As I get ready for the delivery of this week's new games (Duke Nukem Forever and Alice: Madness Returns) I feel compelled to comment on a trend, no matter how minor, with last week's releases, inFamous 2 and Red Faction: Armageddon. What is in that trend? Well, both games have been fun and have a decent to great level of polish, but that's not it. No, what they share is a prologue built around the main character's failure. That's right, both these games start you off as essentially the one to blame for the predicament you will be tasked with solving. If you want to avoid all spoilers related to the plots of both these games please skip this post, though both opening scenes are fairly well documented in trailers and reviews at this point.

Not every modern console game has a full tutorial level, but many do. Some games just open with the story and prompt you through the basics, slowly weening you of the hand-holding as the level continues. Personally I find the full tutorial level a benefit just from an immersion standpoint, but it's a position difficult to defend. But let's put that aside and talk about game opening failure. Does is change our expectations of story or gameplay? Does it even matter whether it is a psychologically sound method of immersion?

In inFamous 2 you receive a quick montage of the ending of the first title and the setup for your new adventure. This is shortly interrupted by the actual appearance of The Beast, your endgame antagonist. Rather than escaping immediately to the new game's setting, you race to fight your foe and are guided through the basics of movement, ranged combat and special abilities. While there is a certain element to the setup that shows your power, you are wholly ineffectual and it doesn't help that many of the prompts are displayed at times where you can't actually pull them off (yes, I'm holding R1, fat lot of good it's doing while I'm being thrown through the air). At the end, which doesn't actually conclude the chapter as you segue immediately to the new environment sans cut-scene, you witness the locale of the first game utterly destroyed and are alerted that in some way the powers you expected to have given the opening as well as the conclusion of the first title have changed.

Things play out a bit differently in Red Faction: Armageddon as the prologue is self-contained. After the obligatory background about the history of the Red Faction universe and Mars you are thrown into the line of fire. As you are taught the basics of movement and combat as well as a number of abilities you traverse a few locales and fight real fights in what appears to be the beginning of the game. This is, however, just a setup as near the end the antagonist appears in an unrecognizable form and in a manner where you don't have the opportunity to stop them, all leading to the destruction of the colony that was the setting for the earlier entries to the series. While certainly not all your fault, a heavy emphasis on personal blame is placed on your character through narration, implying that your failure in this opening act has lead to all the bad things to come and undermined any success you may have achieved playing the earlier titles.

Both of these opening are immersive, and in Red Faction's case a lot of fun, but how do they set you up psychologically to play the rest of the game? In the case of inFamous 2 things are simpler, you just didn't have the power necessary to defeat the major villain, that'[s your quest in this sequel. Red Faction isn't so kind, making your actions in the prologue wholly worthless because of the outcome. Sure, now you have "something to prove", but reaching this setup required burdening you with the thought that future encounters might be as equally out of your control.

Two other games really came to mind when playing these last week: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. In the former the prologue turns out to be a dream sequence which I found wholly satisfying both as part of the story and as an introduction to the gameplay, setting you up for a diverse set of tools to come even if many weren't at your disposal as the game proper begins. The latter features you in control of Darth Vader at the peak of his powers giving you a taste for what you will have after your protagonist completes his evolution. It was a very satisfying tutorial that didn't burden your own character as you began the game.

In the end the opening bits of last week's games in no way will dampen my desire to continue to play, but I find it interesting to think what the designers were thinking when deciding to start you off in a virtual hole as opposed to a sense of the power to come.