E3 '08: inFAMOUS

Sony's been running a very tight ship at E3 this year, and kept me in meetings for almost the entire day (note to self: do whatever it takes to get more GayGamer press passes next year), but I'm doing my level best to get the cream of the day out as timely as possible - without losing everything in one giant bolus.

So we'll start the rundown of SCEA appointments with inFAMOUS, Sony's single-player superhero game (as opposed to SOE's DC Universe Online - more on that later).

The team from Sucker Punch showed a great demo today, revealing gameplay inspired by the free-range GTA series but designed with super powers in mind rather than recreational carjacking. Our hero/antihero, Cole, a bike courier and amateur urban explorer, is the sole survivor of a mysterious blast that destroyed a swath of Empire City and bestowed our hero with electric superabilities of unknown origin.

Not unlike Lost, it's that unknown origin that pulls along the story of the game, adding more questions with each answer - and whether or not Cole solves his personal mystery as a good guy or a bad guy is pretty much up to you.

Empire City has been quarantined, and most of the cops are dead, leaving the city to be divided up amongst gangs and other criminal elements. And freeing Cole to wreak as much havoc as he can.

Since Cole's powers are electrical in nature, he'll be able to draw strength from the local power grid as well as channel his finger-lightning toward all sorts of purposes, from performing superpowered CPR on dying citizens to frying gangsters like bad-guy bacon. The game makes sure that electricity works as true to life as possible, and metal objects in-game will conduct electricity. For instance, you'll be able to chain lightning down a line of parked cars, which looked absolutely sick. Good sick.

Cole's history as an urban explorer has prepared him well for this apocalyptic environment, and he'll automatically duck and cover to give you time to attack, even while hanging from the roof by his fingertips.

A cute girlfriend and a conspiracy-theory-believing best friend round out what looks like a very well-scripted personal storyline, and other Empire City inhabitants who've also been graced/cursed with powers of various-but-undisclosed nature will beef up the combat: you are not alone. In one scene we saw, Cole takes on a baddie who sends underground eruptions streaming toward the player character like a prairie dog from hell.

If all this sounds rather like a comic book, don't be surprised - inFAMOUS delivers its cutscenes in an engaging graphic novel style, and while the game makes certain to be a game before a comic book story, the two seem to mesh entrancingly well. I'm confident that this game will be a must-buy for PS3 owners when it releases in spring of 2009.