So yesterday I finished InFamous and X-Men Origins Wolverine. Wolverine I thought was a surprisingly good game (I just posted a review of it), but the ending of InFamous really floored me. For those of you who know, it's pretty shocking (pun intended), and I think it's especially cool if you're InFamous. There's probably going to be a sequel and I can't wait to play through it.

In other news I traded in a bunch of old games that I haven't even touched in a while and got a fair amount of store credit over at Gamestop, and thus far I've picked up Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood and Dawn of War 2. I'm really diggin' them both at the moment, neither is anything too spectacular but they're still pretty great games. I was also considering spending the remaining chunk of cash on BlazBlue since I keep hearing such good things about it. One question about the game, though, which I would like to extended to any of you who have it is I'm pretty bad at fighting games, so is it at all structured for players who aren't very good? That's my main concern, Street Fighter IV for example was brutal because it simply didn't have any good options for sucky players like me, but I love fighting games like Dead Or Alive 4 which had plenty of tweaks available to make my life a little easier.

Completely off-topic, I made an interesting observation the other day. The Reapers in InFamous look surprisingly like the Reapers in The World Ends With You.

Coincidence? I think not.

Allow me to start this blog post off with a story: I was in France for the past two weeks, and the trip was a lot of fun, though there was one particularly annoying predicament which was that the wall plug adapter that I got to charge up my DS and phone was defective. The phone I didn't care too much about as my phone can't do international calls anyway, but the fact that I couldn't charge my DS sucked because its a long flight. On my way over (not knowing at the time my European plug adapter didn't work) I played Chinatown Wars pretty much the whole time, and my battery ran out only a little bit before we landed. So needless to say when it was time to leave, the journey back was quite long.

But that brings me to the real point of the blog which is not to bash the adapters sold at my local drug store but rather the fact that the portable systems need to be wall charged instead of using batteries. I don't know if the batteries just don't have the juice to power the DS or PSP or what, but using good ol' fashioned AA's would be much more convenient for travel.

Well that's it for my blog today, I'm going to try to do a little blog like this in addition every day that I can this summer, so keep your eye out. I also posted a review for Chrono Trigger.

With InFamous officially releasing tomorrow, I've noticed a trend in gaming that's been quite prevalent recently: moral decisions. Now I'm sure even old school games had moral decisions on some level, but it seems as if from the last generation of consoles and beyond, a player's choice to decide between good and evil has become a pretty standard thing in games.

KOTOR, I would say, is what made virtual moral decision making a popular thing to do. In KOTOR, you were able to actively shape your character into a noble Jedi or an evil Sith based on your actions, and dialogue choices. This has extended throughout all BioWare's titles since then, and beyond in RPG's such as Fable, and Oblivion and even into different genres such as sandbox ****games: in True Crime you got to decide between being a Good Cop or Bad Cop.

It's easy to see why gamers love the decision making game mechanics. For one, it makes you more attached to your character, (s)he can be exactly how you want him/her to be. But it also allows players to experience situations that they would probably never want to in real life, such as choosing between which of two characters has to die, and think through the consequences of their actions while having said consequences add to the fun factor of the game.

One thing I wish games would do more is encourage players to tread a line between good and evil, and blur what it means to be good or evil in the first place. Some of us don't believe in the black and white binary of good and evil, and very few games (Deus Ex, and Beyond Good and Evil, and The Witcher to name a few) allow players to make decisions that aren't so clear cut.

Unlike World War II, exploding barrels and survival horror, I don't see moral decision making in gaming as ever becoming tiresome, I've played dozens of games at this point where I've had to make good and evil decisions, and I still have fun making those decisions. That's why I can't wait to achieve infamy tomorrow.