Format: Flash
Developer: Kerb
www.agame.com/game/Infamous.html

The most entertaining internet timewaster of the last few weeks hasn’t been a game but rather the countdown to one. Kojima Productions’ skilfully infuriating Next website has sent forums and blogs around the world tying themselves up in a frantic tangle of conjecture and over-analysis. The site itself may be a fairly simple animation loop depicting an overgrown field and cloudy sky, while the on-screen action is limited to the slow gathering of storm clouds and the accompanying build-up of mysterious numbers and letters, but that’s been more than enough to ensure a large proportion of the gaming community is applying as much time and effort to interpreting Hideo Kojima’s latest tease as most people will spend playing the game it’s promoting.

Crafting a long and complex history and building a singularly entrenched audience, Kojima’s earned the right to mint such a disproportionate amount of activity from a simple countdown timer. Others have to work a little harder to draw attention to themselves, however. That’s why Sony Computer Entertainment, the publisher of this week’s PS3 release Infamous, has resorted to the kind of self-reflexive tactics Konami’s very own philosophising jester would probably entirely appreciate: using one game to advertise another.



Infamous: Precinct Assault is a surprisingly literal vertical slice of Sucker Punch’s expansive 3D superhero title, showcasing the PS3 game’s core move set, powers, and mechanics – right down to the rather functional take on morality – within the confines of a 2D platformer, as it tasks you with picking your way through a flooded police station and reaching the generator on the roof. It’s a polished piece of work, with elegant, if somewhat ponderous animation, a decent soundtrack, and stylised backdrops that are arguably slightly more appealing than the boxed game’s own strangely soupy vistas. And, even if Precinct Assault is unintentionally misleading, recasting an open world in into the form of a linear side-scroller, it still presents a brisk introduction to Infamous’ world, while subsequent playthroughs reveal an unexpected potential for speed-running.

A few years ago there might have been something a little odd about such a commercially inclined product intruding into the faintly precious world of internet games, but advertising titles are now becoming a familiar part of the landscape. Some of them, like XBLA’s unfortunate Yaris offering, have become shorthand for thoughtless naffness, but at the smarter end of the spectrum, something like the recent browser-based Watchmen arcade game displays the same attributes as the best in indie development: a finely-judged blend of presentation and design ideas, which, in the hands of developer Littleloud, resulted in a title that was far wittier and more careful in its use of the licence than the film’s official game turned out to be.

Ultimately, Precinct Assault sits somewhere in between the two examples: despite the pacy cartoon opening and stylised visuals, it’s lacking in any defining cleverness once the action begins, but it makes up for that with a generous range of features and three nicely varied levels. It may not set message boards aflutter quite as deftly as Kojima’s enigmatic website has, then, but it gets its message across in a way that, after a few minutes, may allow you to forget that someone’s trying to sell you something.