So I've been playing Prototype for the last week-ish... It's a pretty good game; nice graphics, good sound, excellent controls, good central character, decent story (for a superhero game) and all the other pretty good features that make it above average. The character is also a hoodie! How cool is that!? However the game isn't what I'd call amazing. The graphics could be from an eighteen month old (but good for 18 months ago) game and the game play itself is very akin to Assassins Creed. Even the controls are very similar, and Altair's a bit of a "historical hoodie". I've probably spent around five or six hours playing through the story, and what's unusual about that is that I've played at most three single-player games for more than two hours in the last few years. I have no patience for them. Even the genre breakers and classics; I get bored. Prototype however, no sign of boredom yet. I'm surprising myself playing this game as I've surely played technically far better games and put them off after an hour... Are classics really classics then?My games library is pretty much a concise A to Z of triple A titles from the last ten years. I've completed GTA:Vice City, Tribes Vengeance, COD 4 and a bunch of driving games. Half-Life 2 lost my interest after Ravensthingy. I just don't really finish games anymore, which continuously does surprise me as I used to finish several games in any given week... None of the games that I do finish though, are what you'd call "hardcore gamer all-time classics" (or any actual term that I can think of). Yet I'm undoubtedly a hardcore gamer. I'm not sure that I really understand my own gaming preferences...
So what is it that makes any single game a AAA title... Let me run through the obvious features that apparently make a game awesome!- Graphics? Quite obviously not. Gears of War had some of the best graphics on offer for the PC at it's time of release; yet it got uniformly slated by PC consumers and several reviews.
- Audio? Definitely not. The only games that you ever hear mention of the audio in are either part of the Halo franchise or Horror games. It really is that under-valued. Unless you count all the Guitar/Band/Audio games that are mostly out on the consoles.
- Story/script? Hmm... To go back to Gears of War. There was a story. Something about aliens and soldiers. Actually, let me refresh that memory... Halo, Crysis, Half-Life, AvP, etc, etc, etc. Probably 75% of all FPS games ever released are goddam motherfucking aliens versus goddam motherfucking soldiers.
Playability? Well, I found World of Goo much more playable than Crysis. Crysis was meant to have bucket loads of playability... Where was it?!?
- Controls? I'm actually laughing at this part of gaming on the PC; if you've read my other posts here, the one about WASD highlights a tiny part of the problem in PC games' controls. Let me restate that whole post in one tiny sentence... "Fuck WASD!".
After having played "so much" (ho ho ho) of Prototype, I'm re-evaluating what I believe makes a G R E A T game...
The things I'm enjoying about it are the character, the controls (Assassins Creed also managed to syphon several hours of play out of me) and the story unravelling continuously in-game. Really, the AI is distinctly average and the character models are also fairly non inspiring, but the whole game just gels so well, that it's easy to just keep playing and find out the next piece of the story or open the next power. Why didn't Gears of War grip me like that? It's also a massively powered third person game, but it's so "butch" and the characters are 
the most cliched stereotypes that are around in contemporary games, that it's almost impossible to relate to. It's similar to watching an early Arnie film: plenty of action and big men with big guns (Ooooooer!) being all manly with and against each other. Unfortunately I have no latent homosexual tendencies, so maybe that's why this is all lost on me, along with American Wrestling, UFC, Football, pub bonding and Rob Halford from Judas Priest.
Well, I've wandered off topic, as I always do... What I'm essentially getting at is that Prototype, contrary to not being revolutionary is the best "this gen" game I've played since Assassins
