Silent Melody

Well, played through inFAMOUS 2 twice and Platinum'd the game within a week without much effort. Definitely like it a lot more than the first one, although it did have its little charms (grumpy Cole, for one; I don't miss chasing helicopters on foot). The one thing that constantly irked me was the camera though. I really didn't need it swinging back and forth to give me more dynamic angles when I was using finishers. Really, it gets old after the first 20 or so uses. Mostly because there are about 3 animations for a normal finisher and 3 for the ultra finishers, and considering an upgrade you can get for ultra finishers to restore energy after a take down, you'll be seeing those a lot if you go for melee (it tends to be faster to recharge energy this way as long as there's a human-sized enemy, unless you're low on health; Cole can't really eat a rocket to the face on Hard). Another problem with the camera after finishers was that it can be disorienting as the camera will attempt to shift behind Cole, and he's usually not facing the direction you originally had him.

You can see that a lot more effort was put into 2. Didn't really notice any stock animations during key scenes. Somewhat forgivable for the random NPCs since they're not major players. The game was also more my speed. iF1 felt a little bit slow and clunky, iF2 fit more my "let's get this done as efficiently as possible" mentality at times. Plus, with the power variations and being able to swap them out with Left on the D-Pad, more variation in battle! Although it does break up combat while changing things since it does pause the game. Real-time changing probably would've been a bit much in the middle of a massive firefight. Not that I would mind since even Hard Mode was a bit too easy once you got enough upgrades/cheesed your way to either Hero or Infamous ranked powers.

Still prefer the Good powers over the Evil ones. All that extra splash damage is great and all, but nothing really beats freezing your enemies for an instakill and some extra EXP. Not to mention energy regen when you hit human-sized enemies with any Bolt variation. Kinda miss the grenade upgrade that would auto-restrain your enemies if they were taken down by it. Some of the new neutral powers are pretty fun to play with, including the DLC ones. Love the Electrocution Grenade for setting up head shots. The Lightning Tether is also nice for travelling around when I don't feel like climbing things. And then I end up climbing it anyways because I tend to have Kinetic Pulse or Frost Shield equipped to the R2 slot.

Both endings sucked. Kill all humans or kill all Conduits. Either way, someone gets screwed. But then there's Second Son, which leaves me curious as to what really happened with the RFI. Seattle is definitely a lot closer than somewhere across the ocean if we're to take into account diminishing effects based on blast radius... We'll see what happens.


I suppose the next thing I should conquer is the UGC Editor. Looks like a fun little tool to play with. After I watch the tutorial vids. Or maybe I won't get to it because the break's almost over...

Oh yeah. Second Son has been pre-ordered... Problem is, I don't have a PS4. Yet. And the first thing I'm going to do when I get around to playing it? DUNKING DELSIN IN WATER. I should ask a friend who's actually living in Seattle where has the most water... or at least the deepest pool.

Bonjour!

Finally did get Monaco at 80% off, which was nice. Played it for about 3 hours, and it's definitely one of the harder games I've played in a while. Or maybe I just suck at navigating the places. Just waiting until I'm finished with everything before getting into co-op sessions with a couple of friends. If I see it on sale again at a pretty low price, I'm supposed to email a friend about it. Looks like he's interested in playing after I got bored from fixing things and trying to finish assignments with everyone standing around.

Picked up the inFAMOUS Collection not too long ago. About 2 weeks ago, actually. Finally turned on my PS3 again. Good thing I still remember all my sign-ins, then decided to change them all to be more uniform. Almost forgot that I used a JP Yahoo account for my main. Really wish I could change the displayed ID to Zephyr135 to be more consistent with all my other stuff. Using an older alias, which was much easier to pin me as a female. Kinda fun, but kinda not at the same time. At least all those Demon's Souls players didn't send stupid messages at the time. I wonder if the servers are still up...?

Anyways, finished the game on Hard and with the Good ending. And I was only on Hard because the game thought I was doing too well in the initial missions. I don't know if I want to go through it again while going fully Evil since I'm currently trying to grind for EXP to do 1 more lousy upgrade to the simple lightning bolt. I still need 7000 EXP. Could do some amazingly annoying things like kick a innocent bystander, then run up to heal them for a quick 3EXP per go. But fighting is usually the way to go. Lots more EXP that way and I can cause some collateral damage along the way to get some healing in. Still need to clean up the rest of the areas as well.

I'm not really sure what to think of the game, really. Gameplay was OK. Nothing that spectacular, although the sneaking around is done better than in AC. Really, you can take cover. That's one of the main complaints I have about the AC stealth segments: you can't take cover behind random objects on the ground. Instead, you have to stay out of sight via corners or using vertical space. The Good-Evil choices were really black and white. Would've liked something with more of a grey area to it, but that might screw with the Karma system they have in place. Controls were decent. Might just be my controller, but sometimes my L1 doesn't register going into Aim Mode that quickly. Minor quibble, really. Aiming with the right analog could be a little more sensitive, and I've already cranked up the sensitivity to max. Including a slider would've been nice instead of 3 discrete settings.

If there's one thing I'm not particularly happy about, it's the sound. BGM is really sparse and takes a while to kick in whenever you're doing something.


And maybe 1 more really tiny thing: Cole doesn't seem to like running up stairs at times.