Rox Reviews: Infamous:Festival of Blood (PS3)

(This was a post I was originally going to throw up over at Destructoid but due to the short length I am posting it here...)

Infamous: Festival of Blood

With Halloween nearly here  the Playstation Store has decided to put a number of their horror themed genre games on sale this month, one of which was Infamous: Festival of Blood. For those who aren’t familiar with the franchise,  the main character Cole McGrath, is given super human powers that allow him to harness the power of electricity after an earthquake hits his town.  Festival of Blood stars the hero Cole, getting bit by a vampire named Bloody Mary, yes, the same Bloody Mary the drink is named after. 

Rather than give away the whole story I’ll dive right into the gameplay. Overall, the game controls quite nicely just like the other Infamous titles did, this one doesn’t use the karma system which was a main factor in the other titles, which I guess is alright since your goal is to find Mary. My one main complaint about this game is that is very short. I finished the main story in just under 4 hours, getting all the trophies unlocked took maybe another hour to an hour and a half tops.  If you are still craving more content from this game, the developers did put in a level editor and the ability to play user created levels to add some much needed replay ability to an otherwise short title.   As mentioned earlier in my review the game is currently on sale for $5.00 when it is normally $15.00. I suggest you pick it up if you have a free night or want an easy 100% completion to fill out your trophy collection.

A simpler time...

Remember when all you had to do when you wanted to play a video game was just plug the cartridge into the console and you were ready to rock and or roll? I'm referring to the Atari 2600 of course, the last console I had that didn't require a degree in computer science to operate. Some of you are probably arguing, well, Nintendo didn't require you to do anything else. Bull-honkey! You had to pray to whatever diety you believed in and hoped that the cartridge would work, I remember spending 2 and a half hours once trying to get Castlevania to work, I'm not kidding, I blew and blew until I couldn't blow anymore and the thing finally worked after that amount of time. Things have only gotten more complex since then. We eventually moved away from carts to discs. Discs gave us better graphics, sound, and CGI, but it also gave us loading times and scratches. I was usually pretty good about taking care of my games, but I've had a few that were unplayable after I left them sitting on my desk for too long.

As technology evolved, we are at a point today where your game console does everything but cooks you breakfast, (unless you own a George Foreman PS3) but we have to sit through long load times and installs, anyone who recently bought Resistance 3 knows what I'm talking about... my whole issue with it though mainly involves PC gaming. PC gaming has always at least in my point of view, sucked. I recently downloaded Portal for my laptop, keep in mind, my laptop is less than 2 years old, and can run blu ray movies, but I can't play Portal on it! For a game that came out so long ago, you'd think my laptop could handle it, nope. Video card can't render 3D. I try to play the game and get as far as the loading screen and the game crashes. WTF?! This of course was something I found out after my 6 hour download time (I'm on the equivalant of DSL because I'm cheap and would rather pay off my house than have quality internet, although I'm beginning to re-think that.) So my choices are buying a new PC again that can handle the game, or shelling out the 20 bucks for a copy of Orange Box that has that and Half Life included in it, (which ironically I already own and have installed on my 10 year old desktop running XP...at least it's not windows 98... so to make a long story short, I'm going to go break out Super Punch Out on my Super Nintendo.