But my appreciation for it goes beyond the destruction. The gameplay is phenomenal. This is primarily because it's an almost exact lift of one of my favorite PS2 games, SPIDER-MAN 2.
There are several games on the PS2 that I just ate alive: GUN, MERCENARIES, MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE... and SPIDEY-2. This isn't just because I love the movie; it's not like I've got video game adaptations of every movie I've ever liked sitting around the lair. In fact, most of them are known to suck. Go to GameSpot, and the bargain bin titles read like the summer release dates from two or three years ago. Nah, SPIDER-MAN 2 just rocked my house. I thought it was nothing but a very well-made, fun-as-hell game.
And here we have PROTOTYPE, which has taken every aspect of gameplay from SPIDER-MAN 2 and built from there. The comparisons are many... The game's a sandbox set on Manhattan. There's an A-story, but you can also unlock side missions that are either fighting or racing oriented. Anytime you want, you can drop down to street level and deal with the havok. (In SM2, it was stopping random crimes; here it's either general warfare or grabbing Web of Intrigue people). As you play, you collect points which you can spend to either unlock new fighting/movement moves, or improve core abilities. Your character has a method of "flight" which requires using the buildings around you... in SP2 it was Spidey's web-swinging, here it's Alex's gliding.
They're so similar, I was able to dust off my old SP2 skills and immediately get into PROTOTYPE, even on a micro level... getting around Central Park, dealing with overhangs, etc. PROTOTYPE improves a couple of things, too. For instance, Alex has parkour-like abilities, so he never gets hung up on anything while moving around. In SP2, running down the street was a hassle, because Spidey would get blocked by fences, cars and lamp posts unless you specifically dealt with them, i.e. jumping over them or whatever. Alex just automatically handles stuff like that. And Alex doesn't die when you fall. One of my favorite parts of SP2 was diving off really tall buildings, and web-swinging away at the last second before I hit the ground. It was always a pain when Spidey died from falling, and it felt incongruous to the character. Alex not only doesn't die, he lands with a massive BOOM which cracks the pavement and sends everything around him flying. Awesome.
Plus, PROTOTYPE has a disguise element. You can absorb a character, and change yourself to pose as them. It reminds me of DESTROY ALL HUMANS. It's funny; stealth-driven games kinda bore me, but I like games that use disguises. Go figure.
And of course the graphics are way beyond.
But the primary difference between the two games is in tone. SM2 the game is similar to SM2 the movie... It's high key, sunny heroism which is sometimes dark, but more often just fun and funny. PROTOTYPE, on the other hand, is edgy, dark anti-heroism. If it weren't for the presence of two female supporting protagonists whom you sometimes protect - his sister and ex-girlfriend - Alex would be exactly the monster the villains accuse him of being.
It's a game in which, to complete missions, you have to fight and kill New York police officers and U.S. Marines. In order to solve the mystery of Alex's identity, you have to "consume" NPCs and absorb their memories. This usually entails dropping onto a street and murdering them in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, who scream in terror and run away. Alex can regenerate, but it's very slow... The best, fastest and frequently necessary way to heal yourself is to consume human beings. It doesn't matter who, just anybody who happens to be standing close by. When you drive a vehicle down the street and run people over, you score points. Shit, even MERCENARIES 2 and the GTAs penalize you for that kinda thing. (In M2 you lose cash, in GTA the cops come after you).
There are moments in this game that rub me the wrong way.
Now... I'm the last guy in the world to get on a pulpit and rant about how video games are ruining the youth, etc. PROTOTYPE is rated M, and is clearly meant for adults. And I'm definitely not squeamish about violence in games.
But I DO like playing a hero. I've played numerous games in which you are given the choice of taking the high or low road without penalty to your character:
The only other time I've felt the same way I've felt while playing PROTOTYPE was while playing MERCENARIES 2, another game I thoroughly love. In fact, in that game you're given a choice of three characters, and I always play the nihilistically destructive Matthias Nilsson (with excellent voice work by Peter Stormare). Again, M2 penalizes you for harming civilians... though you're free to steal their cars and blow up their houses, which never bothered me.
No - I'm talking about a section of the game in which you're asked to fight U.S. soldiers. It's spun very cynically, as the U.S. is only in the country to protect the oil, and they're allied with the Blackwater-style mercs who give you a hard time early in the game. And the big boss fight guys are evil CIA types. Plus, the overall tone of the game is dark comedy. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
All of that said, I still wasn't sure how I felt about that part of the game, and I had a hard time enjoying those missions.
In PROTOTYPE, there's no humor. It's a dark, serious game. Alex is an angst-ridden anti-hero, dealing with powers he didn't ask for, fighting an enemy who wants him dead for reasons he doesn't understand.
The villains make a point of calling him "it." As in: Alex is no longer a human being, he's a (sometimes) human-shaped vessel for a mutating biological warfare strain. The thing is, they're right, and Alex's actions reflect that.
One time, when I was a little kid, I was playing with some army guys, fighting out a war on my bedroom floor. My dad came home from work and, after watching me for a couple of minutes, said, "You know, those little guys are human beings." My response was something along the lines of nah, they're just pieces of plastic and this is just a game. But now I kinda see what he was talking about.
It's not like anyone who's ever played chess gets upset when they lose pieces. "My knight was a human being with a family!" And this is the same basic analogy, I suppose. Do my guts twist a little bit only because the "pieces" in video games actually look human (despite the uncanny valley) and represent specific people? (That is, they're not generic "pawns," they're members of the United States Marine Corps.) Probably.
PROTOTYPE takes pains to show the evilness of the masterminds behind the military response. They're a shadowy government bio-warfare group who, back in the '60s, killed an entire town of U.S. military personnel and their families in order to test an earlier version of the strain which now infects Alex. (Spoiler). When their strike teams appear, I take immense glee in fucking them up. The player is told it's okay to murder these people, and I'm personally fine with it as I play said game.
But it makes me think of propaganda. As a species, we're by-and-large fine with cruelty and violence so long as we feel it's justified. "They're different from us, they're evil, they must be killed, and in the worst way possible." I don't think this is even an indication of the inherent darkness in the soul of humanity or whatever... I believe it's an outgrowth of our survival instincts, the need to congregate and protect each other in a world where we're near the bottom of the food chain.
This is all well and good when I'm playing video games in which the enemies are non-human representations of evil like zombies, robots, aliens, demons, etc. This even applies to humans who are generally considered to be evil: criminals, Nazis, mercenaries, what have you. But twice now in games I've been asked to shift that "okay to kill" spotlight to fictitious representations of the U.S. military, and it's a little strange to me.
If there were a video game in which you were supposed to run around and kill, say, teachers or firefighters, everyone would lose their minds. But cops and soldiers are okay because... why? They have weapons and can presumably defend themselves from your super-powered character who can kick helicopters out of the sky?
I realize this is rambling and contradictory, and I'm not even quite sure what I'm saying, beyond the fact that I experienced something while playing a video game that was beyond the standard it's-fun-to-blow-stuff-up response.
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