Liberty for All: How We Arrived at GTA4, Infamous, and Prototype

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Liberty for All: Open World Gaming
How western design has given life to world gaming. By John Constantine




It's the season of freedom. Sure, liberty is on our minds what with our recent celebrations of Independence Day (or Canada Day, if that's your thing) and Memorial Day, but patriotic festivities aren't at the heart of it. No, this year we celebrate freedom thanks to the influx of the sandbox games -- that is, the open world adventures that have been popping up on (and being popped into) our consoles. Summer is usually the deadest gaming season, peppered with one or two marquee titles, a few sleepers, and a few measly handheld games to tide us over while we wait for September to kick off the holiday rush. 2009, however, has bucked the trend with the launch of no less than three triple-A titles in the past six weeks alone.



inFamous and Prototype are different takes on super heroic flights of fancy. In inFamous, players take control of Cole MacGrath, a cooler version of Spider-Man villain Electro who can toss lightning from his hands and drive subway cars by standing on them. Cole's a good guy, even if the game does hinge on a good-vs.-evil morality system-you can be bad, and you'll get bad guy powers, but the story barely accommodates your sinister choices. Prototype's Alex Mercer is more of a vintage Image Comics antihero, an amnesiac bruiser betrayed by his government and well along the path to revenge. He can shapeshift, run up buildings, flatten out people, and even take on their shapes. His list of possible skills offers an almost unwieldy number of options. And standing beside these high-profile hits is something of a sleeper oddity called Red Faction: Guerilla, a sequel in a franchise presumed dead these past seven years. Guerilla's hero, Alec Mason, is not a superhero so much as a people's hero: his game's about a violent proletariat uprising on Mars. It is also about destroying buildings.








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[baba19]

Very true. This summer is home to some really great titles. I hope this will still happen next summer.