inFAMOUS

(June - June 2011)

Cool

Climbing dynamic totally unrealistic, but effective - well, I am a super hero I suppose.
Can't die falling from height - and for a reasonable reason.
Telephones ring when you blast them (and car alarms, etc)
Baddies don't know you're there until their attention is drawn to you.
Some missions can only be done by bad you - do you want to be bad for completion's sake? Might yet have to be. (postscript: Aha...maybe not. Might need to play this twice.)
Nice mixture of stealth, puzzle, and sheer violence missions.
In the park on island 1, there's a row of kind of market stalls. When shots hit nearby, the stacked cans move independently like a shooting gallery.
Excellent delivery of intoxicated scenes.
When you arc restrain the baddies, passers by come and taunt them and spit on them. Nice!
Bonus points for incorporating electrical jargon.
Thunder drop puts nearby fires out. (postscript: Only localised wood fires on the ground.) 

Not cool

You can't do what you can do until you know you can do it, including jumping and crouching. (For special abilities, that's fine...but standard human stuff?)
I also suspect that things aren't there until you find out they are there to be found. Like the bomb shards - I haven't corroborated whether they're there before I knew about them, but since they came from the bomb, they should be. Hidden packages too - are they there before we found out about them? Doubt it, since it would ruin some missions.
Some distinctly climbable structures are not climbable (yet) presumably because it would be inconvenient for me to climb it (yet) - might just be oversight.
I 'induction grind'ed a whole circuit of island 1's metro and got nothing for it. Surely that's what trophies are for? Making pointless things like that pointful?
Can't occupy turrets or pick up guns. Why would you want to? - I want to.
Can't drive around. Why would you want to? - I want to.
Argh...a million points off  for inconsistency. I already climbed the prison to get on the roof once, and couldn't get up the same way the second time. In the process of getting up there the second time, I jumped through a wall and found myself in the prison entrance. Then I climbed up the way I assume I was meant to climb up the first time, and got in through the back. Having found my check point, it then led me back on myself where there were three Garbagemen who couldn't possibly have been there, because I'd just been there. Then when trying to proceed to the next check point, I can't grab and climb chains which I've been able to do pretty much throughout.

Amsuing

I managed to arc restrain a baddie to the metro rails. I stood there to see what would become of him when a train came along (disappointing), and a split second later I got hit and killed by a train on the opposite track. Karma rules even in a plague ridden bomb site.
As you become more of a celebrity, people start hanging pictures of you around the city - they actually do. I see them around but never see them being hung (that's maybe a little too much to ask for).
So the police asked me to capture 4 baddies alive, and I did....but has any one come to collect them?! I mean, I know the police are busy what with electrical mass destruction and mutant super baddies, but really...I've been stood here ten minutes now.
Aldan: "I'll kill all of you!....tear you from limb to limb!"

Observations

The sound of you running sounds a bit like distant gunfire - I keep stopping to hear where it's coming from, and it stops with me.
The parachute from a cargo drop that you have to protect lies partly under some standard scenery pallets.
Names on gravestones. There is at least one amusing one, but others could well be the production team's tributes to lost ones.
Static thrusters sometimes sound like distant conduits.
If there's such a lack of engineers in the city, who keeps fixing the petrol stations and gun turrets I destroy and rooftop antennae that I knock over? Eh?
OOooh...thought it was a bug, but it wasn't. Watch out for things that sound like other things. (Unless it's your running sounding like distant gunfire or your static thrusters sounding like distant conduits)

Bugs?

Some camera angles lose the building structure, making it invisible and confusing.
On one mission (trying to get over the bridge), I saw civilians betting shot 'through' the cargo containers. When I stood there, I wasn't shot.
Running forward through an arch in 'sewers 2' made me run backwards into the kill-o-slime . It happened maybe 4 times - so often, that I started thinking it was part of the game and started devising a strategy. Then one time I could just run through it. (postscript: ha...kill-o-slime is water! Of course Electricman has issues with being in water) - This happened way too often. It's like the game loses track of which way Cole is facing, and your controls send him the wrong way. It's way annoying when you're in battle or trying to do some of the complex climbs.
Cars driving on streets above tunnels cast shadows on the ground in the tunnel. Weak.
A rather amusing, repeatable situation. Next to the fortified entrance to the tunnel to the second island is a gun turret at ground level. When I was there, a police man kept coming to stand next to it, pointing his gun at nothing, almost as though he was holding the gun of the turret. If you get in his face and push him backwards or sideways, you get an amusing Stretch Armstrong effect until he eventually falls over.

Crash count:
1) Running across a road chasing the electrical signature of a kidnapee
2) Receiving a call from Moya while destroying a truck turret.
...only 2, in fairly quick succession, so I assumed it was going to happen a lot. Two crashes in total is really not so bad. Two too many, but I've had far worse.