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Boy does Infamous: Second Son look visually stunning—which in a way, makes any glitches you come across all the better. The game manages to look great even when it's messing up a bit.Read more...

Why is it that some guys have platinums while others don't?

Win a copy of South Park: The Stick of Truth! The Last of Us Movie is coming & Watch Dogs to have 8-Player open world multiplayer. Plus, Infamous: Second Son Dev talks sequel and DLC.

At Sony's PS4 press event, Sucker Punch unveiled this new trailer for their open-world superhero game Infamous: Second Son, and announced that it'll be out on March 21, 2014. In other news, I am psyched for this game.Read more...

Things don’t go as planned for Delsin Rowe, the smug but likeable hero of Infamous Second Son. Following the catastrophic events that shook the world in the first two games, Delsin’s super-powered status as a Conduit is laid bare after exposure to other superhumans. Delsin can absorb the powers of others, and then employ them for his own devices. He has serious potential, and that immense potential was on display during the PS4 launch event here in New York City this week.

This third-person, superhero action game already looks electric running on PS4, with fluid animations and sharp bursts of light around every rain-soaked corner. At the event, we join Delsin and his cop brother Reggie as they attempt to pass through a Department of Unified Protection (DUP) security checkpoint. Their dark, menacing uniforms stand in stark contrast with the bright yellows of warning signs that litter the scene.

But unfortunately for Delsin, things don’t go as planned.

Sure enough, Delsin’s spectacular abilities trigger an automated warning at the checkpoint, and the DUP descends upon him with rifles ready. This is where the first playable section of Second Son begins. I grabbed the DualShock 4 with an appropriate level of eagerness (see: extensive), and put Delsin through his paces.

Second Son feels just as it should in the Infamous family, with an addictive fusion of melee combat and projectile play. Once again, Sucker Punch has approached traversal carefully and with a great attention to detail.

The first power on display is smoke, which gives Delsin some great ways to move around. Our hero can burst apart into gouts of red and black, whipping right through obstacles and towards targets. All it takes is a press of the Circle button, but the momentum this move generates is exhilarating and practical, providing Delsin with much needed control of the battle space.

Like past Infamous games, Delsin can also leap up onto cars and launch off of them with more inky explosions, gaining additional height and tactical options. In fact, explosions (and, more specifically, their remnants) fuel Delsin’s smoke abilities — much like Cole’s beloved electricity. By standing near a ruined car or fire that’s belching smoke, Delsin can absorb it into himself for some extra super juice. A fine meal for any smoke-powered protagonist.

Delsin can move around all day, but he still has some very angry DUP soldiers to deal with. Using his chain and shots of smoke, Delsin chews through the opposition with style. Each tap of the Square button peppers targets with sizzling blasts that come in both light and heavy varieties. The heavy, “shotgun” blasts are capable of tearing down guard towers, along with any unfortunate soldiers staffing them at the time of demolition.

Delsin has a few more tricks up his sleeve, however. Our hero can drain the humming charge of neon signs and take on those powers for himself. Yes, “neon” can be a power, and it’s rad from top to bottom. Delsin’s blast becomes a bright streak of light, and his new, neon dash can send him flashing up the sides of walls in a glorious display of color. Sucker Punch is tightlipped on the other applications this power will provide, but the mind races at the possibilities.

The demo ends on Delsin face-to-face with a hulking soldier and his chaingun pal. But even the extra padding isn’t enough to save the soldier from Delsin’s tentatively named “karma bomb,” which sends our hero up into the air and back down again in a screen-wide attack.

Infamous Second Son looks and plays like a dream, and makes our wait for Delsin’s story all the harder to bear. Expect increased smoke levels in Seattle come early next year, when Second Son drops on PS4.

Look, video game names have always been a little silly. And likely always will be. But this past console generation saw the emergence of a new kind of silly, one that graduated from "harmless fun" to "facepalm".Read more...

Nate Fox feels kind of weird about seeing his face everywhere on the Internet. Wouldn't you?Read more...

Germany! I love Germany! Mostly for the beer. Also the pretzels, and Christmas smokers, funky sleds and gamescom. Can’t wait for gamescom! inFAMOUS Second Son will be there in full force. Our E3 trailer featured Delsin reveling in his powers using the Orbital Drop. Our newest trailer drops a lot of new game details: new smoke powers for Delsin and an all-new superhuman with unique powers of her own, ripe for Delsin to take for himself. Wanna see what this gal can do? Watch the trailer. You’ll like it, its set to music. You’ll see cool stuff.

Or course if you’re at gamescom, come on by. On the show floor, we’ll have some Sucker Punchers walking fans through a live gameplay demo of the content we initially revealed at E3. We’ll also be showing off a new behind-the-scenes movie to media, showcasing how Second Son uses the new DUALSHOCK4 controller. Keep an eye out for more news as we talk more about the DS4 throughout the week.

Of course if you can’t make it to Germany you can follow the live stream of the conference on Playstation.com and let us know what you think on Twitter and on our official Facebook page.

Prost Gamers!

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer outdoors in the nice weather! We’ve been looking through our windows with envy as we continue working hard on Second Son. Last time we checked in, we were debuting a trailer and a taste of Delsin’s smoke abilities at E3… It was really exciting for us to see the response from all of you — and we were also grateful to leave E3 with an armload of nominations and awards from the media. It all was a nice lift for us as we continue to try to make Delsin’s story in Seattle into something special…

Here’s something else for you to take a look at, another entry in the “Conversation with Creators” series. The crew behind these came up and intereviewed us about what it’s like making PS4 games, and our experiences with the DualShock 4 controller (which is great, by the way!). In addition to myself, Sucker Punch senior staff members Nate Fox, Jaime Griesemer and Horia Dociu discuss what developing Second Son has been like, and some of the things we’re each excited about…

That’s all I’ve got for today, surely there will be more soon, but meanwhile let us know what you think here, on Twitter, and on our official Facebook page as we release information in the upcoming weeks. Did anyone say GamesCom?

Sold. I mean, I have to buy a PlayStation 4 for work anyway, but if I didn't, this would be the game I'd buy it for right here. The freedom, the flair, the fire... I've run out of 'f' words to complete what would have been an incredibly clever bout of alliteration, but you get the point.

#infamous This is Sucker Punch's Nate Fox, speaking at yesterday's PlayStation 4 launch event. For the briefest moment, between recounting tales of police surveillance and introducing his studio's newest game, the clouds parted. The future was right there. And suddenly, his world stopped. More »

Infamous developer Sucker Punch is continuing its exploration of superheroes, putting a team of metahumans in a depressing police state in its new PS4 exclusive, Infamous: Second Son. The brief demo showed a team of antihero types taking on a surveilling organization in what looked like Seattle.

Developing...

#opinion Over the years, I've played a truckload of video games. Since my youth, when I fell in love for the first and only time—Metroid was what did it, on a chilly autumn night, me with my shirt off, thumbing the controller, over and over, until it hurt—I haven't been able to recreate that feeling of joy, that ecstatic sense of, "This is it. This is forever." More »

#sony You'll be able to play new versions of some old games on your PlayStation 3 soon. More »

#infamous The creators of the enjoyable open-world Infamous games nto their super-hero cities. They've done it before, and, hey, we like when developers make jokes. More »

4 out of 5

With Infamous, Sucker Punch delivered a deeply satisfying and (pardon the pun) downright electric open-world action game. Two years later, Infamous 2 improves in some pleasing, meaningful ways on what I thought was already one of the most playable games ever made in this genre. But it also exhibits a surprising lack of polish in several areas, some more integral to the experience than others. It's only because the core gameplay is still so much fun in Infamous 2 that these rough patches stand out as much as they do.

Specifically, it was the fluidly responsive controls and the laundry list of explosive powers that made the first game such a joy. The controls remain apparently unchanged, again allowing superhero Cole MacGrath to aim and dodge with the ease and mobility that a superhero should. There's also a generous list of new variations on the game's stable of weapon-like electric powers, which still fall into familiar categories like grenade, rocket, and pea shooter. You can even choose between ice- and fire-related variants on these powers later in the game (by making what feels like a contrived, button-prompted moral decision) that further broadens your arsenal. The expanded lineup of powers is certainly robust enough, and the flow of combat is further streamlined by a handy pop-up menu that lets you cycle through available types of abilities on the fly. The powers are once again split across both sides of the moral coin, and while it felt like the first Infamous taunted my pure-hearted boy scout with a bunch of more entertaining, destructive-looking powers available only to an evil character, this time the game does a better job of assigning some desirable abilities to the good side too.

Unfortunately, Infamous 2 shares its predecessor's predilection for overwhelming you with enemies from all sides. You become so overly powerful in the second half, the game responds by ramping up the number and ferocity of the enemies, but there are a few too many cases where the combat feels cheap. It's just not much fun when you get surrounded by elite soldiers who can slide right up behind you, knock you down with a shotgun, then keep damaging you while you're waiting to climb out of a stun animation and regain control. Liberal checkpoints aren't much consolation when things like that happen two or three times in a row. On the whole it's still a blast to lay waste to hordes of enemies in this game, but you do start to wish the enemy design and placement were as refined as the controls and abilities.

In most games, getting from place to place is just a means to an end, so it says a lot about the first Infamous that simply traversing the urban sprawl was an enjoyable end in itself. Sucker Punch has made Cole even more mobile in this sequel, through both new abilities and new environmental features. The "static thrusters" that let you make like a flying squirrel will now get you some extra lift, and there's an ice jump--the single best incentive to play a good character, second to satisfying your own conscience--that shoots you straight upward at the touch of a button. Likewise, new electrified vertical rails on most buildings will send you flying skyward as soon as you touch them. The magnetic way that Cole gravitates to things he can cling to or climb on is still much appreciated, but there are the few frustrating instances where he ends up sticking to the wrong grapple point, which ultimately makes it take longer to get where you're going. Like the combat, it's another case where the central idea is so good that you wish the implementation was a bit more refined.

Origin stories are probably the easiest sort of superhero tale to write, and sure enough, Cole's first tentative steps into his new power and responsibility did a great job of buoying and driving the story in the first game. Now that he's a full-fledged hero, Infamous 2 is inherently a little less exciting, sending Cole south to the New Orleans-esque New Marais to escape the Beast, the towering dervish of destruction foretold in the vision that ended the first game. New Marais is where Cole believes he can seek the origin of the ray sphere technology that started all this mess, and thus amplify his powers to the degree necessary to take on the Beast and stop its wanton rampage across the Eastern seaboard.

Every time you start the game and load your save, there's a great framing device that tells you how many miles the Beast has left to travel before it reaches and obliterates New Marais. The Beast's progress is tied to your own progress through the story, so there's no actual timer ticking down, but this still creates a foreboding backdrop behind your local troubles, which are many. An anti-mutant politician called Bertrand has the city in near-martial lockdown, and mutated swamp freaks are rampaging through some quarters of town. In this already heated mix, Cole and his now-tolerable sidekick Zeke run up against some other gifted individuals with their own superpowers, and tangle with Bertrand's militia, the monsters, and an elite team of high-tech mercenaries as well. The game does a decent job of humanizing its new characters, but in general there's a little too much going on for the story to find its center. By contrast, I really enjoyed the singular mystique the first Infamous built up around the Kessler character and Cole's struggle to understand his new powers and the menace he was fighting. By comparison, the plot here feels a bit scattered. The first game's morality system returns here, and while you generate small amounts of good or bad karma by the way you behave in combat and such, the big story-related moral decisions boil down to fairly contrived freeze-frame button prompts. These choices really only act as gateways to which cutscenes you see and which powers you get to access (and, in a few cases, which missions you have available), though again, I couldn't help picking the good option in every case on my first playthrough.

At least New Marais is much more visually interesting than the grey grit of Empire City, not least because it's a pleasure town rife with neon-lined casinos and brothels, and marked by some authentic-looking architecture. More generally, Sucker Punch has also broadened the game's color palette, enriching the game's look with brilliant orange-red sunsets and other elements that make the game more interesting to look at. Best of all, the first game's spotty frame rate has mostly been corrected here, making for a more fluid experience.

In direct contrast to the lovely visual presentation, there's a bizarre lack of sound work in almost every area of the game. Out in the open world you'd expect to hear way more ambient sound than the occasional murmur of a passerby or honking car that's here. Crickets, the rumble of a passing streetcar, the lapping of the water that surrounds the city, even some basic white noise--any and all of those things would have made the world feel busier and more alive, but none of them are consistently there. There's a similar dearth of sound design in places ranging from the abilities menu to major dramatic cutscenes. That might sound like a nitpick, but you don't realize how necessary good sound is until you take some of it away.

With a whopping 40 story missions, 60 side missions, hundreds of power-enabling blast shards to collect, and endless minor street crimes to prevent (or commit), Infamous 2 is already chockablock with content. So in a sense, it almost doesn't matter whether the game's user-generated mission framework is actually any good or not. But it is. There's a pretty easy-to-use mission editor in here that lets you work from a template or start with a blank slate to create all kinds of custom missions that focus on combat, physics puzzles, or even basic narrative-driven scenarios. People are already making some pretty elaborate missions, but of course there are also the requisite short obstacle courses designed to quickly net you a bunch of trophies and the requisite recreations of Super Mario Bros.' 1-1. The best part about Infamous 2's user-made content is that you can see as much or as little of it as you want. The game makes it simple to filter which missions show up in your world based on a broad range of criteria, or just disable it all completely. There's already an argument to be made in favor of playing the game through twice on good and evil paths, and since the user missions let you earn karma and experience just like the story ones, their value is evergreen.

Whatever complaints you might make about the ways Infamous 2 could be better, the core of the game is so much fun that it's inarguably worth playing. It's only because the series has so much potential, and already makes good on so much of that potential, that I feel compelled to point out those faults at all. The day we see an Infamous 3 that makes good on everything this series could be, well, that will be an exciting day.

In case you were betting on how long it was going to take for something to go wrong on the PSN after it began to come back online last weekend, those of you who bet on "five days or less" win the door prize. Congratulations: you get a free copy of inFamous, and your password stolen again.

Late last night, Nyleveia discovered--and users on NeoGAF have verified--that Sony's online password reset system--specifically, the web-based version on sites such as PlayStation.com and Qriocity.com--has a rather nasty exploit in it that allows any would-be hacker to simply reset your account password provided they know your PSN account email and your date of birth. That's it. Entering that info apparently lets anyone who knows the exploit reset your password and access your account. On the plus side, you'll get an email sent to you notifying you that your password has been reset. So that's awesome.

Not long after this was reported, Sony took all of its web-based login systems down, and as of this writing, there is no specific update as to how long this fix will take to put into place. The official SCEE Twitter account noted this morning that "this maintenance doesn't affect PSN on consoles, only the website you click through to from the password change email." So, to clarify, you can still log in on your console and play games online via PSN. You just can't use any of the web-based login sites until Sony fixes this exploit.

Nyleveia suggested that users create an entirely new email address for their PSN accounts, one not associated with any other online accounts in order to be absolutely safe. Because that's where we're at now. We're creating all new accounts just to be able to safely log into the PlayStation Network. I really hate the Internet sometimes.

Though Infamous followed a fairly commonplace "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gains superpowers in catastrophic electro-explosion" plot, it's required reading if you plan to play its sequel next month. You can do that super cheaply through Best Buy, which has Infamous on sale for $9.99!

#comics It's Wednesday. There are new comic books in comic shops. Only some of them are worth your time and money. As always, I have some suggestions…. More »

#thisweekincomics Wednesdays are new comics days at comics shops in North America. Every week, I recommend some of the new comics to get at the shop or on an iPad. This week is huge for Superman and general DC Comics fans, not so huge for fans of video game comics. More »

#comics New comic books are released every Wednesday in comics shops across North America, as well as on the iPad (though those aren't always so new). Every Wednesday, I recommend a bunch that are worth your dollars. More »

Sucker Punch's inFamous for the PlayStation 3 was a comic book superhero origin story without a comic book. Thanks to DC Comics, there is now a comic book series on the way, with Doug Mahnke cover art to boot. More »

The first week of PlayStation Plus brings a lot of savings for subscribers. Everyone else, however, will find that this week's update is rather sparse. Check out Hot Shots Tennis on PSP, or download the full inFamous game to your PS3.

Check out the full update after the break.

Choose your platform to view the corresponding release list:
(Note: Continue past the break to view both release lists.)

#ps3 Sony's June 2009 PlayStation 3 disc-based video game inFamous is now Sony's June 2010 downloadable game. More »

Did you miss out on Sucker Punch's shockingly awesome superhero simulator, inFamous? Today's the perfect day to rectify your oversight -- Amazon's offering the title for just $26.99 until the end of the day. If you're wondering whether or not it's worth this price, we'd remind you that this is a game where you can electrocute large groups of innocent civilians with a single, errant bolt, provided they're standing in a large enough puddle. Of course it's worth it.

We know that we've approached that proximity to Christmas where you feel bad buying things for yourself, but Amazon's got a pretty enticing offer running today. For just $39.78, the online retailer will let your grab a copy of Assassin's Creed 2 for the 360 or PS3. Yeah, it's probably money you should be spending on presents for your stupid family -- but once they see Ezio's first double-blade assassination, we're sure they'll understand. But wait, there's more! Today's Gold Box offers are all for games on the PS3 platform. You can find a full list of the clues for each of these time-released sales after the jump. The next clue, which goes live at 12 EST, references "an electrifying adventure in Empire City," so we're guessing that a discount for Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game is right around the corner. What? Her concerts are freaking electrifying.

Sucker Punch proves it doesn't need to keep making Sly Cooper games.

Click to read the inFamous comic. Sucker Punch's superpower game has sold 1.2 million copies, according to a recent update by the PlayStation.Blog. According to Sony's rules, that's enough to make the game a certifiable "Greatest Hits" title. However, a game can't don the ugly budget box art until ten months after the game's original ship date. Until then, inFamous will get an almost-Greatest Hits price for its almost-Greatest Hits status: $39.99, effective immediately. Also, the former GameStop-exclusive power-up Gigawatt Blades will be available for all as a free PSN download, starting December 10 -- a nice freebie for latecomers to the game. Considering Black Friday has already passed, it seems like Sony may have missed the best opportunity to announce a price drop on inFamous. Of course, there might be another motive behind this move: to keep this game on the mind of video game editors (and fans) readying their GOTY lists.

Before a game is really, totally announced, you've got to keep an eye out for little hints that it may be on the way. Take, for instance, the sequel to inFamous that may or may not exist. We already knew developer Sucker Punch was looking to add an artist familiar with the "urban style" that figured prominently in the first inFamous game. Now, actor David Sullivan has tweeted (as spotted by G4) that he's being considered for the role of Cole, which he says is being recast for a sequel. You may know Sullivan from the indie hit Primer, or as the subject of actor Jason Cottle's forthcoming book, Job Stealers I Totally Hate.

inFAMOUS electrifies TGS once again this year in Japan.