though, so not so much. I never said that no one else should like the game, just that I, me, MordeaniisChaos, didn't like it. I have a friend that adores the game, and I know a lot of people did too. And I bet I would like it a bit more if I had played on a lower difficulty and maybe tried to live out what I felt was promised in terms of the fluidity and speed and capability of the character in traversal, but I didn't, and I didn't enjoy the game. That said, this thread is about other people having similar experiences, with this game or any other game.

@Abyssfull: No, I played it once and never went into the options menus at all. So either the game was weird for me, or your info is wrong. Either way, I played it the way I played it, and my experience was the way it was. I admit that I'd likely enjoy it more, but in my opinion, if that's the experience the game gives me, I can't change my experience just because YOU like the game. And it also doesn't change the rest of my issues with the game.

Plus, this thread, as I explain above, is looking for people who experience the same thing with a game, not whining because someone doesn't like a game you like. I don't care that you like the game, it just isn't for me. End of story, period, never going to change.

I for one loved it, but I see your complaint - often you find yourself not being able to aim and shoot at the same time, as the buttons you use to shoot can't be used at the same time as the right stick. The game also has some problems like footclipping and going through walls, etc.
 
I've been playing inFamous 2 for a week and am loving it as well - the new powers are incredibly useful (hell, you even can become spider-man at one point), and even when playing the game on hard I feel like the difficulty is just right - the enemies are tough and you have to really think through which upgrades you want, but if you stay near electricity sources and try staying on high ground you should be able to defeat almost any opponent.
 
I also still enjoy both games' climbing more than, say, Assassin's Creed II's.
 
But hey, opinions.

I thought the game was pretty damn good. Aside from the dull art direction, frame rate issues, not-so-great plot and some repetitive mission types I reckon it was one of the best games I played in 2009.

@imsh_pl: It seems like Infamous 2 fixes a lot of my issues with the first game. The controls are still layed out really strangely (like they didn't have enough buttons, but actually they have way more than enough....), but it all felt like a much smoother experience. Plus that rapid fire bolt instantly made typical shootin guys better. I dunno, it just felt more refined. Still not a huge fan of the control scheme, but it at least felt fine when I executed the commands.

When the climbing works, I agree. But it doesn't work (for me, maybe I just try to do it in a lot of weird ways?) a lot, and there is a lot of stuff that I felt was too slow and clunky (just going straight up buildings screamed of crackdown. Just hittin jump over and over till I get to the last window. The crazy jump poles in 2 made me pretty happy for that exact reason, that and the ice jump look pretty great.

@akiz_jack: Man, I put it in bold AND underline it and people totally ignore the purpose of the thread. There is a reason I posted in general discussion! This thread isn't about infamous. I wanna know what other people's self abusing game finishing habits are like, not what ya think of a game that came out god knows when :)

@redbliss said:

@MordeaniisChaos: I havent had that type of experience, but I am playing through Oblivion right now and I know what you are talking about (the whole wanting to go berserk thing). I am playing through Oblivion a second time and I love it (the first time I didnt play too much of it because I didnt like it), but there are moments with the combat that make me want to break the disc. It doesnt seem like enemies follow the same rules your character does (like fatigue and stuff like that), any time you have to fight multiple enemies at once the game gets super frustrating and you have to exploit some properties within the game to get through those moments, and at any some higher levels you will come across enemies that you simply cant beat or take a long time to beat. Unlike you, though, I really like Oblivion because everything else in that game is done so well.

I know how you feel about Oblivion. Early on, I was pretty annoyed with the combat too. I figured out that magic, stealth, and gameplay tweaks make it much more enjoyable and feel a little more balanced. Not really easier, but more even on either side. Melee in that is basically just block, swing twice, block, swing twice, and repeat.

And the issue with inFamous is that all it really had going for it was the gameplay, which I just couldn't get down for whatever reason. The story is a total trainwreck, porrly told and presented, the visual style and the engine are pretty terrible (which is sad because clearly the studio knows how to make an attractive game judging by the sequel), etc. I'm glad you managed to see past Oblivions faults because you are right, so much about it realy is awesome.

As for games that I've also found utterly frustrating, Jak 2 would be the first to come to mind because I only completed that, finally, a couple of weeks ago. To be fair, it's a game from 2003 so some conventions are harder to stomach when looking through a modern lens. But even still, that game is surprisingly hard. Always a wide space in between checkpoints, and with the pretty mediocre shooting and driving meant for a lot of deaths to slave through as well. 
 
I really liked the platforming, though the swinging mechanics weren't all too refined. Fortunately, when I went into Jak 3 straight after, a lot of the problems that plagued the controls and harsh difficulty from Jak 2 were improved upon and Jak 3 is making to be a freakin' awesome game.

@imsh_pl said:

@MordeaniisChaos: Yeah, the ice jump fixes a lot of issues with slow climbing. There's also a power which you acquire later on that

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

let's you throw a leash which attaches to a surface, then pulls you to it. It's pretty awesome, you can scale entire buildings in a blink of an eye and with enough timing you can travel through the city EXACTLY LIKE SPIDER-MAN!

Man, that sounds great. Yeah, my biggest issue with the traversal was loosing ground and then having to tediously make it back up. If at least mistakes were easy to rectify that would be great. I might have to play this sequel.@Jimbo said:

I thought it was pretty good, but had no desire to play the sequel.

I oddly feel the opposite...

@Abyssfull: Ok, lets, for clarity, say that holding left bumper is looking down the sights. Aiming is moving the camera. When you hit LB, the camera comes up over Cole's shoulder, reducing your aiming speed and your field of view. It's not a lot, and I never felt like it was a PROBLEM (in fact I thought it was pretty open, which I liked), but there were times I didn't want to have to look down the sights just to throw a grenade at 3 random enemies, or when I wanted to quickly throw out a precise shock wave without having to look where I wanted to throw it, look down the sights, adjust my aim, and then stop aiming completely to hit X. So EVERY offensive ability reduces FoV AND the speed of the camera because you can't use them when you aren't looking down the sights. Hopefully that is more clear?

Also, I played a good cole. And did you play it on hard? The part that got me was when like two or 3 of the huge guys that toss the boulder bombs at you came up and I was having trouble managing to avoid getting torn up by their machine gun, and throwing a shockwave every second accurately enough to not get hit by them taking turns to rapidly toss shit at me.

Maybe I'll play through as evil cole and on normal and see if my experience is better, but I had a terrible time with the game as I played it. And if one of the paths is that much better, then that's a pretty major design flaw.

Let me start by saying I think you're crazy for saying that the controls in Infamous were poor - but I guess that's just, like, your opinion, man!

When I was young, I hired out Skull Monkeys from the local video emporium (as we called them back in 1998). I found it infuriatingly difficult, died constantly and gave up in a rage. I don't give a damn if all that claymation stuff looked cool as hell at the time, I AIN'T FALLIN' DOWN THAT HOLE FOR THE 10TH TIME, SKULLMONKEYS.

I really liked it and I thought the controls were alright.

to each his own I guess.

@Ahmad_Metallic said:

@MordeaniisChaos: listen to @Abyssfull, he and another GB duder slaughtered me in another thread about the game until i was able to view it from their eyes and bam, a few hours later i was bathing in inFamous, playing for 6 hours straight every day

I understand how frustrating, janky and boring it seems. How grim and offputting the world looks and feels, how crappy and cartoonish the cars and people look, and just how fucking unbearable the combat is, with dead precise enemy snipers and all kinds of fucked up enemies orgy fucking you in the town square

But then i realized, with the help of some people like i said, that i was looking at the game wrong, focusing on the wrong things, and approaching combat wrong. Here's a blog i wrote about the relief of finally LOVING inFamous (i beat it two nights ago), maybe it'll cheer you up..
Too bad that you already beat it though, what are you nuts? How can you beat a game you can't stand? you're supposed to take a break, get some help and then jump back into it and ENJOY IT instead of going through it like a chore..

I can't fucking wait to buy inFamous 2 when my backlog is dealt with a little.

I'm hoping that I can go back to it and have a different experience, but it won't change the fact that I feel like it's kind of sily that you need to go through that process just to "play the game right" and actually enjoy it. And honestly, the sequel is the reason I kept it up. I wanted to at least know what the fuck was going on so I wasn't really confused (turns out, I'm still fuckin confused. The story is so goddamn weird and all over the place and not at all good that I can't keep it even a little straight in my head, But the demo for 2 encouraged me to keep playing because I actually had fun in the demo for 2, and it's sounding like they fixed all the issues I had for the most part and then some.

@Abyssfull said:

EDIT: Ugh, OK, well a thread with the title that is clearly asking if anyone else couldn't stand inFAMOUS... isn't actually about inFAMOUS.. it's an easy mistake. Besides, as for me whining or whatever, this is simply me answering questions you asked to get a perspective on how you played the game. Plus you're the one who opened up this thread with nothing but incessant whining.

Whatever you say boss man. Just because someone says they had a bad experience doesn't make it whining. Whining would be bitching about how I hate the existence of the game and wished I never played it and fuck all the people that made it and wah I wasted my time. Rather, I just said I didn't enjoy it, gave reasons, and used it to give a reason for why the meat of my post (despite being much shorter) existed.

@Abyssfull said:

EDIT: Ugh, OK, well a thread with the title that is clearly asking if anyone else couldn't stand inFAMOUS... isn't actually about inFAMOUS.. it's an easy mistake. Besides, as for me whining or whatever, this is simply me answering questions you asked to get a perspective on how you played the game. Plus you're the one who opened up this thread with nothing but incessant whining.

Whatever you say boss man. Just because someone says they had a bad experience doesn't make it whining. Whining would be bitching about how I hate the existence of the game and wished I never played it and fuck all the people that made it and wah I wasted my time. Rather, I just said I didn't enjoy it, gave reasons, and used it to give a reason for why the meat of my post (despite being much shorter) existed.

What the hell? Infamous is one of the best open world games ever.

@josty81: no doubt. But I hated it. Get over it.